Codifying a crisis: Progressing from information sharing to distributed decision‐making

A key challenge in crisis management is maintaining an adequate information position to support coherent decision‐making between a range of actors. Such distributed decision‐making is often supported by a common operational picture that not only conveys factual information but also attempts to codify a dynamic and vibrant crisis management process. In this paper, we explain why it is so difficult to move from information sharing towards support for distributed decision‐making. We argue that two key processes need to be considered: supporting both the translation of meaning and the transformation of interests between those on the front line and those in the remote response network. Our analysis compares the information‐sharing processes in three large‐scale emergency response operations in the Netherlands. Results indicate that on several occasions the collaborative decision‐making process was hampered because actors limited themselves to factual information exchange. The decision‐making process only succeeds when actors take steps to resolve their varying interpretations and interests. This insight offers important lessons for improving information management doctrines and for supporting distributed decision‐making processes.     

Activating constructive employee behavioural responses in a crisis: Examining the effects of pre‐crisis reputation and crisis communication strategies on employee voice behaviours

This study explores how organizational management can promote employee voice behaviours, as positive behavioural reactions with constructive ideas, in responding to organizational crisis. Using an experimental study (N = 640) among full‐time employees in the United States, the study found that pre‐crisis internal reputation and crisis communication strategies—accommodative response and stealing thunder—positively and directly affected constructive employee voice behaviours in a crisis situation. Furthermore, the study revealed how post‐crisis internal reputation mediates the influences of pre‐crisis internal reputation and stealing thunder on positive/constructive and negative/destructive employee voice behaviours. The findings of this study contribute to the theoretical development of crisis communication in the internal context of an organization, especially with respect to employee voice behaviours. The study also highlights an important practical implication for crisis managers who can activate and promote positive employee behaviour voices, thereby influencing leadership's strategic decision‐making in an organizational crisis.     

Preparing for Critical Infrastructure Breakdowns: The Limits of Crisis Management and the Need for Resilience

Modern societies are widely considered to harbour an increased propensity for breakdowns of their critical infrastructure (CI) systems. While such breakdowns have proven rather rare, Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of such breakdowns. This article explores how public authorities can effectively prepare to cope with these rare events. Drawing from the literature on crisis and disaster management, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of traditional approaches to crisis preparation and crisis response. We argue that the established ways of organising for critical decision‐making will not suffice in the case of a catastrophic breakdown. In the immediate aftermath of such a breakdown, an effective response will depend on the adaptive behaviour of citizens, front‐line workers and middle managers. In this article, we formulate a set of strategies that enhance societal resilience and identify the strong barriers to their implementation.     

Crisis Politics in Authoritarian Regimes: How Crises Catalyse Changes under the State–Society Interactive Framework

Most studies and research on crisis management and government crises focus on nations that are advanced and democratic. Through the institutionalized mechanism of voting, the public can respond to a government's handling of a crisis without destabilizing the democratic system of government. However, the consequences of crises, particularly governance crises, in authoritarian regimes have not been adequately addressed. Drawing upon different frameworks in the field, this paper proposes a heuristic crisis development ladder and a state–society interactive framework more relevant for studying crisis management in authoritarian nations such as China. By focusing on the catalytic effect of crisis that accelerates reforms and changes, this paper argues that critical crises are politically powerful and decisive in authoritarian systems, especially in the context of an increasingly proactive civil society. This paper illustrates the crisis provoking politics that influences decision‐making under non‐democratic rule.     

Incident Command Skills in the Management of an Oil Industry Drilling Incident: a Case Study

The successful management of a complex, hazardous event in many domains demands a high level of incident command skills. In the oil and gas exploration and production industry, these skills were required by members of an Incident Management Team (IMT) established to respond the failure of a drilling riser in the Gulf of Mexico. When an incident occurs, members of an industrial IMT form an interdisciplinary, interdependent, but ad‐hoc team. As actual experience of dealing with major incidents of this nature is relatively rare, IMT members have to rely on emergency exercises in training, along with existing domain‐specific knowledge. Following a serious incident on an offshore drilling rig, semi‐structured interviews with the on‐shore strategic and tactical level IMT members (n=7) were conducted. These interviews have resulted in the identification and definition of incident command skills for members of an industrial IMT, namely decision making, situation awareness, communication, leadership, and teamwork, all of which can be affected by stress, as well as organisational factors that influenced the outcome of the incident. Limitations in current incident management training were identified, namely the need for specific incident command skills training. A framework is suggested around which specific incident command skills training can be structured. Key learnings from this case study are also presented which can provide guidance for the training and preparation of industrial incident management teams.     

