Seize today

At some point in their lives, companies, individuals and institutions will get caught up in a public crisis. All at once, their mostly uninspected lives are klieg-lighted and exposed, their actions judged by others, not on the basis of understanding mores but measured against the values of the viewer. Whew!

With crises arising at such frequent intervals, the advice for handling them has become routine. Begin by telling all at once. Being the source of the bad news can earn public support for what comes next. And what comes next is a set of changes in the “business as usual” that become a part of the brand of the company, individual or institution in the glare.

A former colleague once outlined an infallible script for those caught in the headlights. He called it the “three R’s – regret (We are sorry this happened), reform (Here is how we’ve changed) and restitution (Those harmed will be whole).” A good plan that can help set the stage for a second act.

But as technology has made information persistently immediate, as the flat world has intensified competition and the “qualities” of zero-sum, retail politics have become the style of business, such an approach, once thought glib, is now akin to classical music: complex, deliberate and hard to master.

In its place is arising an approach informed by a single word: Today.

The new script plays upon the anxiety caused by the gap between a reality averaged on facts-and-figures and the real world where each of us lives. It is the gap between good unemployment statistics and the bad mood of people when asked about their economic futures. It is the gap between a soft housing market and how hard it seems to buy a home. And it is the gap between wanting to stem illegal immigration while hoping to find affordable help for work few others want to do.

Straddling these gaps and still functioning takes a lot of muscle and mental control. So, individually we focus less on the future and not at all on the past. Collectively, the strain of maintaining our balance makes us susceptible to this new approach; we are willing to listen to any story that helps get us through today. And more and more it is a story that challenges us more than it informs us.

As a result, the spotlight today may be as hot, but it lingers less. It is on and gone. If we play the right cards, those caught in crisis can spend less time on regret and nearly no time at all on reform and restitution. No matter the mess, we are too distracted to take things more than one day at a time. It is always “today,” and has been more so since September 11, 2001.

The sound bite now goes something like this: “Mistakes were made, but there is too much as stake to let what we did undermine the value of what we do.” I heard this on the news just today. You?

I am reminded of the character of Reverend Leroy created by the late comedian Flip Wilson. Rev. Leroy was a bit of a flim-flam man who led the “Church of What’s Happening Now.”

At the time it was an inconceivable conceit to think that a man who stood for good would be so howlingly bad or that any church would be so currently temporal. It may be that Wilson wasn’t as much a funny man as he was a futurist and we may all be members of his congregation.