This thing is so very small to have caused so much disruption.
I have spent my entire career in higher education. I am a first-generation college student in my family and I believe in the transformative power of education – so this is a field that I’m passionate about. I tell everyone interviewing for a role on my team that I don’t get out of bed every morning excited to crush the bottom line – I get out of bed excited to change the world through education, research, and service to the community I live in.
That said: if you’ve been reading anything about colleges recently, it’s pretty obvious that COVID-19, and the novel coronavirus are making closing out our semester – usually a highlight for faculty, staff, and students – a nightmare. I’ve been in this field for twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Most schools are transitioning classes to fully online for the rest of the semester, closing residence halls and effectively emptying the campus as much as possible to support social distancing. That sounds simple enough, but through the lens of pedagogy and IT this is an unplanned revolution – it is, in a word… hard. Our teams (both academic and technologists) have been working every day around the clock in order to try to make this as successful for the students as going to class would have been.
I wanted to spend a bit of time talking through a method that I’ve been using as I manage a team directly responsible for supporting our students and faculty. This will be a shorter post for sure, as I’m still embroiled in supporting the campus. As it is, I’ve already bounced away from writing this three times to tend to some pressing issues – and I’m only 275 words in so far.
When dealing with any large-scale disruption or crisis, I have relied on a construct I came up with that I remember as PSI. PSI stands for Priority, Simplicty, and Information. I’ll break down how this is applied in a minute, but first I just want to give you a high-level overview. Generally speaking, during any time of high-demand pressure the biggest risk I’ve seen is lack of team coordination and understanding of what they are supposed to do. By prioritizing the tasks in front of us, keeping them simple and making sure people know what is going on – it significantly reduces the risk of the team seizing up or doing the wrong thing during a crisis or disruptive event. While you can get fancier models - they would violate our second principle of simplicity, so I have stuck with this one for a while and it hasn’t let me down yet.
PRIORITY
First up, you need to prioritize what is in front of you. During any emergency, crisis, or period of intense activity, you have multiple things happening at the same time and no one – not even the best multitasker – can tackle everything all at once. Your job as a leader is to figure out which tasks are most important and then making sure that you and your team are executing them in that order. If you spend too much time working on things other than what you’ve declared as a priority, you aren’t getting the best effect from your team. Keep people focused on the priorities and re-evaluate this list often.
Generally speaking, in a crisis your priority should not be playing Scrabble. Incidentally, “priority” is not a great word based on score. Better hit the triple word space.
In the current event, I’ve set up a Microsoft Teams site and made sure it was clear to everyone to be looking at it multiple times an hour. I communicated this clearly and made sure everyone knew what I expected of them. Clarity during crunch time is key. Then I’m using Teams to make sure that I’m keeping a running list of tasks that people know they should be working on with a priority assigned to it. It’s not elegant, but it works – and in the past, I’ve used such inelegant solutions as whiteboards and sticky notes. The important thing is to make sure that the people looking to you know what they are supposed to be working on. Make sure they know to say “no” to lower-priority tasks.
Finally, do not forget to let people know what strategy is guiding your tactical priorities. For instance, in my world our first priority was to support faculty transition to online learning. As a result, we did not spend much time or resources on staff or student needs right away, because the most important thing was to give faculty time to get classes online for students. Once that acute need was abating, we then started to focus on other issues. The strategy was “enable online teaching, enable online learning, enable support processes.”
SIMPLICITY
Do not complicate your plans and tasks during an emergency. For instance, you should be able to keep messages simple. Don’t worry about flowery language. During ultra-hectic times, we don’t do much besides focus on the task at hand. We had to re-deploy a ton of laptops and chromebooks in record time to support distance working and learning. We didn’t spend a lot of time focusing on how to make it look good; we crashed two conference rooms and started setting up laptops in the hallway to get it done faster. We needed to re-license a bunch of students for remote access to software. We could have built a webpage to capture student logins and needs – but we decided to just license everyone.
Another example of simplicity is how we were talking about prioritization up above – “enable online teaching, enable online learning, enable support processes” isn’t a complex thought. We could have written a paragraph about how we were going to prioritize those that teach so that we can enable our.. blah, blah, blah. Keep it simple – here’s the order we’re doing things. All communication should be simple when you’re pressed for time.
There isn’t really a tool that I think conveys simplicity very well, but here’s the acid test – if you’re explaining something that needs to get done, and anyone says “I don’t get it,” it’s too complex. In other words, don’t tell people to deploy laptops based on previously measured demand and make sure that the scale-up is proportional to the previous day’s demand plus 5%. Just tell them to get all the laptops ready as fast as possible. Don’t micromanage.
While this is a stand-up meeting, it mostly serves to remind me that I do not work on a beach. Seriously, though - informal information sharing is critical.
INFORMATION
This one is possibly the most important of all: your job as a leader – especially during a crisis - is to make sure everyone on your team understands what is expected of them and what the current situation is. Communication is always important, but during a major disruption its importance doubles or triples. If people don’t have all the information they need, they cannot do their jobs appropriately. For instance, if we don’t communicate the priorities from above, how on earth can we expect our teams to execute in line with them?
There are a lot of tools in 2020 to keep communication open and you should use as many as possible. Teams or Slack are great tools – but don’t forget that old standby of email. The bottom line is that you should communicate in whatever way that your team is going to listen. If that means sending a voicemail blast to everyone – do it.
A really simple way to make sure that you’re staying in contact is to meet with your team often. During the COVID-19 issues, I have been having daily wrap-up meetings with my whole team (including everyone who directly or indirectly reports into my organization) to talk over what has happened that day and answer any questions.
So, there you go. It’s not a complex playbook, and there’s a lot of room for latitude and movement within it. That’s essential during a crisis. You need to make sure that you aren’t locked into anything when you need to get stuff done fast – stay flexible. Ultimately, the plan is to keep people informed, make sure they understand the priorities, and don’t make everything simple.
If you keep PSI in mind when you’re under a lot of pressure, you at least have a plan to make sure that you can get through anything.
Okay, on to you:
When was the last time you had a major disruption that impacted your work team substantially? How did you handle it?
What communication tools does your team prefer? How can you leverage them in an emergency situation as seamlessly as possible?
How can you simplify your objectives so that everyone understands what they should be doing at any given time? Practice making “the mission” very clear in your daily work so it’s second nature in a crisis.