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SWANS, SWINE, AND SWINDLERS

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface..................................................................................................................xi1 A Crisis Is Not What We Have Been Led to Believe; Every Crisis Is an Existential Crisis of Meaning.....................32 What Is a Mess? The Fundamental Differences Between exercises, Problems, and Messes....................................153 All Crises Are Messes..................................................................................................374 When Good Organizations Do Unwise, Immature, and Bad Things............................................................555 It's the Culture.......................................................................................................676 Overcoming Mega-Denial.................................................................................................817 Beyond Fear-Based Crisis Management....................................................................................998 The Art and Science of Messy Inquiry...................................................................................1279 Trust, Transparency, and Reliability: What Can the HROs Teach the Financial Sector?....................................149Afterword................................................................................................................169Notes....................................................................................................................173Index....................................................................................................................195

Chapter One

Every Crisis Is an Existential Crisis of Meaning

There is a central human experience that will shake us to the roots and that each of us must eventually face. Nobody likes to acknowledge or talk much about it. So we usually try to ignore it, wrapping ourselves in habitual routines to avoid having to face it. Since there is no ready-made term for this experience, I will call it the moment of world collapse....

World collapse occurs when the props that have supported our life give way unexpectedly. Suddenly the meaning our life previously had seems to lack weight and substance and no longer nourishes us as it did before.

—JOHN WELWOOD, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

In common parlance, a crisis is an unexpected event that causes, or has the potential to cause, severe loss of lives, serious injuries, and widespread destruction of property, and to exact serious financial costs. In addition, something is usually considered to be a major crisis if and only if it attracts serious media attention. Further, a major crisis also has the potential to destroy an individual or an organization, or to bring a major institution to its knees.

While the preceding definition applies to every crisis of which the authors are aware, it does not capture fully what a crisis does to those it affects. In this sense, while true, the definition is incomplete. In fact, the commonly held belief that there must be a single, universal definition of a crisis is wrong. If there were universal agreement on the definition and meaning of crises or "messes," then they would not be "messes." Instead, the varying meanings and definitions of crises provide valuable information about the assumptions that people make about crises and their prevention and containment.

If there is a common property that all crises share it is the fact that every crisis destroys the underlying assumptions ("props") we have been making about ourselves, the goodness and the safety of our society, and the world in general. This is precisely why crises are so traumatic. In one fell swoop, they turn our lives completely upside down. They not only disturb but seriously threaten our very existence by undermining the bedrock assumptions that we use to give meaning, purpose, and a sense of stability to our lives. As a result, we feel deeply abandoned and betrayed. This is why every crisis is a deep existential crisis of meaning. In short, every crisis is a moment of world collapse.

A DEADLY EXAMPLE: OKLAHOMA CITY

On April 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in downtown Oklahoma City was bombed. The result was that 168 people were killed, 19 of whom were children, and over 800 were injured. It was the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil prior to the attacks of 9/11.

As horrific as the tragic loss of lives was, it became clear to the authors through analysis of countless hours of televised coverage plus many written accounts of the tragedy that the true definition and meaning of the crisis was rooted in something deeper and thus much less apparent. The bombing not only blew up a building and took countless lives, it ripped a set of basic, fundamental, taken-for-granted, largely unconscious assumptions out from under the citizens of Oklahoma City in particular and the United States in general. In other words, it was a true moment of world collapse. As a result, Oklahoma City revealed the existential dimensions of crises and tragedies and a whole different definition of them, which had been virtually ignored and unfortunately still is.

To see this, consider again the typical definition of a crisis. A crisis is a sudden, unexpected event that has the potential to

1. cause serious injuries or diseases, and raise public health concerns and issues;

2. lead to deaths;

3. exact major financial costs;

4. destroy an individual or organization;

5. cause serious damage to a whole society;

6. attract serious media attention.

There is little doubt that Oklahoma City satisfied almost all of the components of the preceding definition. Notice carefully that a "potential crisis" does not have to satisfy all of the components in order to qualify as a "crisis." For this very reason, the determination of what is a crisis is not an exercise in applying a static definition. Instead, it is part of an ongoing process or mess.

Thus, while the preceding definition applies, it became clear that something else was operating. Again, through our extensive media analysis, it became clear to us that prior to the tragedy, the citizens of Oklahoma City and the rest of the United States held at least three major assumptions as to why such an act would not take place on U.S. soil and, furthermore, would not be perpetrated by a U.S. citizen:

1. Terrorism does not happen in America, and certainly not in the heartland of America; terrorism only happens in Europe, the Middle East, and other dangerous regions of the world.

2. Americans are not terrorists, period! Therefore, an American would never commit an act of terrorism against fellow Americans, and certainly not on American soil.

3. Innocent men, women, and especially children will not be killed to "further the cause" of terrorists.

In other words, the tragedy was not only completely unexpected, it made no sense at all because it was completely...