Collective Intelligence and Crisis Steering

Reinforce the decision process

At the end of December, Pearl is contacted by a large industrial company in Lyon, in a sensitive sector, to carry out a crisis management exercise at COMEX level on January 10th.

We specify with the customer the final effect they are looking for.
Given the preparation time of the exercise and our limited knowledge of the client, we honestly delimit the scope of our action and agree on the modalities. We are going to project the COMEX very quickly “in the bath”.

We understand that the goal is to reinforce the collective intelligence and the decision-making process of the Executive Committee in exceptional situations.

The client wants a training session, a rehearsal, because weak signals indicate a turbulent start to the new year.

Helped by “accomplices” at the customer’s, Pearl realizes the plausible scenario. Several meetings allow the validation at the beginning of January.

The day of the exercise finally arrives. Relaxed atmosphere. The exercise is launched.
At first, we let the team do it according to its habits, its culture and what it has retained from its own procedures… We observe.

Then we stop for a while. We share the first observations, we suggest some points, we question and we propose. We move on to the CALM method.

And we start again. The operation becomes much more fluid.

That’s it, the end of the exercise is sounded. A little frustration: 1 hour more would have allowed us to go further.

But the debrief, which we chose to be as long as the exercise, is exceptionally rich. The freedom of speech is total: direct questions are asked without turning into a settlement of accounts, the quality of the listening is there. Leadership is questioned.

The session concludes with a very pragmatic action plan for progress.

In just a few hours, we achieved each other’s objectives. The emphasis was gently put on possible improvements.

The manager who called on Pearl is satisfied when the CEO says he would like to do this kind of exercise once a year. A virtuous improvement process is thus launched.

For Pearl, it is also a satisfaction because the exercise was a challenge. A strong and reactive team was needed to realize in such a time a quality scenario, to get the final effect wanted by the customer, to observe and address at the right level this management team.

A very big thank you to Pearl’s partners who came to reinforce us: Caroline Saisou who is at the helm, imaginative, lively, almost omnipotent and who always keeps a sense of humor; Hervé Arnaud-Joufray with his sense of listening, his analytical capacity and his huge experience in decision making process.

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