With no training for such a scenario, he stopped and reflected for a matter of seconds-all that he could afford-to determine if he could get to the airport safely and instead pivoted to the Hudson River for landing. After a bird strike caused both of his plane’s engines to fail shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in January 2009, he had very little time to decide whether to try to land at a nearby airport, as the control tower was urging, or to aim for a water landing. Ferrera, Jack Grinband, and Tobias Teichert, “Humans optimize decision-making by delaying decision onset,” PLOS ONE, March 5, 2014, Volume 9, Number 3, Ī dramatic example of a leader who paused during a landscape-scale crisis is Captain Chesley Sullenberger. Research shows that the simple act of pausing, even for as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds, allows the brain to focus on the most relevant information. In a crisis atmosphere, it is tempting to jump from one urgent task to the next, to take charge of what’s right in front of you-to just execute. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” That is easier said than done. When asked what makes a great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky is said to have answered, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. Giving yourself a moment to step back, take stock, anticipate, and prioritize may seem counterintuitive, but it’s essential now. To make bold decisions quickly in these uncertain times, leaders can follow these five principles. For instance, delaying the decision to cancel noncritical surgeries can mean not freeing up physician and hospital capacity now and potentially exposing or infecting more people. But when the environment is uncertain-and defined by urgency and imperfect information-waiting to decide is a decision in itself. Postponing decisions to wait for more information might make sense during business as usual. The typical approach of many companies, big and small, will be far too slow to keep up in such turbulence. When you have a crisis of uncertainty such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived at overwhelming speed and enormous scale, organizations face a potentially paralyzing volume of these big-bet decisions. But the trickiest are those we call “big bets”-unfamiliar, high-stakes decisions. Leaders know that making good, fast decisions is challenging under the best of circumstances. Separate articles describe organizing via a network of teams displaying deliberate calm and bounded optimism demonstrating empathy and communicating effectively. It draws together McKinsey’s collective thinking and expertise on five behaviors to help leaders navigate the pandemic and recovery. This article is part of a series Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges.
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