Planning for black swan events: how to create an effective panic team

Ever experienced that unexpected and urgent crisis that needs immediate effort and expertise? No matter how agile we are I’m willing to bet every team/project/organisation experiences these interrupts – the ‘Black Swan’ events – on a surprisingly regular basis.

So why don’t organisations plan for them? We can’t predict what the interruption will be, so we can’t put in place the right resources to deal with it, but a panic team pulled together at a moment’s notice needs time to form before it can be effective – time we don’t have.

Are there any organisations out there that thrive on reacting to urgent interruptions? Yes. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), provides reactive Search and Rescue (SAR) response around the coast of the UK and Ireland. They respond to emergencies, launching state-of-the-art boats, with volunteer crews, into complex and evolving situations within minutes.

So how do they manage to create a team from a pool of volunteers in that timeframe? How do they compress Tuckman’s lifecycle into minutes?

I’ve been a crewman on lifeboats for twenty years and through this talk will explore the culture of the crews, what we can learn from them and bring into the workplace.