Crisis Management Focus
User driven planning methodology for crisis management
A By Lex Drennan
ny consultant or practitioner who has been in the crisis management game for some time will know that exercising is a vital part of organisational preparedness for a crisis. Similarly, conducting post-incident reviews is an essential part of learning and improving an organisation’s capability. However, organisations have shown a remarkable inability to learn from experience when it comes to crisis management. There is a significant body of research and experience that points to this limited ability. This issue is so prominent now that post-crisis and post-exercise reviews discuss lessons identified, rather than lessons learned. In this article, I explore the idea that the failure of organisations to learn from experience arises from the planning methodology employed rather than from an inherent inability to learn from experience. With this idea in mind, an alternative approach to crisis management planning, driven by the user experience, is proposed. A Failure to Learn A significant body of research and practise has evolved about how to create learning organisations that learn from their experience managing crises. The underlying assumption with this approach is the problem lies in the organisation’s ability to learn. Whilst this may be true, it may not reflect the whole story. What if part of this repetition of error lies in the crisis management practises asked of an organisation? What if asking organisations to learn these lessons is akin to asking a left handed person to write right-handed? Whilst it may be possible, it does not come naturally or easily and requires an extensive investment of time and training to master. The Problem with the Traditional Approach The traditional approach to crisis management planning tends to be top-down and ‘expert’-driven. Plans and frameworks are developed, generally in isolation or with small scale consultation, and superimposed upon the organisation and
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the crisis management system participants. These expertdriven plans dictate what ‘should’ be, in accordance with prevailing best practise. A significant amount of time and energy is then invested into training people and adapting the organisation to the documented system. However, there is often little understanding of or engagement with existing organisational crisis management practise, culture and behaviour. The saying “a failure to plan is planning to fail” is almost axiomatic in the crisis management industry. This sentiment is often, potentially unwittingly, taken to mean that the absence of a documented plan means no crisis management capability exists. The organisation without a documented plan is, in essence, treated as a blank canvas on which ‘the plan’ can be readily superimposed. In practice, this necessitates on-going training for organisations to learn and maintain their understanding of this expert-driven plan. Sustaining a crisis management training and exercising program is often challenging, and can rarely be conducted with the frequency necessary to ensure deep capability is built and maintained. This training liability is generally shown during exercises and/or real incidents when plans are not followed or even referred to. Post incident reports and debriefs then take on a wearying familiarity as the same lessons are identified time and again. Approaching the Problem Differently The standard approach to building crisis management capability is to document the system, then practice increasingly complex elements of the system. This generally progresses through training individuals, training teams, to exercising one team then multiple teams simultaneously. This approach could be reversed by taking a ‘user-driven’ approach which makes two assumptions: i. The organisation knows itself and its business best; and ii. The organisation’s instinctive crisis management process is already embedded in its DNA.