Processes in (a) Crisis

Processes, Why do we need them, When do we need them.

It is generally said that Processes are needed for Quality Purposes and you would need processes for doing Quality Work. It is also often said that Quality work is skill dependent & we need processes to hedge against uneven skill sets.

But what happens in a Crisis situation. What is generally seen is that  the Processes get tossed into the recycle bin and work gets delivered Some How In Time (S.H.I.T.). The team puts in a heroic effort to deliver a defect free work product. Most of the time people turn a blind eye to the damned processes and use whatever short cuts they can use.

There are even some instances where people create crisis and solve it to become heroes. But lets leave that aside.

Lets look at what happens during an actual crisis.

• Panic, Loss of Time & Spatial Awareness
  The first thing that happens is Panic & Fear. The situation makes people loose track of time & spatial awareness. Spatial Awareness makes people focus on a specific task & not have a view of the big picture. This can result in loosing opportunity to rectify the situation.
• To Err is Human.
  The second thing that happens in a crisis is injection of errors. Errors are of 2 kinds - errors of ignorance & errors of ineptitude. If the errors are not corrected then cascading errors result in Failure. In industries which do not have a positive attitude to errors the probability of failure is more. In industries which do have a positive attitude to errors, the errors get corrected & the cascading effect is halted.

Crisis Situations are present in all industries. Lets look at what some Industries do to tackle and prepare for the situation

Fire Dept

Fire Departments continuously train for crisis. They train for scenarios where there are multiple objectives. The live exercises check whether firemen loose their situational awareness and miss out the big picture while getting bogged down in a particular situation and resulting in failure.

Aviation

Aviation industry has processes & procedures which are always updated to incorporate learnings from disasters & crisis situations. Processes are ingrained in the aviation industry because they are based on learnings in which price has been paid with lives. There is a heavy usage of checklists in Aviation and pilots swear by it.

A good example is Hudson River landing of US Airways Flight 1549. The aircraft had a bird hit which caused both engines to shut down. The situation was statistically too rare to even have a flight simulator scenario. Capt Sullenberg remembers feeling fear before he started going through his checklist even though he knew that he may not finish all the items. He shortlisted his options going through the checklist & decided to land in the Hudson river. His training prompted him to chose the location near operating boats so as to maximise the chance of rescue. This was a good example of people knowing what they were supposed to do and they did it and as a result, nobody lost their life.

Surgery

Any surgery involves risks. Dr Atul Gawande through research showed how using checklists during surgery in an Operation Theater reduced mortality by 35%. In a surgery it is quite easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Using Checklists has reduced effects of errors during crisis in surgery & forces the surgical team to walk through key steps in a complex surgery & reduces errors. This also forces junior members of the team bring any missteps to the notice of the entire team. This has been promoted in hospitals throughout the world by WHO.

Processes designed & deployed without any thought has created a situation where People equate processes to documentation, metrics and burden. Industries should look at other industries and learn to create appropriate processes. In Industries where lives depend on decisions made, Processes are created as result of learnings and people live by processes.

When a driver is new its the conscious mind which does the thinking, but when the driver is experienced the thinking is done by the subconscious mind. A well defined and oiled process becomes like second nature. Its similar to how driving becomes second nature to experienced drivers. 

If any Process is tossed away during a crisis then that Process does not deserve to exist in the first place. A process should aid the team in times of a crisis. Processes should inspire confidence in the team so that they can depend on it in times of a crisis.