There’s a pattern when crisis announces itself – your phone keeps on buzzing towards infinity as starts accommodating for – calls, texts, slack messages & voicemails. It was the middle of the night and when my hotel phone rang it was clear that our much-celebrated global release was – the best way to put it – facing difficulties. The call was from the Head of Digital let’s call her Diggy and the message was shortly and simple – “Sagar, our teams in APAC & EMEA are not seeing any orders”.

The only response I could murmur – “That’s half way across the world, but let’s get to work”.

Framing : Moments like these are a trial by fire for leaders & litmus test for business process. The first crucial task of a reported disaster is to use the art of framing to describe the nature of the problem faced by the organization. Frames shape the way we think, from the problem towards potential opportunities and solutions. As the coffee pot started warming up, I kept telling myself we cannot blame the upgrade else the whole digital transformation initiative gets smeared – hope Diggy feels the same way.

Moments later as we connected, Diggy came up with a better frame: “This is a technical problem that we are working to establish causality. In the light of uncertainty, we recommend that teams scale back operations until we satisfy ourselves that the systems are reliable again”.

Awareness: We humans hate surprises especially when it’s a bad one like the Regional Sales Leader seeing zero orders in the daily sales report. In a radically changing, data -driven business it is important to communicate – “we know” & “we care” when technology fails. The first set of communication was led by Diggy – acknowledging that there is a known issue and providing alternative options to downstream leaders. The second set of communication was led by me to the technology stakeholders and getting on a screen share with regional teams for a first-hand view of the problem.

Just Like A Band – Aid:  It’s been an hour now and there were multiple hypothesis thrown about the root cause. With no confirmed causality in sight, dependent teams started to align on an interim solution.  As I rattled off with the technical details, Diggy interrupted “in English please”. Paused, sipped a glass of water and explained that our solution frame was simple: Remove the module for new services with an interim module that ensures business critical data are passed between systems.

We retired for the night implementing our band aid and confirming with our ground teams that systems are back to normal. The outage & impacts were estimated and communicated across stakeholders with the confirmation that – “we are back to business as usual”

Expectations Setting: With the interim solution in place its time to define expectations for the business. Going back to the framing board next day, the expectation communicated was – we know the problem we must solve and with the interim fix in place there would be minimal impacts to your business operations. Thanks to our love hate relationship with change, confidence in the transformation has to be always maintained and communicated.

P1 Permanent Solution for the Band-Aid: This crisis has been a huge setback for the vendors, stakeholders and owners of this digital transformation. Diggy’s leadership frame was simple to the team – priority 1 find a permanent solution to the problem without pointing fingers and impacting any other initiatives. Difficult yet effective since everyone from the impactor to the impacted rallied towards solving the crisis at hand.

Rip Off Slow& Steady: With the new solution tested within human possibilities, its time to replace the patch with the permanent solution. Instead of a snap global replace, we opted for a slow and steady region – wise change. Closely coordinated by Diggy and the regional leadership, deployments were evaluated with the ground teams and closed after all custom requirements have been made. It helped contain failures and surprises to a regional level with additional support deployed as required instead of an enterprise -wide breaking news.

Celebrate Success with Documentations: Enterprise capabilities cannot mature without documentations about how it works. A single jolt of failure can bounce them back to using legacy systems. The communications from leadership had been loud and clear – The project closes only after all documentation has been complete.

The key for leaders is to do the hard thinking first and define your framing board. Clearly communicate the need and scope of a band aid to solve the problem in hand. When ripping off slow and steady always wins the pain.