Crisis management is something we will all be faced with during our careers and will ultimately sharpen our capability. I’ve had a fair dose of it on the home front due to a child with anaphylaxis and the other with a recent rush to surgery. I’ve had several defining moments in my career that have also shaped how I manage in these situations. The combination of these lived experiences has ultimately shaped how I respond.
In my early days working for GE, we were on a large program to migration a general-purpose store card to a Mastercard. GE had flown in execs from all around the world to deliver this project. About five days before launch date, the program got held up in court. There was equal likelihood of it going ahead and being shelved. I was mid-twenties and gob smacked. I’d worked so hard. We’d worked so hard. There was an 11th hour settlement, and we launched. But it taught me early, there can be a lot of hard work and things never see the light of day. This is life and we need to dust ourselves off and move forward. This was my first real work lesson in resilience.
This experience taught me valuable lessons in crisis management that I carry with me to this day.
I was in my first week with Equifax as General Manager of Product when I heard my boss on the phone, “what do you mean we’re on the front page of the New York times?”. That can’t be good I thought. I had a strange feeling, but it was the end of the day, so I headed home. The next morning, I arrived at work to an incredibly sombre mood and an emergency meeting. Equifax had just suffered the biggest data breach in history at the time. The NZ system was not impacted by this breach, but nobody knew this. Our customers were hitting our systems to stress test for vulnerabilities. The US were so busy managing fallout they hadn’t considered how to manage proactive communications across time zones, which is critical in effective crisis management.
The lessons learned in this one were huge for me. My outtakes: it wasn’t a complicated breach. The basics were missed. The companies own security policies slowed down onboarding third party security experts (think about that one) and their BCP didn’t include not one, but two crisis call center’s being brought down by cyclones. I also learned a lot about security hardening and the practical outcomes when you don’t prioritise the less sexy work.
Getting a bit more recent, let’s talk about cloud strike. There was an extraordinary amount to be learned that night. I had my own special experience. I was on the plane back from Melbourne with daughter number two, when I jumped on to use the plane’s Wi-Fi to hear that daughter number one was waiting for an ambulance for anaphylaxis. I’m also reading real time about how half on NZ is down due to cloud strike. With a husband away and me mid-flight, there was nothing I could do other than hand the reigns over to her friend and have another parent on standby. She waited two hours for an ambulance because comms were down. She gets refractory anaphylaxis (it comes for a second pass) so this got a little scary, but she eventually got to hospital and got sorted.
We no sooner got home, and daughter number two started to complain of her recurrent, undiagnosed, tummy pain. So ensued six hours of writing, vomiting and pain screaming. I did not call an ambulance due to cloud strike and the fact that we’d already ordered one for the other child. The plan was to manage at home until morning. It would be another nine months of extreme pain events and not being listened to, before her appendix eventually burst. I have demons every time I think of that night. I was trying to balance risk, triage, emotion, practicalities and gut instinct. I did my best with the information I had, but in hindsight I did not get it right. Ultimately it wasn’t my call to make. I’m not a doctor. Get the facts, communicate the risk, find the right decision maker. If you get investigated for munchausen by proxy, so be it.
The evolution of all of this lived experience, is that I remain calm and protective in the eye of the storm. If we are in work crisis, you can put pressure on me, I will handle it, but I will shield my project team from this every time. They need psychological safety, mental space and support, to trouble shoot well. This is a given. I continue to seek out new strategies and lessons to upskill. Right now I’m very much looking forward to getting more information on how Tomorrowland rebuilt a main stage 72 hours before go-live? I suspect that’s a crisis management masterclass. Watch this space for more.
