The front section of this month’s HBR is a depressing (but important) look at how to prepare for a pandemic (the Post business section picked this up today as well). By the way, if you need something to give you a little “perspective” on your current problems, as many as 50 million people died from the flu outbreak in 1918-19. Fifty million!
Nitin Nohria has a great piece in there, though, that talks about disaster plans and risk management teams in organizations. I like his conclusion: being adaptive will help you more than a having a plan:
We know from complexity theory that following a few basic crisis-response principles is more effective than having a detailed a priori plan in place. In fires, for instance, it’s been shown that a single rule—walk slowly toward the exit—saves more lives than complicated escape plans do.
Even when you are dealing with a crisis that is more complex than a single burning building, a series of contingency plans is not nearly as effective as an organization’s capacity to “evaluate ongoing changes in the environment and develop responses based on simple principles” Nohria said.
The same concept is applicable to broader organizational strategy, and Jeff and I apply that in our “building strategic capacity” projects. It’s not only about clarifying the few simple principles (which is not easy work, by the way), it is also about building the capacity to actually put those principles to work in responding to your environment, even it means doing something—gasp—different than what you had planned!
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