Control your risks.
Identify important decision points.
Forecast potential crises.
The solution starts as soon as planning begins!

There is absolutely no reason the command group can not pick the five most probable contingencies or missions that your unit could be called on to execute today. Identify those missions and then schedule a crisis planning session for each mission. The training and preparation value of doing this is tremendous.

You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double the efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I'm advocating is — Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos. Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events.

Los asuntos menores deben ser estudiados con seriedad. Hay pocos problemas realmente importantes, solamente se presentan más de dos o tres en toda una existencia. Una reflexión cotidiana os convencerá. Es por ello que es indispensable prever lo que conviene hacer en caso de crisis. Cuando ésta se manifieste, habrá que acordarse de la solución, para resolverla en consecuencia. Sin una preparación cotidiana, cuando sobrevenga una crisis delicada, se será incapaz de tomar una decisión rápida, lo que conlleva el riesgo de consecuencias desastrosas.

Poorly managed corporations, disorganized businesses, and badly led service agencies experience crisis daily and most will eventually fail. In contrast, the danger is to well organized, smooth running institutions that may not recognize a building crisis. Too often, sound organizations rely on their normal modus operandi to pull them through a crisis. It might. But at what cost? And what if it does not pull them through?

When an individual's or group's basic survival is threatened, stress becomes tremendous, and productivity drops. Under these conditions a manager's ability to reason and maintain a proper focus on developing plans or solutions to a crisis is extremely difficult.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.

It is natural for government and business leaders to want to make the best of a bad situation. For example, articles on Watergate postulated that we are now better off because the crisis demonstrated the strength of a democracy. Some contend that the Exxon Valdez oil spill had a good side in that there were many "lessons learned". THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! I do not subscribe to the "I have to fail to learn and improve" theory. A set-back leading to "experience and growth" is one thing; total failure is another. Few corporations could sustain as much bad press as Exxon, not to mention the opportunity cost of billions of dollars that could have been applied more profitably elsewhere. An organization's most precious resources are its time, energy (individual and corporate) and capital. They should be directed toward increasing profit, providing better service and improving the organization's reputation. They should not be wasted on damage control. Yet we continue to hear stories of crisis situations that drain organizations of that valuable energy and focus.

This is the same problem that established companies experience. Their past successes were built on a finely tuned engine of growth. If that engine runs its course and growth slows or stops, there can be a crisis if the company does not have new startups incubating within its ranks that can provide new sources of growth. Companies of any size can suffer from this perpetual affliction. They need to manage a portfolio of activities, simultaneously tuning their engine of growth and developing new sources of growth for when that engine inevitably runs its course.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns — or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book — it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

you must not only have a plan but also prepare for what happens if the plan works or fails or if an unexpected situation suddenly requires a completely different approach. What then? And what happens after that? And after that?

When failure is expensive, plan carefully.

When failure is cheap, act quickly.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!

For almost all of us, recognizing a crisis can be difficult unless we have significant warning, or are prepared before-hand to deal with change. It is also important in an emergency, as it was in Dan's situation, to identify and focus on the actual crisis, not the cause. It is time to "put out the fire" not waste precious time figuring out how the fire started.