HOW TO MANAGE CRISIS?

During years of experience in the French Air France and some other years in different industries such as security, automotive industry or logistics, I learnt a lot about crisis management and outsourcing.

Here some quick tips to be successful in such situation:

Select a good team to lead the crisis and its task force:

• Best profiles to lead and manage crisis who have really experimented complex situations,

• People able to get a large vision but quickly go into small details, taking care of all the different inputs that have to be taken in account,

• People who keep "cold & fresh" attitude in any situations

• Obviously fast moving people but with the condition to be fast moving not only acting but also synthetizing and analyzing

Define your priorities & processes

• each business has its own priorities depending on its processes but also its context (cash flow problems, critical operative processes, critical supply or customers etc...), so do not apply a standard priority system, build your own priority matrix implementing the current context into it,

• small items or topics could be more critical than big ones

• solve small issues which are easier to deal with, could positively impact other big issues,

• the prioritization requires updates, every minute, day or week the impact of an issue could change so review and update your priority list, everything is moving fast

• implement "Simplexity" attitude: integrate all the complex aspects of your situation but keep it easy for the action plan implementation with your team. "KISS" Keep It Easy and Simple/Stupid is not good enough, you have to integrate the complexity in the analysis and resolution processes

• if the situation imposes some changes into your organization, don't focus on the changes, just give the new goals and objectives, most of humans are creative enough to find the new way of doing things, just control the goals and control the impacts... to adjust the processes if necessary..

Use technologies adapted to your business and culture:

• an action plan should be integrated in user friendly tool, sometimes .xls helps you a lot but implementing a webplatform for the crisis task force will help a lot to auto-updates of the tasks and milestones, communication, global analysis, information centralization, reporting tasks, time tracking and more....

• don't use complex platform if your company's DNA is not technological, you will lose a precious time to get people on board, but work around this for the future

Of course I could mention a lot of other tips because, crisis management is a 360degres project, but I decided to focus on some topics that seem to me very helpful