Friday, March 06, 2009

Credit Crisis – Made Simple

A colleague of mine got an interesting question the other day. What do we do to defuse people haranguing at local officials about the downturn?

“Mad” and “Sad” can be viewed as nearly the same emotion, just different expressions. But as Rick Amme, a crisis management expert here in North Carolina has warned, “always try to avoid using facts to counter emotion.”

Though venting is normal, it can easily become grandstanding and rarely leads to problem solving. Many news media and some politicians feed on assigning blame. But problems as vast as the current credit crisis that is log jamming the world’s economy rarely have so much blame to go around that everyone is a victim and no one individual or group is responsible.

Sometimes life just isn’t that simple.

Sometime we all have responsibility…and who cares. Solving the problem is much more important.

But for anyone truly interested in solving this crisis, by better understanding how it came about, here are two entertaining and very informative sources.

One a six minute graphical explanation by Jonathan Jarvis
http://vime o.com/3261363

Another is very funny and informative transcript of an American Life that ran on NPR
Transcript
Podcast

So let’s all take a deep breath…bone up on the problem, put a moratorium on finger pointing….and solve this problem. But there I go, using facts to counter emotion.

No comments: