A meme was circulated recently in which contradictory bits of information on what to do during the COVID-19 pandemic were listed side by side. I’m not sure whether it was meant as a joke or if it was borne from individuals’ relative frustration about the barrage of information circulating through social and news media. But it reminded me of school administration, my career of many years.
The sheer volume of information available to us today makes it more challenging than ever to make a clean decision about anything. And in a crisis situation, collecting, evaluating, and responding to information is a critical skill for a leader to have. And it is the second step a leader takes to manage a situation.
(Presenting a calm exterior while taking hold of a situation is number one, as discussed in The Sky is Falling.)
At one of the schools I led, we spent many hours developing protocols for emergency situations. We had a full response team, including many managers and upper administrators, a COO, HR, a nursing staff, a public relations manager, and a full communications staff. Depending on the situation, representatives were gathered to address crises as they occurred.
Sometimes things went more smoothly than others. Response to extreme weather, for example, became routine because it was a relatively frequent occurrence. But when new challenges presented themselves, our responses varied. Situations where adequate information was gathered were handled relatively well. Scattered information gathering resulted in frustration and chaos. Quickly evolving situations—and sometimes with contradictory information—made it even worse.
Early on in a crisis situation, forming the right questions is critical. What exactly happened? What should our response be? And what might happen next? In the case of the Boston Marathon bombings, our first question was “What happened?” followed quickly by “Are our people okay?” The marathon routinely serves as a platform for runners to fundraise for various charities; in turn the runner has a spot in the race. That year, the non-profit I worked for had six marathoners running. Several of us were set up at mile 20, ready to cheer on individuals as they passed us by. When we noted that the field of runners had trickled down to only a few, and our app-trackers showed no runner moving forward, we knew something was wrong.
My colleagues and I reached out individually to our personal resources to get more information. It happened that my daughter was cheering on some friends at about the 25-mile marker, so I quickly called her for information. Some kind of explosion had occurred, she said, at around mile 26. From where she stood, runners and spectators were being turned away, the racecourse closed.
What happened next was a collective attempt to communicate with each runner, followed by a phone meeting between school leaders to determine if additional dangers existed. There’s much more to this story, but I can tell you that in the hours that followed the bombings, our leaders responded efficiently and effectively, gathering information and planning their response.
The information-gathering step is one of the most important for a leader to manage. To learn what one needs to know, a leader should reach out to others to get the full picture. Asking trusted colleagues and other sources whose expertise you are familiar with will yield more accurate and helpful information to assist you in determining next steps. ASK. LISTEN. DISCUSS. It’s so important that you don’t gather and assess information in a vacuum; multiple perspectives and collective information yield more informed actions and decisions.
And when you are gathering information, once is not enough. You need to check in, cast a wider net for perspectives, check and recheck facts, ask, listen and discuss again. If you depend too much on initial information, the quality of your decisions and actions will be low because the situation will have evolved beyond that initial circumstance.
It’s too easy to become overwhelmed by information, especially in a rapidly changing emergency situation. Keep calm, and carry on gathering and evaluating the information as it rolls in.