Case‐based approach for supporting strategy decision making

The practice of strategy decision making proves that when the management board is strongly limited in its capacity to take rational actions, specifically in the context of great decision complexity and uncertainty, it is considered good practice to refer to experience through reasoning by analogy. In this paper, we would like to concentrate on supporting strategic decisions in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The complexity of analogy‐based reasoning has its roots in an attempt to solve new problems based on past cases from a different domain, while we will focus on case‐based approach for a single domain. Additionally, we have chosen case‐based reasoning as a suitable decision‐making paradigm because it is corresponds to managers’ decision‐making behaviour. We present the STRATEGOS case‐based reasoning system for supporting strategic decision making by SMEs management boards and then the system evaluation by the dozens of chief executive officers (CEOs) from SMEs is presented. The results of the survey are promising and show the remarkable correspondence of the proposed solution with expectations and strategic behaviour of CEOs.     

Towards a Theoretical Understanding of the Recurrence of Crises Embracing the Issue of Organizational Learning: An Illustration with the Case of Two Hostile Takeover Bids Faced by Société Générale (1988, 1999)

In this article, we try to better understand the relationship between learning and crisis through the analysis of recurrent crises. Our study focused on two successive and similar crises experienced by the same organization, namely two hostile takeover bids a French bank (Société Générale) had to cope with in 1988 and 1999. From a literature review within the fields of organizational learning and management crisis, we proposed an analytical grid making it possible to get a better understanding of crisis‐induced lesson‐drawing processes. We then used that grid to analyse and compare the learning processes implemented during the two crises under study. This comparison leads us to suggest that lack of organizational learning is one factor that accounts for crisis recurrence. Conversely, proactive crisis management behaviour – resulting from double‐loop learning – seems to be the most fruitful behaviour to adopt in order to prevent a recurrent crisis and produce long‐term effects in the organization.     

A Schematic View of Crisis Threat Assessment

Given the short time available for decision‐making during a crisis, a schema is considered useful to organizations both for making sense of crisis situations and for developing an effective crisis plan. As an effort to bridge the existing ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ approaches in crisis classification, a schematic view of assessing crisis threats is elaborated in this study and a new instrument for empirical measurement is further developed. The study is based on a triangulated research design. Based on inductive research and a questionnaire survey, we developed a schematic framework using a measuring instrument for assessing crisis threats that has four dimensions: command incompetence, environmental pressure, information ambiguity, and coordination difficulties. Then, a comparative case study was used to justify the schematic framework.     

A Lack of Insight: An Experimental Analysis of R&D Managers’ Decision Making in Innovation Portfolio Management

This study analyses the decision to exploit an innovation project and investigates differences in individuals’ evaluations of project attributes in the context of innovation project portfolio management. A conjoint field experiment was used to collect data on exploitation decisions made by 126 research and development (R&D) managers to test how managers evaluate specific project attributes in the context of innovation project portfolio management. I analyse the relative power and popularity of profitability, strategy, uncertainty and social dimensions of the portfolio while R&D managers exploit an innovation project. Moreover, using social judgement theory, I analyse actual exploitation processes (i.e., the innovation attributes an R&D manager considers while he or she is making an exploitation decision) and self‐reported decision‐making attributes (i.e., managers’ self‐reported data). The data underline that R&D managers value specific project attributes more and others less, and therefore find disparities in innovation project portfolio decision making. Based on this study's results, decision makers are better able to reflect and understand the influence of specific project attributes. Therefore, they should investigate established decision‐making processes which can help them to improve portfolio performance.     

It's meaning making,stupid! Success of public leadership during flash crises

Boin et al. (International Review of Public Administration, 18, 2013, 79) and others propose that public crisis leadership consists of several core tasks, among which crisis decision‐making and meaning making stand out in “flash crises.” We however argue that successful leadership during a sudden crisis implies being visible and appealing to the public in need of hearing that the shattered world will be healed. When being visible and using the right rhetoric, public leaders are by and large automatically considered proficient crisis decision makers, that is “the right leader in the right place at the right time.”     

Development of a behavioural marker system for incident command in the UK fire and rescue service: THINCS

Non-technical skills in high-reliability industries include decision making, interpersonal communication and personal resilience. It has been argued that these skills are key to effective performance, safety and welfare. However, there is no agreed upon set of such skills or formal means to identify and assess them for incident commanders in the UK fire and rescue service (FRS). The aim of this research was to identify the non-technical skills that underpin effective incident command in the UK FRS, and to develop a behavioural marker system that captures these skills. Our research assessed the current range of training offered in non-technical skills across the UK FRS, and identified the non-technical skills of incident command within the UK FRS through interviews with incident commanders, and workshops with subject-matter experts. The six non-technical skills were: assertive, effective and safe leadership; effective decision making and planning; interpersonal communication; personal resilience; situational awareness; and teamwork and interoperability. A bespoke behavioural marker system, called THINCS, was developed with exemplary behaviours for each skill.     

