The past provides little guidance about what will work in the future, and executives must learn rapidly and execute reliably under extreme time constraints. These factors can make situations chaotic, which is discouraging and, often, frightening.
In such emotionally charged circumstances, most leaders feel torn. They worry: Should they be directive, taking charge and closely monitoring people?
Or should they be empowering, inviting innovation and letting many experiments bloom? Our research suggests that the answer should be yes—to both. The choice presents a false dichotomy. In complicated and rapidly evolving settings, CEOs have to command action so that they can execute efficiently and capitalize on even fleeting opportunities.
That will happen only if leaders foster creativity and openness, encourage exploration and invention, and facilitate cooperation across disciplines and perspectives. To meet these conflicting demands, leaders must alternate between directing action and enabling innovation. At times, they must be decisive, give instructions, and periodically close down discussions so that the team can get things done. At other times, they must create space for new ideas, encourage dissent, ask questions, and promote experimentation.
Leaders that lean too much toward either relentless commands or unchecked ideation do so at their peril. The concept of duality in leadership has been discussed before in HBR. This article extends that thinking, unveiling a framework that leaders facing complex, high-pressure situations can use to integrate fast innovation and urgent execution.
Each phase focused on a different problem: The first entailed finding a needle in a haystack; the second, quickly designing and implementing a novel rescue system. The leaders focused on driving work forward and looking for new ideas in unlikely places; they acted quickly and yet took time to reflect. To effectively implement this dual approach, we find, leaders must perform three key tasks: Envision, enroll, and engage.
These tasks must be done iteratively; imagine them as the nodes of a triangle, not steps in a process. At any time, the main emphasis should be on only one of them, and as the situation evolves, each will become the center of attention.
Moreover, each task has directive and empowering components. To orchestrate a balance between them, leaders must constantly analyze their changing situation and environment. To thrive in chaotic environments, teams need realism and hope.
Leaders must promote both, by understanding what is and by envisioning what could be—and by inviting others to participate in moving from the existing to the desirable. Coming to grips with reality starts with conducting a clear-eyed assessment of the current situation and trying to anticipate any future consequences.
But the gap between the present circumstance and the desired outcome can be psychologically overwhelming, immobilizing people. The management expert Jim Collins refers to the dual need for hope and pragmatism as the Stockdale Paradox, after the coping mechanism that U.
Navy pilot James Stockdale used to lead his fellow captives in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. Context may have played a part in the decision; his predecessor had been criticized for responding too slowly to an earthquake in February , and there was a growing aspiration in Chile to be seen as capable of doing great things.
His directive was clear: Bring home the miners, dead or alive, sparing no expense. At the accident site, Sougarret found chaos. He and his team cut through the confusion to establish situational awareness a high-level understanding of critical elements of a complex environment, employed by air traffic controllers, military leaders, and emergency personnel , assuming little and asking myriad questions.
The roughly square-foot room held only enough provisions to feed 10 miners normally for two days and sufficient water for a month. The danger was that they would still perish before rescuers could get to them. In his first interactions with the media, he promised a determined effort, not a successful outcome. He explained his experience and expertise, his goals, and his absolute commitment to the rescue. Maintaining situational awareness became a never-ending task, as reality kept changing.
At first Sougarret thought his team could reach the trapped miners by using the existing ventilation shafts and emergency tunnels to get to the lower maze of tunnels. The growing instability inside the mine and the secondary rockfalls that blocked the shafts quickly made this plan unworkable.
The gap between the current state and the desired end had widened, and it was necessary to find a new way to bridge it.
It became clear to Sougarret that the team could rescue the miners only by drilling a borehole that intersected the refuge or the tunnels near it.
However, creating a hole large enough to admit a rescue capsule might take months. That realization led to a conceptual breakthrough: The challenge had to be broken into two parts. The first would involve quickly drilling a small 15 centimeters in diameter shaft to locate the miners and provide them with critical supplies. The second would require drilling a shaft wide enough to extract the miners from an underground location almost two Empire State Buildings deep.
