With our recent history of corporate scandals, financial meltdown, and environmental disasters, one would think that “crisis-management” would be high on the competence list for leadership. Painfully, this expectation has proven false. Tony Hayward is now called the “Bumbler from BP” for his leadership during the oil spill. Wall Street CEOs made every misstep imaginable before, during, and after the crisis they caused. And Toyota’s executives showed as little sensitivity to public anguish as their car company colleagues who two years ago flew separate corporate jets to Washington to petition lawmakers for public bailout funds.
Business schools have been teaching crisis management as a discipline since the 1980s, after Johnson and Johnson set a benchmark for diligence for recalling Tylenol in the midst of fatal product tampering. Somehow, even though crisis has become commonplace, the hoped-for proficiency has yet to emerge.
Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. Perhaps, because crisis management has become a strategy, it is too easy for executives to stay within the referents of business even when the stakes or consequences have become moral. Perhaps, rather than study business, we would be wiser to study history.
Etty Hillesum was not a CEO, but just may be the moral exemplar we all need for crisis management. A Dutch lawyer, Hillesum volunteered during the early days of Nazi occupation to work in the hospital within the Westerbork concentration camp. She was later arrested and along with her family deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered on November 30th, 1943. Eight or so notebooks of her journals and letters survived.
Only twenty-nine when she died, Hillesum has been called “the mystic of honesty.” In the midst of squalor and humiliating indignity, she managed to pierce the barbed wire encircling the camp to free-up transcendent truths about human nature. I wept when I first read her letters, and have treasured her lessons ever since, respectfully applying them to the work of moral management.
Four features of Hillesum’s humanity are particularly relevant to this reconsideration of crisis management.
First, she dove into the crisis seeking to serve other victims, even at grave risk to her own self. This is the reverse posture from that of CEOs. Understandably, executives want to minimize their liabilities in crisis. But this over-riding priority blinds them to the human reality embroiled in any crisis so that their efforts at management too often only exacerbate the problems and harm. Hillesum wrote that her desire was to be “the thinking heart of her barracks.” Her insight was that empathy and compassion are the entry points for understanding a crisis. Rather than think from strategy, the charge is to think from feelings of concern and solidarity with others.
Second, Hillesum declared that what she most needed in the brutal busyness of the camps was five short minutes for “turning inwards.” She wrote, “Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.” For Hillesum, this specifically meant prayer, but the important implication is that we need to create some reflective capacity to keep the crisis in context – even as the demands for action become all consuming. No leader or manager can possibly know when a crisis will irrupt, or how it will end. But we can be clear of our moral priorities to serve as the definitive guides for whatever occurs. Hillesum wrote: “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others.”
Third, even though Hillesum had all the reason in the world to assign blame, she insisted on trying to see the humanity within even the most vicious of the camp guards. Our business culture demands accountability for performance, yet we tend to be in such a rush to point fingers that we neglect the shared work of examining causes and response. Blame-throwing often involves vilifying others. This robs the complexity of any crisis its due diligence, and further dampens the capacities for compassion.
Fourth, Hillesum never ceased wondering at the beauty in nature, recognizing a moment of transcendence from a blooming Jasmine tree just beyond the perimeter of the camp fence. We have become fatalistic about our crises. Economists tell us bubbles will always happen. And in the cause of recovering from the financial crisis, we have delayed attending to the potentially far more calamitous ecological and social crisis from Global Warming. In times when the crises seem to be the norm, Hillesum reminds us that beauty and awe are indispensible resources for generating practical hope in situations of abject despair.
Boards and management schools need to wrestle with crisis management in a new way. Hillesum provides an alternative yet compelling logic to add to that project:
- Make serving the victims the overriding priority. Forget PR and risk management. Stay focused on the harm done to human persons, and their communities. Lead with the heart to find more effective solutions with the head.
- Make time to reflect – to keep clarity on the moral context even as the facts or consequences of the crisis become more pressing and murky.
- Practice accountability with humanity – humility for mistakes; respectful regard for critics; honest dialogue to untangle symptoms from causes. We will never agree on all issues. Nor should we back off from assigning blame. But these should be the outcomes of critical thinking, not of ideological name-calling.
- Allow wonder, particularly towards nature, to leak into the heavy duties of crisis response. Our deepest wisdom is often found at the intersection of grief and wonder. This is why Hillesum could write from a concentration camp that: “Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.”
