Crisis finally!

Crisis is in everyone’s dictionary these days and each in a totally different meaning! A lot of people know i’ve been talking about writing on Crisis ever since i read the Andromeda strain by which i mean i’m going to copy paste the excerpt and take credit for bringing it to notice :D As a severe case of Baddder Meinhoff syndrome (google it), ever since i came to IIM Shillong, everywhere I hear someone or the other using the word.

Dean – “Crisis is the mother of innovation” (Catch phrase here)
Visiting faculty – “Our resources drain is gonna lead to a huge crisis soon”
Senior - “You’ll hear a lot about this @$#%^ Crisis a lot”
Overheard – “Shit,Personal Crisis time! I’ve run out of clean ‘things’ to wear” :P

But on a more serious note I suggest you read the following excerpt and appreciate the relevance to anything and everything u see around.

According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable. Whether the additional factor is political, economic, or scientific hardly matters: the death of a national hero, the instability of prices, or a technological discovery can all set events in motion.

The noted scholar Alfred Pockrun, in his study of crises (Culture, Crisis and Change), has made several interesting points. First, he observes that every crisis has its beginnings long before the actual onset. Thus Einstein published his theories of relativity in 1905-15, forty years before his work culminated in the end of a war, the start of an age, and the beginnings of a crisis.

Similarly, in the early twentieth century, American, German, and Russian scientists
were all interested in space travel, but only the Germans recognized the military potential of rockets. And after the war, when the German rocket installation at Peenernfinde was cannibalized by the Soviets and Americans, it was only the Russians who made immediate, vigorous moves toward developing space capabilities. The Americans were content to tinker playfully with rockets and ten years later, this resulted in an American scientific crisis involving Sputnik, American education, the ICBM, and the missile gap.

Pockran also observes that a crisis is compounded of individuals and personalities,
which are unique:
“It is as difficult to imagine Alexander at the Rubicon, and Eisenhower at Waterloo, as it is difficult to imagine Darwin writing to Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb. A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices,propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.
Yet underlying the uniqueness of each crisis is a disturbing sameness. A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability,they seem predestined. This is not true of all crises, but it is true of sufficiently many tomake the most hardened historian cynical and misanthropic.”

MC
The Andromeda Strain

Beautifully put. Our actions without thought, bear the burden of sowing the seeds for things you do not anticipate. Yes, Man is intelligent enough to come out of it, be it the current global meltdown or the energy crisis. But aren’t we always thinking in retrospect? True, one cannot predict whats going to happen, but you can adjudge what your present action might lead to. The entire concept of causality is not a retrospective study.

I’m not sure, if this is true of every person, but whenever i try to do an impact analysis (a term from office), i end up over-thinking. There was a brief coverage on Game theory for decision making, but what we don’t realize is how do you account for variable change when there is a sense of foreboding and inevitability! (see movie 21 :) )

I sensed i’m going too technical (or just terms dropping), but something we need to think about before we term the situation as crisis. Problem, scenario, difficulty, hurdle are more apt words than a crisis for most of our day to day life. But our decisions taken to handle the scenarios are to be rational and with a bit of forethought.

As i typed this, i kind of remembered that our batch music band is also called Crisis! They were awesome in the cult comm fest yesterday, and i need to make a special mention of the pianist and singer, a certain Rukma Jayaram (here). She’s got 3/4th of the batch having the gchat status messages praising her voice and more so in awe after reading this article. The humbleness of someone like her and the fact that she’s one among a very promising set of future managers, makes me really proud to be part of this batch :)