Angela had a real crisis on her hands. Senior employee at Taub Radio Repair, she had promised Mr. Taub that she would keep the seven person business running smoothly while he took his first vacation in 10 years.
Yesterday, with Mr. Taub on a trek in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, two employees had been injured in a fire in the back room. And the insurance company was making noises about negligence and not covering damages.
Angela has a lot of decisions to make, the biggest one being whether to temporarily close the shop. But right now, Angela, usually a very clear thinker, was having trouble thinking at all.
Managing a crisis means managing the decisions you make during that crisis. And to manage those decisions, you need to control how you think under stress.
But, in fact, its in stressful situations that our thinking processes are most likely to go off track. These derailments can kill the quality of a decision. For example, I may go off into an avoidance pattern. Under pressure, I convince myself that no good decision exists and therefore it is right for me to do nothing.
Or I may go into polarized thinking, defining the crisis arbitrarily in simple black and white terms. This erroneous mode of thinking allows me to shut out any information that might add to my stress, even though that information is critical.
Finally, I may abandon thinking altogether and regress into a primitive coping style. I make decisions on the basis of gut reaction alone and justify them by referring to my "intuition".
To avoid these derailments, your stress has to be managed and maintained at just the right level to keep you moving along but not throw you off the track. Crisis situations do not get resolved simply by breathing deeply or reciting mantras.
On the other hand, letting yourself get revved up to high anxiety won't work, either. Panic leads to desperate decisions, not good ones.
Two steps you can take to help you make better decisions in crisis:
• Avoid making decisions in a vacuum. You don't need a committee, but you do need to get others involved for some reality-testing. Also, having others involved helps you to avoid polarized thinking.
• Build backup systems. Having an emergency plan and emergency resources can keep you from going into avoidance mode.
Angela needs to pull the company lawyer, account and her coworkers into the decision making process. And like it or not, now is the time to start putting together the plan "for the next time".
