Clearing the Skies: Building Decision-Making Strategies for Crises at Work
The Dual-Process Theory – Part III
In the first part of this guide, we explored the foundational steps of adaptive decision-making: recognizing problems, maintaining control, consulting guidelines, and troubleshooting effectively. Now, it’s time to focus on the human element of crisis management. In this second part, we’ll delve into strategies for fostering collaboration, ensuring clear communication, and leveraging support to resolve challenges efficiently. These steps are crucial for navigating workplace crises, where teamwork and transparency often determine the difference between success and failure. Let’s continue refining your decision-making framework to create solutions that inspire confidence and drive results.
5. Coordinate and Communicate With Others
Effective collaboration and communication are essential to resolving challenges efficiently and avoiding misunderstandings. Keep these principles in mind:
- Collaboration is Key: Clarify roles, foster transparency, and ensure everyone is informed about the current situation and their responsibilities.
- Delegate Clearly: Assign tasks explicitly to ensure clarity and avoid confusion or duplication of effort – for instance, specifying, “Alex will handle the client presentation, while Jordan focuses on updating the project timeline.
- Align Stakeholders: Bring your team, senior management, and the customer into alignment on realistic next steps and shared goals.
- Understand True Needs: Take time to uncover the customer’s underlying interest in a request; often, their needs can be met with a different or simpler solution.
- Encourage Open Communication: Promote an environment where all team members, regardless of rank or position, feel comfortable sharing their input or raising concerns.
- Establish Communication Protocols: Work on your communication culture to avoid misunderstandings, finger-pointing, or aggression, and ensure everyone knows how and when to share updates.
- Foster a Just Culture: Encourage accountability without blame, focusing on solutions and improvement rather than punishment.
- Be Strategic With Meetings: Limit unnecessary meetings to save time and ensure focus remains on resolving critical issues.
Try This: Develop a communication framework inspired by aviation’s Crew Resource Management (CRM) or Team Resource Management (TRM) principles [2] [4]. Regularly train your team to balance healthy leadership with empowered collaboration, ensuring that hierarchical boundaries do not suppress critical information. Practice scenarios where team members are encouraged to assertively share their input or challenge decisions in a constructive manner. Internalizing these skills will strengthen your team’s ability to handle crises effectively while maintaining mutual respect and clarity.
6. Seek Support When Necessary (“Declare an Emergency”)
Don’t hesitate to ask for help. If resources or expertise are lacking, reach out to external partners or escalate to leadership for additional support.
Try This: Keep a “Crisis Resource List” of contacts, tools, and methods you can turn to in emergencies.
7. Achieve a Resolution (“Land Safely”)
Implement a realistic solution that addresses the immediate issue while remaining open to flexible outcomes. In high-pressure situations, avoid restrictive, black-or-white thinking that can limit your ability to identify creative alternatives. Instead, focus on finding a “spot to land” whether that’s an emergency solution to stabilize the situation or a longer-term resolution. For example, consider temporary fixes that provide breathing room, phased implementations, or entirely new approaches that align with the core objective without rigid adherence to initial plans.
Try This: Use the “Wide Angle Method.” Step back and ask yourself: “What’s the next best outcome if my ideal solution isn’t feasible?” Encourage your team to brainstorm solutions beyond the obvious, aiming for safe and practical options that meet key priorities without being bound by initial expectations.
8. Analyze the cause (this is the equivalent to the accident investigation)
Dig deep to find out why the issue occurred. Was it a communication breakdown? A misalignment of goals? Understanding the root cause not only helps resolve the current issue but also allows you to refine your processes and prevent similar problems in the future.
Do not stop at the surface – note additional information, such as patterns which either were helpful or challenging. Identify resources, tools, or relationships that proved beneficial, as these can be leveraged in future crises.
Try This: Conduct a “Root Cause Analysis” with your team after resolving the crisis to document lessons learned.
Preparation: Setting Yourself Up for Success
To avoid or at least minimize the potential for encountering a crisis, consider these practical tips:
- Align on Goals: Ensure all stakeholders share a clear understanding of the project’s objectives and priorities.
- Understand the Customer’s Interests: Identify the customer’s true goals and desired outcomes. Sometimes, their needs can be better met with an alternative solution that is simpler or more feasible.
- Create a Decision Dashboard: Summarize key facts, stakeholder needs, and deliverables in a single, accessible place. Use project management tools like ClickUp or Trello to maintain transparency and track progress.
- Define Roles and Communication Protocols: Clearly outline responsibilities and establish guidelines for how information should flow within the team.
- Prepare a Quick Reference List: Develop a concise guide for handling deviations in processes, modeled after aviation’s Quick Reference Handbook [3].
- Build a Crisis Resource Bank: Collect tools, contacts, and successful strategies from past projects to serve as a resource during unexpected challenges.
- Learn from Past Failures: Incorporate root cause analyses from previous projects to identify common pitfalls and prevent recurring issues.
- Conduct “Fire Drills”: Simulate crises during workshops to practice emergency response, establish rules and procedures, and improve communication culture.
Finally, foster a just culture of reflection and learning. After each project, document what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved. Preparation not only minimizes crises, but this also ensures you handle them with confidence and clarity when they arise. By drawing from aviation’s rigorous frameworks and adapting them to broader applications, this approach can empower teams across various fields to navigate high-stakes scenarios effectively. Train your teams properly to enhance their self-efficacy to deal with a crisis, help them to communicate in an effective way and define useful rules which aid the process of dealing with a crisis.
By embedding psychological insights, such as understanding stress responses and cognitive biases, these protocols not only enhance decision-making but also address the human factors that often underlie errors. Additionally, the novelty of this approach lies in adapting aviation’s systematic rigor to diverse industries, providing a tested and reliable framework for managing high-stakes scenarios effectively.
References
The Beatles. (1965). We can Work it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyclqo_AV2M
Skybrary. Crew Resource Management (CRM). Retrieved 2025.13.01. From: https://skybrary.aero/articles/crew-resource-management-crm
Skybrary. Handbook (QRH). Retrieved 2025.02.01. From: https://skybrary.aero/articles/quick-reference-handbook-qrh
Skybrary. Team Resource Management (TRM). Retrieved 2025.13.01. From: https://skybrary.aero/articles/team-resource-management-trm