Senator (at the time) John F. Kennedy gave a speech at the Convocation of the United Negro College Fund in Indianapolis, Indiana on April 12, 1959. Just a few minutes into his speech, he famously said, "When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters – one represents danger and one represents opportunity." Kennedy reportedly used this same statement on a number of speeches throughout his 1960 Presidential Election campaign. Similarly, both former Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have also used it.
It sounds really cool, doesn't it? There is no question that a crisis can be a moment of danger for an organization (or country). As change management guru John Kotter describes in his 8-step change model, the first step to creating the momentum to overcome organizational inertia and resistance to change is to create a sense of urgency - to use another overused phrase, a "burning platform". When viewed in this context, a crisis certainly represents an opportunity to begin anew, to disrupt, and to change for the better.
The problem with Kennedy's statement is that it is unfortunately not true. The Chinese word for crisi ("weiji") consists of two syllables that are written with two separate Chinese characters, "wei" and "ji." Here is the Chinese symbol for "crisis" (weiji):
The first syllable (depicted by the first character) is "wei", which does in fact mean "danger". However, the second syllable (depicted by the second character), "ji" doesn't mean "opportunity." Rather, "ji" refers to a "crucial point in time" or "incipient moment." In other words, the Chinese word for "crisis" means a dangerous, but pivotal moment in time (which pretty well sums up what it is meant by the word "crisis").
I don't now how many times that I've heard Kennedy's statement in a leadership context. Analogies and metaphors like this are almost too good to be true, and in this particular case, it is exactly that. It sounds good, and I wish that it really did mean "danger" and "opportunity", but that's simply just not the case.
I view this interpretation as too literal, and rather see “crucial point in time” or “incipient moment” to loosely mean opportunity: a fork in the road… which path do you take that this dangerous moment in your life presents you with? In other words, is it an opportunity to choose a path of life altering change or double own on ineffective patterns of behavior that anchor you to the status quo?
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