First published by Grant Rayner on 30 Aug 2024
5 min read
Crisis ManagementI’ve been conducting crisis simulation exercises for 24 years. years. During that time, I’ve spent well over five hundred hours in the room with crisis teams at global, regional and national levels. While some teams are effective, most teams struggle to manage even simple incidents. They make it through the exercise, but it’s clear that their performance is not as good as it could be. They miss key information, fail to make timely decisions, fail to manage tasks, and fail to communicate the right information to the right people at the right time (among other issues).
Managing a complex incident may appear difficult. It’s actually not that difficult given the right processes, tools and training. The challenge for many teams is that they are already hamstrung before they even enter the room.
There are a few areas where crisis teams struggle:
Each of these aspects can be readily addressed through effective processes, tools and training.
In this essay, I’ll describe a few ways you can improve your organisation’s approach to crisis management so that your crisis teams can perform effectively during a crisis.
The most important action you can take to ensure your teams are fully prepared for crisis events is to provide them with a workable process they can follow during a crisis. We advocate an initial response process and an ongoing review process. The key is that process must actually be usable during a crisis.
Unfortunately, many crisis plans are poorly designed. As a result, team members are unlikely to refer to them during a crisis.
What makes a process usable?
First, the process must be actionable. Actions must be laid out step by step, so the team is able to actually follow the process during a crisis.
Second, the process should assume no expertise in crisis management. You should be able to hand the process to anyone in your organisation and ask them to manage a crisis. Just by following the process, they should be able to navigate the situation to a successful outcome.
Sometimes organisations blame poor team performance on a lack of experience. The fact is that very few, if any, people on crisis teams are actually professional crisis managers. They don’t need to be. Instead, they need to bring their functional knowledge into the room and apply this knowledge to the impacts of the crisis. In addition, all crisis teams experience turnover in membership, which means at any one time there will be members of the team that haven’t received training, haven’t participated in exercises, and may have never experienced a real crisis.
The key message is that even inexperienced teams will be able to manage a crisis effectively with a defined process, provided that process is actually usable during a crisis.
Having a process is only part of the solution. In addition to providing a process, you should provide tools to enable the team to manage information at each stage of the process.
These tools should be mapped against each stage of the crisis response process.
Using status displays to display key information will provide immediate clarity to a complex situation and reduce the possibility that key details may be missed or forgotten.
In addition to the core crisis response process, develop smaller processes for conducting specific activities. Examples of such activities include:
While these activities may seem insignificant, they are critical building blocks for how the team manages the overall crisis. As a simple example, the ability of each team member to collect good information during an interaction is a key enabler to broader performance. At the least, better information will result in better decisions.
It can be difficult for a crisis team to handle too many activities at one time. Where a specific activity requires ongoing attention, it’s useful to either task an individual or establish a small team to manage that activity on behalf of the team. These groupings can then report back to the team at key junctures with critical information and updates.
Here’s a few examples of the types of activities that can be managed by people working outside of the team’s routine operations:
For them to provide a useful capability, the responsibilities of these individuals and teams must be clearly defined. At the same time, they need to be able to display initiative and be able to forecast the crisis team’s requirements.
Teams come into incidents cold. If they’ve never had to manage such an incident, they’ll have to learn about the incident and its potential impacts on the fly. As a result, their performance will be sub optimal.
It’s therefore useful to develop playbooks for key risks.
Playbooks don’t need to define the full extent of the response. Instead, they should prompt the team to consider different factors in their response. Not all factors will be relevant for all crisis events, but they will help to ensure the team doesn’t overlook critical aspects of their response.
The content of the playbooks should align with the crisis response process. Playbooks should also be used during exercises, providing an opportunity to build awareness of specific incident types while also providing an opportunity to refine the playbook.
Teams often struggle to know what decisions they are permitted to make without seeking authorisation from other people in the organisation. As a result, they waste time and energy determining how to escalate certain decisions. Worse, decision making is delayed as the team waits for a response, which can have a compounding effect over time.
We advocate providing your teams with explicit delegations of authority, so they know what decisions they are empowered to make during a crisis. These delegations of authority should be defined in the team’s plans and procedures. Also make it clear which decisions will require a higher level of authority and provide a primary and alternate contact person for that decision.
Even with good procedures, teams can struggle to manage a crisis if the members of the team are unaccustomed to working together.
Try to get the team together once a quarter for training, exercises or other activities. Use training to ensure team members are aware of the role and responsibilities of their colleagues on the team.
Training is an obvious enabler of effective crisis team performance. The problem for most organisations is that their training focuses on policies and high-level concepts. It doesn’t actually tell team members how to manage a crisis.
To be useful, training should touch on key policies but should focus on how to actually manage a crisis. Always include a short walk-through activity at the end of each training session so that team members have the opportunity to put theory into practice. By doing so, they’ll walk out of the room confident that they will be able to manage a crisis if one does occur.
Short of an actual crisis, crisis simulation exercises are the only way to build the competence of a team in managing crisis events. Training will get you part of the way, but it’s not dissimilar to letting someone who’s never driven a car read the manual and then throw them into the driver’s seat of a car (on a racetrack, no less).
Crisis simulation exercises provide an opportunity for the team to respond to a crisis event in real time. As such, they are an extremely valuable tool for building competence and confidence. They answer the question “are we ready?”
From an organisational perspective, crisis simulation exercises provide the opportunity to assess the performance of the team and determine whether the team requires more or different training. Exercises can also surface more systemic issues relating to procedures that may need to be addressed.
To maintain any level of collective competence, you’ll need to exercise your teams at least once a year.
A key challenge you will face in practice is that members of crisis teams rarely, if ever, get to see a high performing crisis team in action. As such, they don’t have a role model for crisis team performance.
Without an objective way to measure team performance during a crisis or simulation exercise, it’s difficult for team members to know how their team performed. Similarly, they will have no way to know how to improve.
Most companies don’t have frameworks for assessing crisis team performance. As a result, they are hampered in the quality of feedback they are able to provide after exercises or actual responses. It’s therefore difficult to identify areas of improvement and retarget training to implement those improvements.
In short, without the ability to measure team performance, it’s almost impossible to improve team performance.
Empowering crisis team performance is not an impossibly difficult task. Simply by providing the team a usable crisis response process and integrated tools will have a marked improvement in performance. Having the owners of the crisis management programme in the room with the team to guide them during an exercise or crisis will also improve performance.
The other key aspect is to run exercises for your crisis teams. Exercises are the best way to assess the capabilities of your crisis teams and identify areas for improvement.
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