Broken Promises Shattered Dreams

“When times are tough, vision is the first causality. Before conditions can improve, it is the first thing we must recover.”
Michael Hyatt

This post will be a little different. I will synopsize and review an article from the January-February 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review entitled “How to Bounce Back from Adversity” without a lot of additional comment. The coauthors are Joshua Margolis, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University and Paul Stoltz, founder and CEO of PEAK Learning, a consulting firm specializing in the study of and solutions for businesses that find themselves in crisis situations. I recommend going to your local library and making a copy of this article for future reference or buying a copy on line directly from the Harvard Business Review.

Stoltz has spent his life studying human psychological response to negative experiences in financial and business environments. He contends that whatever your initial reaction to a setback might be, the key is turning this negative experience into a productive experience, “that is, to counter adversity with resilience.” The author describes psychological resilience as the central dynamic in almost all survival stories.

The authors point out that in moments of fear, anger, confusion, or paralysis we tend to receive bad advice even from the best intentioned mentors, generally a “how to pep talk delivered utterly without empathy or understanding, or a sympathetic ear and reassurance that things will turn out OK.” The authors contend neither approach is useful. They have found that asking a series of three questions applied to four different areas, will provide constructive information that can then lead to a productive reaction to crisis events.

The questions are, “Specifying questions that help managers identify ways to intervene; the more specific the answers, the better. Visualizing questions help shift their attention away from the adverse event toward a more positive outcome. Collaborating questions push them to reach out to others-not for affirmations or commiseration but for joint problem solving.”

The Four Areas and the Three Questions

1) Control

When a crisis hits, do you look for what you can improve not rather than trying to identify all the factors even those beyond your control that caused it in the first place?

Specifying: What aspects of the situation can I directly influence to change the course of this adverse event?

Visualizing: What would the manager I most admire do in this situation?

Collaborating: Who on my team can help me, and what’s the best way to engage that person or those people?

2) Impact

Can you sidestep the temptation to find the origins of the problem in yourself or others and focus instead on identifying what positive effects your personal actions might have?

Specifying: How can I step up to make the most immediate, positive impact on the situation?

Visualizing: What positive effect might my efforts have on those around me?

Collaborating: How can I mobilize the efforts of those who are hanging back?

3) Breadth

Do you assume that the underlying cause of the crisis is specific and can be contained, or do you worry that it might cast a long shadow over all aspects of your life?

Specifying: What can I do to reduce the potential downside of this adverse event-by even 10%? What can I do to maximize the potential upside-by even 10%?

Visualizing: What strengths and resources will my team and I develop by addressing this event?

Collaborating: What can each of us do on our own, and what can we do collectively to contain the damage and transform the situation into an opportunity?

4) Duration

How long do you believe that the crisis and its repercussions will last?

Visualizing: What do I want life to look like on the other side of this adversity?

Specifying: What can I do in the next few minutes or hours, to move in that direction?

Collaborating: What sequence of steps can we put together as a team, and what processes can we develop and adopt, to see us through to the other side of this hardship?

The point of this exercise is not to come up with a final plan, but to generate possibilities and a series of short term actions. Such planning and small actions taken on a consistent basis over time will lead to major breakthroughs.

The authors recommend writing down the answers to the twelve questions as a timed exercise. They recommend allowing 15 minutes a day, a length of time they believe you will find both too short and too long for the practice. They believe that doing it every day until the crisis is past is critical.

I repeat they believe repetition and writing down the answers is critical to success.

This is the best that modern organizational psychology can offer in dealing those moments when life seems like nothing but broken promises and shattered dreams. Perhaps I have a high opinion of this research as it seems to support the findings of the Silver Eagle Experiment.