A crisis is exciting. Crisis management is a series of boring meetings to plan for something that may never happen. There are so many immediate and obvious challenges facing an organisation that very few senior managers/ chief executives/ board members get excited about joining the working group. Which explains why the person appointed to chair the group is someone who wasn’t required for anything important and the membership of the group is made up of those who can be spared and the geeks fascinated by end of the world scenarios.
I remember many years ago a colleague on the senior manager team who had recently attended a crisis management event trying to convince us that the world was over due another Pandemic and we were ill prepared. This was shortly after the millennium preparations when it was speculated computers would fail, aircraft would drop out the sky and our video recorders wouldn’t work. I’m ashamed to say the fact that this was the last item on the agenda was taken to indicated it was there for a little light relief and we all had some fun at his increasingly desperate attempts to convince us that the collapse of the NHS, panic buying, the closure of schools, pubs, restaurants and shops, the quarantine of older people and a lockdown of cites and Towns would happen. Well now he can tell every one ,”I told you so”.
Blair Mcpherson former Director author and blogger www.blairmcherson.co.uk
