Having studied and taught crisis management workshops over the years, I've noticed a benefit and a drawback to being immersed in that topic. The benefit is obvious: you understand how crises develop and the stages for handling and, you hope, preventing them.
The drawback is you can become a tad too sensitive to potential problems. At least, some of us can. Richard Nixon wrote a very good book, Six Crises, prior to becoming president and that didn't keep him from jumping chin-deep into an alligator-filled swamp a few years later. But the myopia of The Man From Whittier was the exception. Study crises long enough and you can conjure up worst case scenarios faster than a barbarian down the street can say "knife." An event which a normal person regards as an inconvenience can rapidly become, in your keen eyes, a disaster with plague, fire, locusts, wolves, and Attila the Hun on steroids.
Those of us who fall into that trap are heavily into prevention. The brave or pig-ignorant souls of a remedial bent completely baffle us. I confess to having a raw admiration for the proverbial fools who wander in where angels fear to tread if only because the fools often - dare I say it? - succeed. Nothing bad happens to them. They aren't chain-whipped or banned from decent society. They are splashing about while the rest of us are on the bank looking for gators.
They may not be so foolish after all.
2 comments:
As a fan of history, I enjoy the kind of crisis narratives I find in much of when I read. This crisis lead to the French Revolution, that crisis lead to WW1, etc. But I often think it is too easy to go down this path.
Take WW1. If you argue that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the fallout of that lead to it, you also have to examine other crisis which came to nothing. Keeping that in mind allows better understanding as to why the participants didn't take the matter as seriously as we do now.
I guess the point is the same as yours. You can't assume you understand cause and effect perfectly.
Daniel,
I apologize for the delayed response.
I too am a fan of history and love seeing how this resembles that but there's always the human factor. If Henry Wallace instead of Harry Truman had been president when North Korea invaded South Korea, there would have been a very different outcome.
Michael
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