WMBA 6000 Week 5 Outage Crisis Leadership Post Example

Week 5 Discussion: Leading Through a Crisis

Nine Hours Down and Five Hours Silent: Judging the Downbeat Founders' Meaning Making During the Calendar Sync Outage

Last month, Downbeat Software's calendar sync failed. Lesson slots disappeared from the schedules of several hundred music schools, parents arrived for lessons that teachers did not know about, and some teachers waited for students who had been told their lessons were canceled. Service was restored after nine hours. Downbeat is the composite company I have used all term.

Boin, 't Hart, Stern and Sundelius describe five tasks of crisis leadership: sense making, recognizing what is happening; decision making, choosing a response; meaning making, offering an account that helps people understand the crisis and act; terminating, bringing the crisis to a close; and learning, drawing lessons afterward (Boin et al., 2017). I focus on meaning making, because the technical fix went reasonably well while the account the founders offered did not.

The chief executive's first message to customers came five hours into the outage. It said that a third-party calendar provider had experienced an issue and that the team was working on it. It did not tell schools what to do that evening, when lessons were due to start, and it did not acknowledge that the error was in Downbeat's own sync code, which the engineers already knew. Schools had nothing to tell parents. Research on crisis communication suggests that when an organization is responsible for a preventable failure, deflecting blame tends to harm its reputation more than accepting responsibility (Coombs, 2007). Here, the vendor statement was both inaccurate and unhelpful.

The support team did better. Within the first hour, two support staff began calling the largest schools directly, telling them which lesson slots were affected and suggesting they confirm the evening's lessons by text. That was meaning making in practice: it gave people an accurate picture and something to do. Nobody had assigned them the task; they simply knew which schools had the most evening lessons.

My verdict is that the founders failed at meaning making, mainly by delay and deflection. One thing they did well was terminating: the next morning they sent every school a plain account of the cause and a credit, and they held the support team's improvised call list up as the model for next time.

What should a leader say in the first hour of a crisis when the cause is not yet known?

Reply to Andre

Andre, your hospital's ransomware response is a strong example of sense making, since the team isolated systems within minutes. I wonder about meaning making for patients, though. You mention staff used paper charts, but what were patients told when appointments were delayed? In a crisis, the account given to the people affected often matters as much as the technical response.

Reply to Lena

Lena, you suggested that the first message should wait until leaders know the cause, to avoid saying something wrong. I see the risk, but at Downbeat, waiting five hours left schools with nothing to tell parents. A first message can say what is known, what is not and what to do now. Weick (1993) argued that organizations fall apart in crises when people lose the shared understanding that lets them act together, and silence can produce that loss as surely as a wrong statement.

References

Boin, A., 't Hart, P., Stern, E., & Sundelius, B. (2017). The politics of crisis management: Public leadership under pressure (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10(3), 163-176. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550049

Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628-652. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393339