Netflix recently released the miniseries The Days, which goes through the events during -and immediately after- the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011. While The Days is an interesting show and not a complete waste of time, it made me recall the magnificent Chernobyl that HBO released in 2019 and shows (no surprise here, lol) the events during -and after- the nuclear disaster in Chornobyl in 1986.

Am I using this newsletter as an excuse to watch again TV shows I love? Yes, I am.

So when watching Chernobyl (and The Days), I remembered how important it is to manage a crisis appropriately. When we lead products or programs, it is only a matter of time before something goes terribly wrong. There’s no use in avoiding it. It will happen, and we must own the situation. Many people say we are the CEO of our program or product. As such, we are responsible for stepping up as leaders and managing the crisis. Hopefully, it won’t be a nuclear disaster, but it can feel equally dramatic when you are in the thick of it. For this exercise, let’s assume that no one is dying, but the problem is damaging the company’s image, revenue, or both.

Yes, it is a very shitty situation, but it is also your opportunity to shine. How you deal with it will significantly impact your relationship with senior leadership and stakeholders. Even if the crisis is huge, and even if it is your team’s fault, you’ll project a lasting positive image of yourself if you manage it well. Also, problems make us stronger and better professionals.

Ok, let’s go! So shit happened: a tsunami, an explosion, bad code on production, or the servers died. Now what?

Assess how big the drama is…

… or how big it can potentially be. The bigger the drama (or the impact, outcome, or damage to the company), the higher the urgency of a fix, and the more senior the people you wake up at night will be. We will assume the impact is enormous (in a terrible way), but you may want to pre-plan and put together a cheat sheet for less dramatic events based on what we will cover here. Not all crises require you to wake the President or the Prime Minister. Apply common sense and pregame different scenarios in advance.

Please ensure you have all the data and metrics to help you with this assessment. Monitor and listen. Knowing you have a problem because there is a red light somewhere is better than because a customer complains (or someone dies).

Keep calm, be realistic, and don’t lie! In Chernobyl, the response from Dyatlov, the guy leading the team working with the reactors, is like a playbook of the opposite of good crisis management:

• He tries to find a scapegoat instead of owning the problem. He yells and becomes emotional.
• He downplays the situation putting even more people at risk (the Not Great. Not Terrible sentence is still a meme of total disaster).
• He lies when affirming that the problem is under control.

These actions are the consequence of incompetence and fear. Remember, you are the leader. You are not incompetent, and though you may be scared, you need to keep calm and direct your actions toward the greater good, not your own immediate benefit. You are going to be the person setting the tone. Your senior leadership and stakeholders are going to freak out already. Don’t add fuel to that. Keep your head cool.

Put together a team to work on a fix

This is something that both Chernobyl and The Days do pretty well once they finally assume they have a big problem. You will enlist the folks that can fix the problem in the best and fastest way. It may be your team, but if it is an “all hands on deck” situation, you will have to involve other teams. I advise that you prepare for this eventuality in advance and have a list of all SMEs in your company or section. You should also get familiar with on-call procedures.

Communicate clearly, succinctly, and often!

Now we get to the fun part! This is where you’ll have the opportunity to shine. COMMUNICATION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU’LL DO DURING A CRISIS.

1. Get ready to communicate the problem, current situation, and its impact in one or two sentences. You need to be clear and concise. Your leadership will have follow-up questions, so before they ask, be also ready to share:
2. What is being done to fix the issue?
3. What are the plan and ETA for resolution? If you don’t have a plan or ETA yet, you need to share what you are doing to develop a plan and to get ETA.
4. When will you update leadership again? Every thirty minutes is usually a good option. If you promise an update every thirty minutes, please provide an update every thirty minutes. Even if you don’t have any updates, you go to leadership and you update them on the fact that you don’t have updates. Believe me, senior leadership will remember how responsive and reliable you were.
5. You will need to know what caused the problem and what you are doing to prevent it from happening again. While this is super important, and you may have this info right away, don’t worry about it excessively unless it is helpful to fix the issue. You will have time to come back to this later. Your main priority now is fixing the problem and communicating succinctly and regularly.

The consequences of unclear communication are reflected very well in The Days, where the Prime Minister gets increasingly frustrated because he feels he is not getting the information he needs, and in the way he needs it, from the team in Fukushima. What does he do? He jumps into a helicopter and pays a visit to the nuclear plant. No one is happy about this. The PM entourage doesn’t want to be in a contaminated zone, and the team on-site doesn’t want to waste time showing them around or being micromanaged. Remember: this situation is preventable if you keep your leadership informed clearly and succinctly. No one wants senior leadership and difficult stakeholders hovering over the war room. Still, they will unless they are satisfied with the information they are getting, and they trust you are doing everything possible to solve the issue. How do you convince them? Points 1 to 4 above :-)

Try to put yourself in the shoes of your senior leadership. Remember that they will be the ones dealing with the most critical, difficult, and high-maintenance stakeholders. In The Days and Chernobyl those stakeholders are other countries and World Organizations. At your company, they may be clients, customers, other teams, etc. Leadership has a difficult job dealing with the PR of this situation. You help them by keeping them informed at all times.

Widespread misinformation seems inevitable these days. In The Days, the press complains about the Japanese government hiding information. In Chernobyl, the Soviet state did hide information. I have no idea how to deal with mass media communications during a global crisis, but I know someone always knows. I also know that if you inform people, the chances they second-guess or spread misinformation diminish. The important thing here is that you ask yourself who else apart from senior leadership needs to be informed of the situation, how much information they need to have, and how you need to communicate with them. These are pretty challenging to figure out in the heat of the moment, so I suggest you include them in your crisis cheat sheet in advance. For example, you may need to have the contact of the community manager handy to update them, or you may need to contact the customer service team so that they are aware. If you need to email all users, you should have a template ready, plus the addresses or distro lists. Maybe someone in your company already deals with all this, and you just have to loop them in. The key is that you have in mind that other folks, besides leadership, need to be informed.

Root Cause Analysis

So let’s go back now to the two remaining questions leadership is going to be very interested in:

1. Why did this happen?
2. What will we do so that it doesn’t happen again?

This exercise is done through Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and I could dedicate dozens of posts to it. To keep it sweet and short for now, let’s focus on some basics:

Take the fear out of the equation when figuring out what happened and why. Some companies refer to it as “blameless RCA.” The goal is for the team to candidly align on what went wrong and why without the dark shadow of retaliation. RCA should not be a witchhunt but a constructive exercise. The output of RCA should be a list of tasks for teams to work on. The outcome of RCA should be a reduction in the probability of the issue happening again.

Once again, Chernobyl turns itself into a playbook of the opposite of good RCA, and again, mainly because of fear. In this case, the RCA becomes a witchhunt to convict the obvious culprits while actively avoiding acknowledging a systemic problem fostered and encouraged by the Soviet state. Sigh.

We are almost done here. If there is something you are going to take home after reading this, let it be:

1. Communicate regularly, clearly, and succinctly.
2. Control fear and rise above it. You may be unable to avoid it, but you should tame it. Keep your head cool and do the right thing.
3. Watch Chernobyl. It is an excellent TV show.

One very last thing, please note that my comments here refer to what is depicted in the TV shows (The Days and Chernobyl), not to what happened or didn’t happen during the actual nuclear crises of Fukushima and Chornobyl. Please also check why I write Chornobyl when referring to the actual city, not the series.

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