The Fifth Stage of Crisis Management

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch wrote in the WSJ OpinionJournal this past week that Hurricane Katrina is illustrating the five stages of crisis management, with the fifth being that of learning from our mistakes:

History shows us that crises almost always seem to give way to something
better. Maybe that’s because crises reveal how and where the system is broken in
ways that make denial no longer feasible. They have a way of forcing real
solutions to happen.

Hurricane Katrina has the potential to do that in New Orleans–to compel
leaders in government and business to find ways to break the city’s cycle of
poverty and corruption. The opportunities are huge because the losses were.

There is a blank slate for change to begin, and it most likely will. Just watch
the entrepreneurs rush in with ideas and energy, revitalizing old and creating
new businesses with the help of the money politicians will be outbidding one
another to throw at the problem. Just watch the residents of New Orleans flock
to the jobs that are created with a new spirit of optimism.

Crises like Katrina
have a way of galvanizing people toward a better future. That’s the fifth and
final part of the pattern–the best part.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.) 

We see this pattern throughout human history:  We get hammered, by a nature that we don’t fully understand — or that we ignore — and by conflicts among ourselves.  In response, both individually and collectively, motivated not just by our self-serving desires but also by empathy and concern for our neighbor:

• we struggle to grasp, often dimly and incompletely, what is revealed to us;
• we adapt our thinking and our ways, at least somewhat;
• stumblingly, haltingly, we manage to make the world just a bit "better."

We never do this perfectly.  We make progress in one
area while sometimes causing unintended harm in others.  Our learning often comes at terrible cost.  Still, over time, we do seem gradually to be making at least some improvements in our tiny corner of the universe. 

Where is God in all this?  I don’t know.  My hunch is that we mortals are somehow playing teeny-tiny parts in a divinely-authored story that’s still unfolding.  I think we may well be serving as workers on a cosmic construction project of some sort, where we have no real clue what’s being built. 

But, you ask, how do we explain all the suffering that humans must endure?  Again, all I have is a hunch:  that there’s more to "life" than the familiar four dimensions of space  and time.  What we think of as the end of life, may not be:

• Many physicists think that there may be something like ten or eleven
  dimensions, because the math they use to describe the universe seems to work
  out better that way.
• There’s anecdotal evidence that people have encountered dead friends and relatives in some form or fashion.  As I’ve said elsewhere, we can’t arbitrarily dismiss the Christian resurrection stories, because the evidence is pretty compelling that at least some of Jesus’s followers believed that they had encountered him after his death.
• And of course, the Christian faith, among others, teaches that suffering in this world is just a prelude to eternal life. 

Near-term pain in this world often has a long-term payoff.  So perhaps individual suffering, and even death, may have a payoff of some kind in another dimension of life. 

We don’t have enough reliable evidence to reach even a semi-firm conclusion about this.  But consider this:  notwithstanding the iron grip of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the universe’s evolution, during the past 13.7 billion years, can fairly be characterized as "positive," at least from our perspective.  That’s certainly reason for optimism, and for hope.