One of the scenes from Finding Nemo is rattling around in my head. This particular scene, in which Nemo and his father convince a school of fish to work together to escape the net of a fishing boat in which they’re snared.
Nemo boldly takes action to free the fish. However, he knows that he needs to motivate them all to “swim down” to try to break the net that’s slowly lifting them up. He has to get the fish to work together, quickly and in crisis, and has no time to explain his big plan or explain why he thinks this will work. And the fish don’t have time to ask any questions.
The fish follow his commands and they all escape, off to lead the rest of their lives. Nemo swims away a hero.
In his article “Effective Leadership Response to Crisis,” Helio Fred Garcia cites the Art of War by Sun Tzu to explain that effective leaders possess both situational awareness and self-awareness (knowledge of others/knowledge of self) in times of crisis. Both kinds of awareness are necessary to accurately size up a crisis and take action to right the situation.
Nemo convinces the fish to swim down, and against what might have been their better instincts, they do it. Though our protagonist is a cartoon fish, real-life examples of quick decision-making and crisis aversion aren’t hard to find.
What kind of leader are you in a crisis?
And what kind of follower would you be? Would you “swim down?”
Scene from Finding Nemo (’swim down’ starts around 3:40)
