Jim Lukaszewski explains affirmation in crisis management: the early commitment to say what you'll learn from the crisis, how you'll learn it, and how you'll prevent it next time. Stating this plan before you have all the facts reduces speculation and gives stakeholders a sense of direction.
Foreign. Welcome to the 2 Minute Drill. This is part 4 of the Seeking Forgiveness sequence of explanations. This one is about essentially affirmation. And what I mean by affirmation is beginning to talk about what you plan to learn, how you plan to learn it, how are you going to apply the things you learned from the circumstance to preventing it from happening again. It's extremely important to start this thinking even very early in the process, when you don't necessarily know that much about what's going on. This commitment and then you're talking about it from time to time, will actually dampen the speculation that occurs by people because nothing seems to be coming from the process that's happening now. The thing to remember is that all crises happen explosively, but they're remediated incrementally. And this is one of the important increments to forecast what you're going to be doing, what you're going to be learning going down the road. Because as I mentioned, these crises take time to resolve themselves, but you need to be talking about what you're going to be doing. And this concept of affirmation which promises that you're going to learn lessons and talk about those lessons going forward, is very important. Sam.
James E. Lukaszewski and Helio Fred Garcia discuss writing Influencing Leaders together
