Marlys Christianson tells how rare events can actually benefit a workplace by providing it with a ‘brutal audit’ of its strengths and weaknesses
Accidents and other rare events can actually benefit a workplace by providing it with a ‘brutal audit’ of its strengths and weaknesses. How can a disaster can be turned into an opportunity?
I studied the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, which provides a remarkable case study for those of us interested in resilience how an organization can not only survive but thrive in the wake of a catastrophe. Baltimore’s B&O Railroad -- familiar to anyone who plays the board game Monopoly -- is the birthplace of American railroading. In February 2003, a record-setting snowstorm resulted in a roof collapse in the main building of the museum, a historic round house.
It is difficult to describe the sheer size of this building, which is often compared to a cathedral, and the magnitude of the damage that occurred. The roof collapse resulted in the destruction of many of the Museum’s artefacts and presented some tough choices to its leaders: initially, they weren’t sure whether the Museum would be able to recover. However, in the end they were able to accomplish something remarkable, which was to use the disaster as an opportunity to step back and re-imagine the museum and create something even better than what existed before.
At each step of the recovery, potential problems were turned into positive outcomes. For example, they realized that although the trains were insured, the insurance fell short of what would be required to send them out for repair. The insurance money was instead spent to establish a facility where the trains could be repaired on-site. This facility is now used by other organizations for their trains as well, and can be visited via a moving tourist train that is itself a popular attraction.
These days, if you ask staff about the disaster, they will tell you it was the best thing that ever happened to their organization. The Museum is now much larger, and the new round house is now accessible, both wheelchair and stroller friendly. The Museum has increased and diversified its attractions and activities, and as a consequence of these changes, its revenues have increased substantially.
Describe how this amazing recovery was accomplished.
To make sense of the roof collapse and the very unusual turnaround story that followed, we viewed the disaster as an interruption rather than as a one-time-only rare event. It is difficult to learn from rare events because they almost never recur. It is more helpful to view disasters as just magnified versions of the sort of interruptions that take place all the time in an organization. An interruption allows an organization to step back and ask what it is doing and where it is going. In the case of the museum, it was transformed from a place that children were forced to visit on their school trips to being a lively and up-to-date attraction.
In addition to providing an occasion to reflect and recalibrate, crises provide plenty of attention to an organization. Through the media coverage that followed the roof collapse, staff had an opportunity to find out what people thought about their institution, and this feedback them reinvent it. Also beneficial was the fact that, at the time of its near destruction, the museum was already gearing up for an important event, the ‘Fair of the Iron Horse’, to mark the 175th anniversary of American railroading. As part of the preparation for the fair, the Museum had audited its own strengths and weaknesses, and discovered a number of problems: the telephones were not connected to each other, the computer systems were completely outdated, there was insufficient staff to handle a large-scale event. By fixing these problems, and by improving ties with the media and the public, the museum was in a better position to deal with the large-scale crisis of the roof collapse.
Framing the collapse in positive terms was an important first step in emerging from the disaster. The senior leadership and board of directors were quick to decide that the museum would survive, and put in place measures to ensure that the comeback could occur. Simple things mattered, like the decision by one manager to list her own phone number on the Museum’s website to give media a central contact, or the changes made to the website to channel donations and offers of support from the community.
In the ensuing months, the museum’s leadership did an admirable job of making sense of the situation and sharing updates with staff and the public at large. The executive director, in particular, was praised for his ability to manage his emotions during a difficult time in order to project an image of strength. Other steps included starting a blog to provide constant updates on the rebuilding efforts. From a human resources standpoint, the staff was entirely reorganized to best accomplish the recovery of the Museum’s holdings from the rubble.
What leadership style is best suited to managing such a crisis?
Leaders have many different styles of interacting with people. There are a core set of behaviours that are effective in a crisis, but leaders can enact these in whatever way is most comfortable for them. The first crucial stage is noticing that there is a problem or crisis and viewing that problem from both the perspective of the organization and that of the customer. One of the critiques levelled against Toyota during its recent troubles is that the company was not sharing information with the public as quickly as it might have.
In addition to formulating a plan to deal with a crisis, leaders must also think of how to keep the organization functioning during bad times. Because of the way we are biologically hardwired, people tend to react to a threat with the ‘flight or fight’ response: we narrow information processing, conserve resources and try to protect ourselves at the very moment we would be best served by remaining open and flexible. Resilient organizations, on the other hand, are capable of adapting to the circumstances of a crisis. When it comes to leadership behaviour, acting with integrity and doing everything possible to regain trust are crucial at this stage.
The final stage involves learning from the experience, and embedding the wisdom of best practises back into the organization. This is where many companies run into trouble: they do not develop new routines and protocols, but make the assumption the future will be problem free.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]