Prediction of product design decision Making: An investigation of eye movements and EEG features

Design decision making is happened in every design node and iteration, and the expert decision-making bias and personal preference will ultimately affect the success or failure of the product reaching the market. In this paper, we try to predict the design decision making by investigating the relations between design decision making and subjects’ eye movements and Electroencephalogram(EEG) response. Four different methods were applied and compared to classify the different EEG features and two methods were used for EEG feature selection to correspond the design decision making results. In this study, the authors applied a multimodal fusion strategy for design decision making recognition where the authors used eye tracking and EEG response data as input dataset. According to the experiment results, the performance of the fusion strategy combined with EEG signals and eye movement characteristics is well in fitting the expert decision making results. The multimodal fusion combining eye tracking data and EEG has a strong potential to be a new design decision method to guide the design practice and provide supportive and objective data to reduce the effects of subjectivity, one-sidedness and superficiality in decision making. These results show that it is possible to create a classifier based on features extracted from eye movements and EEG response for the design decision making behaviour.     

Initial Crisis Agent‐Response Impact Syndrome (ICARIS)

There has been a dramatic shift in attitude among organizations regarding the probabilities of crisis occurring. Once crises were considered the domain of the contingency management team that sought the fastest means to recovery, now the entire organization is compelled to take steps intended to mitigate conditions leading to a crisis. In this paper, the authors consider the organization's ‘first responders’ i.e., those who become involuntarily placed in the decision making process because they are the first to become aware of the conditions which indicate impending crisis simply because they are ‘on scene.’ As agents of the organization, these persons will make initial decisions well before the implementation of any formal contingency plan and because their decisions will be based on incomplete assumptions, they are likely to be in error. The impact of these initial crisis‐agent responses can cause irreparable damage to the organization, to the individuals within the organization, and to the surrounding environment. This tendency toward error is referred to as the initial crisis‐agent response impact syndrome: ICARIS. Exercising a program that prepares all employees for the initial decisions that need to be made at the moment of crisis can mitigate problems related to this issue.     

“Damned if you do,damned if you don’t”: Media frames of responsibility and accountability in handling a wildfire

Previous research on media framing of wildfire has chiefly been concerned with the nature of wildfire in the context of climate change and with framing effects on policy and public opinion. Empirical studies on media content, hence what is mediated to crisis managers and the public concerning authorities’ and the public's response, seem to be largely missing. This is remarkable, given that the media represent main sources of information that may influence crisis management and shape public opinion. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify key media frames relating to portrayals of public and authority responses during and after a wildfire crisis. The study is based on media articles from two time periods: immediately after the fire and 1 year later. We used a thematic method of analysis (TA), thus an inductive, “bottom‐up” approach. A core frame, Responsibility/accountability is identified, underpinned by two sub‐themes. One sub‐theme relates to the causes of the fire and its escalation, revealing a number of different interrelated blame frames. The second sub‐theme refers to management of the crisis, reflecting both authorities’ and citizens’ responses. The deficiencies of the former are implicitly suggested to have forced citizens to act to compensate for their inadequacy. The main theoretical contribution is the identification of an interrelationship between frames in relation to different groups of individuals responding to a crisis, pointing to a more complex view of framing effects. In addition, results show how media tend to assess crisis management based on idealistic criteria, inevitably making the evaluation negative. This contributes to an understanding of how media blame frames, thus “blame games,” may unfold. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

A Visual Analytics Framework for Microblog Data Analysis at Multiple Scales of Aggregation

Real‐time microblogs can be utilized to provide situational awareness during emergency and disaster events. However, the utilization of these datasets requires the decision makers to perform their exploration and analysis across a range of data scales from local to global, while maintaining a cohesive thematic context of the transition between the different granularity levels. The exploration of different information dimensions at the varied data and human scales remains to be a non‐trivial task. To this end, we present a visual analytics situational awareness environment that supports the real‐time exploration of microblog data across multiple scales of analysis. We classify microblogs based on a fine‐grained, crisis‐related categorization approach, and visualize the spatiotemporal evolution of multiple categories by coupling a spatial lens with a glyph‐based visual design. We propose a transparency‐based spatial context preserving technique that maintains a smooth transition between different spatial scales. To evaluate our system, we conduct user studies and provide domain expert feedback.     

‘He's One of Ours’: A Case Study of a Campus Response to Crisis

Early on Friday, 19 April 2013, officials at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth learned that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was an enrolled student. That morning, the entire campus was transformed into both a crime scene and a potential target for an act of domestic terrorism. This article examines the campus response to this crisis, based on interviews with campus officials and a review of a task force report produced to review the campus response. This case study speaks to three important issues in the crisis management literature. Having a crisis plan helps (1), but testing of these plans is critical for an effective response (2). Furthermore, the plan must allow for real‐time decision making that is both centralized and decentralized (3).     

Communication Gaps in Disaster Management: Perceptions by Experts from Governmental and Non‐Governmental Organizations

The complexity of current disasters creates a challenge for crisis communication. This paper aims at identifying gaps in communication in disaster management experienced in practice in order to facilitate learning from those situations. The research was conducted using a qualitative online open‐ended questionnaire. It shows that despite the developments in the discipline, communication as an integral part of decision making in disaster management needs to be further developed. The paper provides a practical‐oriented overview of the communication constraints in complex crisis situations, which has not been provided so far. This research is part of an international project developing performance indicators for a quality measurement system for crisis communication.