Panic Rules but doesn't resolve

Recently I received an escalation from a customer who had experienced a couple of issues on a service we had just launched. The customer was rightly concerned because if not resolved these issues would have an impact on the success of the program and clearly the customer was nervous. However, not as nervous as some of my management team. Within 5 minutes of the customer's email I had received a call, a text and a visit from two executives and the customers account manager requesting status or offering me advice.

In operations it is important to retain a cool head and focus on identifying and resolving the problem at hand. Probably the worst thing you can do is overreact. One thing I have learnt over 20 years in operations management is that things rarely look as bad after the storm as they do in the middle of it. So it is imperative you take that into account in your decision making or else you are likely to simply over correct and make a bad situation worse. The title of this post came from one of my operations managers who appreciates the importance of a cool head. As Kipling says, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs..."