Confronting wicked problems and creeping crises: Integrated crisis management

Abstract

The disciplines of crisis management, emergency management, business continuity and resilience are at an inflection point. Is the work of professionals in these fields subject to what some have called at recent industry conferences a failure of imagination? Are the tried-and-true methods and activities serving practitioners as well as they always have, or does today’s world demand something different? The more important question is: In these conditions, how can crisis leaders do the most good? To answer that question, crisis management professionals may consider shifting their emphasis from planning, training and exercising alone and introducing more explicit focus on the delivery of good decision making — in other words, a transition of emphasis from response planning to more strategic programme management. All crises — whether fast burning, slow burning or creeping — require decision making. Ultimately in the aftermath, organisations and their leaders are judged not only on the outcomes of a crisis response, but on the decisions they made. Furthermore, this judgment is made not only on whether the decisions were right or wrong alone, but also whether they were defensible based on the best available information at the time. In confrontation with these realities, there is a unique role for enterprise crisis teams to define a value proposition along a set of guiding principles. From there, operational execution may be bridged through an integrated crisis management framework. This paper proposes a way forward along these lines. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.