Dealing with impossible crises - Relentless resourcefulness at work | Hacker News Reader

Dealing with impossible crises - Relentless resourcefulness at work

danieltenner.com

87 pointstomh-22 comments

The type of person who consistently pulls off these sorts of tasks, is someone I call "the firefighter". Every good organization has one, the person you call when all hope is nearly lost. The one who always manages to salvage the failing project, to fix that bug before the demo, etc.

The article is a great "how to" on becoming "the firefighter" in any situation. In my experience the big one that people miss is "take an active part". So many people when they hit the wall don't put themselves into the middle of the problem, and just hope that everyone else will follow through in time.

Great article!

I hadn't seen it that way.. "the firefighter".. Thanks for sharing that angle, it's a good way to put it. And you're right, every organisation needs one of those.

If you really want to enjoy your job, learning how to become the 'Fire Prevention and Safety Officer' is much more rewarding.

Firefighter, janitor, whatever you call it: either way you end up cleaning up someone else's mess.

While I often seem to be in the role of firefighter, it is one I despise. The more the firefighter saves the day, the more people play with matches in the gasoline refinery.

I've seen it go both ways. In some cases people come to rely on this person's intervention, but in others it's seen as a badge of failure to have to call in the "firefighter". I think it all comes down to how management handles the situation, as well as the dynamics of the group itself.

My former tech lead was like this, and it seemed like impossibilities just did not exist for him. It was very inspiring.

One of the reasons I left that job for this silly wild goose chase of starting a business was to force myself to learn some of these skills the hard way, rather than letting someone else magically handle the problems.

The advice here makes an interesting contrast/overlap to my own slogan "Shut up and do the impossible!", though that's advice honed on a completely different sort of impossible problem where the main resistance comes from technical difficulties or your own confusion, rather than people.

"Be prepared to lose" is the main advice I would completely reverse for supreme technical difficulties.

I prefer to look at it this way...

If you find yourself "dealing with impossible crises", you've already failed. Something is seriously wrong for this to have happened.

I like to identify that flaw and design and implement a system (digital or otherwise) that will make is so that the impossible crisis can never happen. It doesn't really matter how achieveable perfection is, it just matters that that is your goal.

If you are not dealing with the occasional unforeseen crisis, by definition you are only sticking to things you fully understand.

Some people prefer that, and in some fields like aircraft safety maybe it's an essential characteristic. But in most competitive endeavors, that attitude tends to be defeated by the person who chooses to take more risks, even if some efforts fail.

Either that or you take on things you (and your competition) don't understand and you explore it until you understand it completely and now you have a leg up on the competion.

I work in a safety-critical industry and this is how progress is made: dream up the technology, implement it and debug it fully until you can show the risks have been eliminated and then release.

In our industry the people who take dangerous risks will probably be sued into the ground if they're not shut down by the FDA before that happens.

Let me know how that ivory tower is treating you

I think this article is about how to get bureaucracies to do the impossible.

Smiling and being patient isn't the right approach if, say, you're a football coach, or Steve Jobs. There, passion and impatience can work to inspire others.

The difference is that a bureaucracy is set up so that no one is motivated to assist. One has to build human relationships to change those motivations.

When you have acknowledged leadership power, you may use different techniques.

Takeaway: Air France sucks, and I couldn't agree more. Those #######'s managed to lose most of my important personal belongings in Paris, in 2002, and gave me a very measly amount of compensation after hassling with them for a long time.

I sure hope that's not your only takeaway from this article :-P

Oh, I just skimmed the motivational blah blah blah part;-)

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm just teasing swombat a bit, it was a good article, and had good advice).

swombat deserves it, so don't tell him it was a good article - it will go to his head. ;-)

From the article: Principle #1 for doing the impossible - Calm down, smile and stay polite

> Angry people are always wrong, and they’re rarely worth helping or cooperating with.

I did technical support for a company that sold really cheap PCs to a regional department store. I felt sorry for people who bought those cheap PCs instead of spending a little more for a name-brand like Dell. A fair percentage of these calls dealt with fairly angry people (e.g. father calling on behalf of daughter who lost their term paper because computer crashed - for real). I learned to always keep my voice calm. And my manner upbeat. It soon became habit. The customers weren't very technically savvy; I tried semi-subliminal stuff like "I for Intelligent" when spelling out DOS commands. I did manage to solve a fair number of issues (in the arena of bringing modems back to life by resolving COM port issues). Sometimes, though, I had to tell them to get a RMA # (for returning their piece of junk).

Thanks for the well-written article. I need to apply these lessons more.

Your comments reminded me of a salon.com article I read a few years back on tech support and a guy classifying tech support coping personalities. Hope your experience was better. A quick search found it:

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_suppor...

I guess I was in the minor leagues when it came to tech support (no call center - just me in the backroom), but, yes, I think tech support is almost like tele-marketing (you're trying to sell the customer that you adequately provided service).

Great article. I'm reminded of Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction.

That reminds me to get a good coffee and get others to clean up the mess, not my style :)

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