How flexible is your crisis team?

Last week we ran an exercise in which the scenario was nothing to do with the organisation concerned. The crisis team were part of a financial services organisation, but the scenario was a transport crisis. You might think this a little strange, but it’s something we are asked to do from time to time. Why would a team choose to do this? The main reason is to ensure that the team focuses on the process of managing a crisis, rather than relying on the participants’ knowledge of their organisation. It’s a great way of ensuring a mature crisis team continues to gain experience in diverse circumstances and remains flexible in their thinking.

I was reminded of this flexibility when I picked up an old motorsport magazine at the weekend and read an article about how the Mercedes Formula 1 team helped save thousands of lives during Covid. It’s an amazing, and little-known story. When Covid struck in 2020 there was a critical shortage of ventilators. The team realised that their record of fast-paced engineering research and development, together with their extraordinary design resources, meant they could step in and help. They relocated to University College London and doctors, academics and engineers worked, at times, 22 hour days to design a new ventilator from scratch. Well, it wasn’t quite from scratch - they actually realised that the new ventilator needed to perform a very similar function to a Formula 1 fuel pump. In a matter of weeks they had redesigned the pump, retooled a production line at the Mercedes factory and began production.

Ben Hodgkinson, Head of Mechanical Engineering at Mercedes-AMG HPP, with technical drawings of the UCL Ventura CPAP device. Photo courtesy of Royal Academy of Engineering

Just 30 days after the first meeting to discuss the project the team had delivered 10,000 of the machines, named UCL / Ventura CPAP ventilators, to the NHS. And the blueprints were made available online for anyone to copy.

Delving a little more deeply into the article (the Motorsport magazine article was an extract from a book: Racing Green: How Motorsport Science Can Save the World by Kit Chapman published by Bloomsbury) I was reminded that this wasn’t the first time that Formula 1 had helped the NHS. Back in 2003, paediatricians Allan Goldman and Martin Elliott were watching a Grand Prix after their shift at Great Ormond Street Hospital. They realised that there was a startling similarity between an F1 pitstop and transferring a child to intensive care after an operation. In hospitals 70% of mistakes are breakdowns in communication - and half occur at this important ‘hand-off’.

Working with the Ferrari F1 team Goldman and Elliott studied the pit stop process and realised that they were witnessing strict, well-drilled routines practised to perfection. Each person had just one task and everyone was working in calm silence. Great Ormond Street initiated new handover protocols and when the results were analysed they revealed that information errors had reduced by almost 50%.

For any team, the ability to adapt and think outside of their day-to-day sphere can yield spectacular results, and no more so than in a crisis.