Never waste a crisis
A heuristic that encourages deploying innovation teams alongside recovery teams during a crisis to capture novel practices and drive change.
THE IDEA
Never waste a crisis
At the beginning of 2020, the Coronavirus crisis led us to use Cynefin and SenseMaker in Wales in ways that we hadn’t previously. At Audit Wales, we stopped audit work, and using SenseMaker, focussed a large number of our staff to look for new and innovative practices across Public Services.
Dave’s quote, “During a crisis you should be deploying Innovation Teams alongside the Business Recovery Teams, to capture the novel practice,” fired people’s imagination during this time. It’s a quote I’ve heard from Dave on many occasions and, more recently, on a webinar with Robert Koch, the Head of Enterprise Resilience for Eskom, South Africa’s electric public utility. The quote captured Welsh Public Services’ imagination, and you could see people using variations of it in many places, quite often linked to their recovery planning processes.
Beyond Wales, I was asked to speak to academics at Northumbria about a webinar I’d done with Toby Law on our approach to Complexity, Learning, and Coronavirus. I mentioned this to Dave, and he signed up for the webinar to listen. This created great excitement and delight among the Northumbria University people. I was a bit more anxious, and my response was, “Great, it’s like having your dad come to watch you play rugby.” I told Dave, I think he laughed.
When to use it
During a major system outage, instead of just restoring service, form a team to document workarounds and improvements.
After a natural disaster, use community feedback to identify new resilience strategies.
During a product recall, create a team to capture lessons for future product design.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Wales Public Services during Coronavirus
At the beginning of 2020, the Coronavirus crisis led to using Cynefin and SenseMaker in Wales to look for new and innovative practices across Public Services.
The Eskom Webinar Connection
The author heard Snowden repeat the innovation-team advice in a webinar with Robert Koch of Eskom. The passage does not say that Koch or Eskom implemented it.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
What novel practices have emerged in your organization during a recent crisis?
How can you ensure that innovation teams are deployed alongside recovery teams?
What prevents organizations from capturing novel practices during crises?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World ED02 (Dave Snowden Sonja Blignaut Zhen Goh)