

Dealing with impossible crises - Relentless resourcefulness at work - tomh-
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0007-dealing-with-impossible-crises.html

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tannerburson
The type of person who consistently pulls off these sorts of tasks, is someone
I call "the firefighter". Every good organization has one, the person you call
when all hope is nearly lost. The one who always manages to salvage the
failing project, to fix that bug before the demo, etc.

The article is a great "how to" on becoming "the firefighter" in any
situation. In my experience the big one that people miss is "take an active
part". So many people when they hit the wall don't put themselves into the
middle of the problem, and just hope that everyone else will follow through in
time.

Great article!

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TJensen
While I often seem to be in the role of firefighter, it is one I despise. The
more the firefighter saves the day, the more people play with matches in the
gasoline refinery.

~~~
tannerburson
I've seen it go both ways. In some cases people come to rely on this person's
intervention, but in others it's seen as a badge of failure to have to call in
the "firefighter". I think it all comes down to how management handles the
situation, as well as the dynamics of the group itself.

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Eliezer
The advice here makes an interesting contrast/overlap to my own slogan "Shut
up and do the impossible!", though that's advice honed on a _completely
different_ sort of impossible problem where the main resistance comes from
technical difficulties or your own confusion, rather than people.

"Be prepared to lose" is the main advice I would completely reverse for
supreme technical difficulties.

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neilk
I think this article is about how to get bureaucracies to do the impossible.

Smiling and being patient isn't the right approach if, say, you're a football
coach, or Steve Jobs. There, passion and impatience can work to inspire
others.

The difference is that a bureaucracy is set up so that no one is motivated to
assist. One has to build human relationships to change those motivations.

When you have acknowledged leadership power, you may use different techniques.

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davidw
Takeaway: Air France sucks, and I couldn't agree more. Those #######'s managed
to lose most of my important personal belongings in Paris, in 2002, and gave
me a very measly amount of compensation after hassling with them for a long
time.

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swombat
I sure hope that's not your only takeaway from this article :-P

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davidw
Oh, I just skimmed the motivational blah blah blah part;-)

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm just teasing swombat a bit, it was a good
article, and had good advice).

~~~
Musashi
swombat deserves it, so don't tell him it was a good article - it will go to
his head. ;-)

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wallflower
> Angry people are always wrong, and they’re rarely worth helping or
> cooperating with.

I did technical support for a company that sold really cheap PCs to a regional
department store. I felt sorry for people who bought those cheap PCs instead
of spending a little more for a name-brand like Dell. A fair percentage of
these calls dealt with fairly angry people (e.g. father calling on behalf of
daughter who lost their term paper because computer crashed - for real). I
learned to always keep my voice calm. And my manner upbeat. It soon became
habit. The customers weren't very technically savvy; I tried semi-subliminal
stuff like "I for Intelligent" when spelling out DOS commands. I did manage to
solve a fair number of issues (in the arena of bringing modems back to life by
resolving COM port issues). Sometimes, though, I had to tell them to get a RMA
# (for returning their piece of junk).

Thanks for the well-written article. I need to apply these lessons more.

~~~
blogimus
Your comments reminded me of a salon.com article I read a few years back on
tech support and a guy classifying tech support coping personalities. Hope
your experience was better. A quick search found it:

[http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_suppor...](http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_support/print.html)

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wallflower
I guess I was in the minor leagues when it came to tech support (no call
center - just me in the backroom), but, yes, I think tech support is almost
like tele-marketing (you're trying to sell the customer that you adequately
provided service).

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edw519
I prefer to look at it this way...

If you find yourself "dealing with impossible crises", you've already failed.
Something is seriously wrong for this to have happened.

I like to identify that flaw and design and implement a system (digital or
otherwise) that will make is so that the impossible crisis _can never happen_.
It doesn't really matter how achieveable perfection is, it just matters that
that is your goal.

~~~
neilk
If you are not dealing with the occasional unforeseen crisis, by definition
you are only sticking to things you fully understand.

Some people prefer that, and in some fields like aircraft safety maybe it's an
essential characteristic. But in most competitive endeavors, that attitude
tends to be defeated by the person who chooses to take more risks, even if
some efforts fail.

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HeyLaughingBoy
Either that or you take on things you (and your competition) don't understand
and you explore it until you understand it completely and now you have a leg
up on the competion.

I work in a safety-critical industry and this is how progress is made: dream
up the technology, implement it and debug it fully until you can show the
risks have been eliminated and then release.

In our industry the people who take dangerous risks will probably be sued into
the ground if they're not shut down by the FDA before that happens.

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tptacek
Great article. I'm reminded of Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction.

~~~
Zsolt
That reminds me to get a good coffee and get others to clean up the mess, not
my style :)

