‘If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.’
The quip collected by Arthur Bloch continues to describe life in contemporary organisations surprisingly well. Despite decades of investment in planning, processes, information systems and management methodologies, much of the work still takes place under pressure: clients changing their requirements, suppliers running late, regulations changing, projects departing from schedules and opportunities emerging when no one was looking for them.
The easiest explanation is that organisations work badly. In some cases this is true. There are disorganised businesses, ineffective processes and managers incapable of planning. Yet this interpretation becomes inadequate when we observe that even sound, well-managed companies with a wealth of expertise live in an almost permanent state of urgency.
As early as the 1970s, Henry Mintzberg observed that much managerial work consisted of continually handling interruptions, exceptions and immediate problems. Since then, the situation has not improved. If anything, it has become more apparent.
The reason is simple. Organisations do not operate in stable environments. They operate in contexts that change faster than their ability to represent them.
In this sense, a certain degree of emergency cannot be eliminated because it is a structural consequence of acting in complex environments.
To make decisions, every organisation constructs a simplified representation of reality. It selects some variables, ignores others, and defines procedures, roles, budgets, forecasts and control systems. Without this reduction of complexity, action would be impossible.
The problem arises when the world evolves faster than the models used to describe it. An emergency appears at the point where this divergence becomes visible. For this reason, the unexpected does not necessarily represent an organisational failure so much as a signal that the world contains something the organisation has not yet incorporated into its own representation.
The most effective organisations are not those that eliminate the unexpected altogether. They are those that learn to use the unexpected to update their models.
When a problem reveals hidden knowledge
A few years ago, during preparations for an international trade fair, an operational problem prevented the company's brochures from being delivered on time. The printed material arrived too late, and the company had to attend the event without the sales material it had planned to use.
At the time, the situation seemed like an organisational error to be avoided in future. Without brochures, it seemed impossible to ensure a consistent presentation of what the company offered. Then reality took a different course: the salespeople began talking to visitors for longer. Conversations became less standardised. Explanations were adapted to the specific needs of the people they were speaking to: dialogue replaced printed material, and the results were positive.
The unexpected made something clear that the organisation had not yet understood: the brochures had been introduced years earlier to ensure a minimum level of consistency in sales communication, which all the salespeople had since internalised.
The tool continued to exist because no one had had sufficient reason to question it. The emergency then took care of that, forcing it to be called into question.
That episode led to the decision to eliminate much of the printed material from subsequent trade fairs. Learning thus arose from a departure from the plan.
A similar phenomenon also occurs frequently in industrial processes. A company approves the purchase of a new production line to increase the plant's capacity. After months of analysis and investment, delivery is significantly delayed.
Meanwhile, demand grows and the organisation has to find alternative solutions. Shift patterns are changed. New logistics flows are tried out. Coordination practices that had not previously seemed necessary are introduced, and some long-standing inefficiencies suddenly become visible.
The company goes through difficult months, but when the line is finally installed, a surprise emerges: the plant has already become more efficient, even before the planned investment. The delay has forced the organisation to look at aspects that had gone unnoticed until then. Here too, the emergency has acted as a cognitive device. It has created the conditions for knowledge to arise spontaneously.
The four questions that turn emergencies into learning
Many organisations respond to the unexpected by trying to restore the previous situation as quickly as possible. It is an understandable reaction. When a problem arises, the priority is to solve it. The risk is that the solution erases the learning. If the objective becomes simply to return to normal, the organisation loses the opportunity to ask whether that normality really was the best arrangement.
Donald Schön described this process as reflection-in-action: the ability to reflect while acting, without rigidly separating execution from learning.
In management practice, this ability can be translated into a few simple questions.
The first concerns implicit assumptions.
Which organisational belief has the emergency disproved?
In the case of the brochures, the assumption was that printed material was indispensable for ensuring quality and consistency in sales communication.
The second concerns procedures.
Which established practice has proved less necessary than we thought?
Many procedures survive because no one puts them to the test. The unexpected often does this work for us.
The third concerns capabilities.
Which unexpected skill has emerged while dealing with the problem?
Organisations often discover that they possess cognitive, relational or operational resources they had never explicitly recognised.
The fourth concerns the future.
Which behaviour that arose during the emergency deserves to be retained once it is over?
This is probably the most important question. Many organisational innovations begin as temporary solutions, and the organisation should think carefully before abandoning them as soon as the situation is back under control, because that is precisely the moment when what has been learnt from the experience risks being lost.
Organisations that learn as they act
Mature organisations do not seek chaos. They continue to plan, forecast, measure and control. To do otherwise would be irresponsible. The difference is that they regard emergencies as sources of information.
Many businesses today invest in increasingly sophisticated forecasting tools, including artificial intelligence platforms capable of anticipating anomalies, optimising processes and suggesting decisions. But no technology can eliminate the unexpected altogether.
Every improvement in forecasting ability simply makes new levels of complexity visible. Some problems disappear while others emerge. Uncertainty changes shape.
For this reason, competitive advantage comes from the ability to learn quickly when forecasts prove incomplete. Organisations that obsessively seek stability often end up defending procedures born in contexts that no longer exist.
Organisations that learn as they act, by contrast, retain a greater capacity to adapt. The realistic objective is to build systems capable of turning the unexpected into learning.
In a constantly changing economic environment, the difference between organisations that win and those that lose depends on what they have learnt by tackling emergencies.
References
Bloch, Arthur, Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong, Los Angeles, 1977.
Mintzberg, Henry, The Nature of Managerial Work, New York, 1973.
Schön, Donald A., The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, New York, 1983.
Argyris, Chris; Schön, Donald A., Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Reading, 1978.
Weick, Karl E., Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, 1995.
Teece, David J.; Pisano, Gary; Shuen, Amy, “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management”, in Strategic Management Journal, vol. 18, Hoboken, 1997, pp. 509–533.