My wife coined the phrase “headless chicken leading the blind” last week to describe the phenomenon of her organization experiencing a bit of a crisis. It’s a common enough situation that we all feel familiar with it.

Something goes wrong that affects most or all of the business, and suddenly customers and executive leaders are paying attention. Not only are the leaders aware there’s a problem, they’re also visiting you to “help.” No one wants to show up at daily progress meetings and have to say, “We didn’t accomplish anything today,” or “I don’t know.” People get busy doing anything in any kind of apparent activity whether it makes sense or not.

The problem extends into so many functional areas and processes that no one simple correction will solve it. This means no one knows who is in charge of solving it, or who should be. No one has enough information to single-handedly provide a meaningful solution; thus we have the headless chicken, and chaos ensues.

 …