Rescue Plans. Plan A and Plan B each required two holes to be drilled - a small hole first and then a wider one about 26 to 28 inches centimeters in diameter. Golborne said the second pass would progress more slowly than the first pass. Plan A involved using a drill placed directly above the shelter where the miners were holed up.
Under Plan B, a hole was drilled at a roughly degree angle into an area of the mine shaft that was used as a mechanical workshop. That distance, engineers estimated, was around 2, feet meters. The drill used in Plan C needed to cut through some 1, feet meters of rock and earth. Plan A drill was a Raise Borer Strata , usually used for drilling ventilation shafts in mines.
Plan B drill was a Schramm T, usually used for boring water holes. Plan C drill was a Rig drill, usually used for drilling for oil.
Photos: Chile mine rescue. Relatives stand by as rescuers work to free 33 miners trapped inside the San Jose mine near Copiapo, Chile, on August 6, The mine collapsed a day earlier, and the miners ended up trapped 2, feet underground for more than two months.
See how the rescue operation unfolded. Hide Caption. Miner Daniel Espinoza waits outside the collapsed copper and gold mine to help in the rescue efforts on August 7. Miners carry an effigy of Saint Lorenzo, the patron saint of miners, before a Mass outside the collapsed mine on August Chilean President Sebastian Pinera holds up a plastic bag containing a message from the miners on August Translated from Spanish, it read: "We are OK in the refuge, the The same hole was used to provide the miners with food, supplies and letters.
Drilling machines work in the rescue operation on August By Erica Vella Global News. Posted December 3, am. Updated May 11, am. View image in full screen. Smaller font Descrease article font size - A. Share this item on Facebook facebook Share this item via WhatsApp whatsapp Share this item on Twitter twitter Send this page to someone via email email Share this item on Pinterest pinterest Share this item on LinkedIn linkedin Share this item on Reddit reddit Copy article link Copy link.
View link ». Story continues below advertisement. Leave a comment Comments. Engineers, geologists, drilling specialists, and more came together from different organizations, sectors, and nations to work on the immensely challenging technical problem of locating, reaching, and extracting the trapped miners.
Senior leaders in the Chilean government provided resources to support the on-site efforts. Yet their initial attempt at rescue had triggered that devastating secondary shaft collapse.
As news of a mine cave-in spread, family members, emergency response teams, rescue workers, and reporters poured into the vicinity.
Meanwhile, the Chilean mining community dispatched experts, drilling machines, and bulldozers. At the request of President Pinera, Codelco, the state-owned company, sent a senior mining engineer to lead the effort; Andre Sougarret, known for his engineering prowess, calm composure and ease with people, brought extraordinary technical and leadership competence to the project. Sougarret formed three teams to oversee different aspects of the operation. One searched for the men, poking drill holes deep into the earth in the hopes of hearing sounds to indicate that the men were alive.
Another worked on how to keep them alive if found, and a third brainstormed solutions for how to extract them from the refuge. The most obvious through the ventilation shaft, was quickly rendered impossible. The second strategy, drilling a new mine ramp, also soon proved impossible as the instability of the rock was discovered.
The third, tunneling from an adjacent mine a mile away, would have taken 8 months and was thus soon excluded. The only hope left was the last strategy—drilling a series of holes at various angles to try to locate the refuge.
Even that was optimistic, because the location of the refuge was imprecisely known. Maps of the tunnels had not been updated in years. Additional technical challenges disallowed drilling straight down from the top of the mine, further exacerbating the drilling accuracy problem.
Rescuers soon divided into subteams to experiment with different strategies for drilling holes. More often than not, these teams failed to achieve their desired goals in any individual drilling attempt, but they soon learned to celebrate the valuable information each attempt provided, such as revealing features of the rock, to inform future action.
For instance, the drillers and geologists discovered that fallen rock had trapped water and sedimentary rocks, increasing drill deviations and further exacerbating the odds of reaching the refuge in time.
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