The Common Thread

Unless I have more important things to do in the morning, I would drive my wife to a nearby station to take public transport to work. Listening to the radio today, I learned that an unpleasant public transport event was happening. To minimize its adverse impact on her, I immediately drove her directly to her work place in our SMART car.

From the perspective of the service provider, the happening of unforeseen combination of circumstances that called for immediate action must be an emergency. It has to mitigate the public harm and prevent the situation from worsening. If the critical event becomes out of control and escalates into a crisis, society will lose more capital.

The common thread in incidents, emergencies and crises from the leadership or management perspective is that: not taking appropriate responses to them timely. The causes of the dysfunction might be too complex to be identified or recognized by machines or humans. Or, they might just be negligent errors or reckless mistakes.

While those at the operational level are answerable and responsible for their acts or omissions, those in high authority are accountable. They should have influenced those working for them to do things otherwise they would not do beforehand. I duly discharged my former role, but wonder if other smart people would accept theirs?