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The Prepared Leader: The Five Phases of Crisis Management

July 24, 2023 • 5 min read.

In an excerpt from their book ‘The Prepared Leader,’ Erika James and Lynn Perry Wooten lay down five steps to becoming a more prepared leader in times of crisis.

 In  The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before , two crisis leadership experts — Wharton Dean Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten, president of Simmons University — provide tools and frameworks for addressing and learning from crises. In the following excerpt from their book, James and Wooten identify the five phases of crisis management.

Twice a day, the common swift performs something called a vesper flight. The bird ascends to the planetary boundary layer — a part of the atmosphere that is characterized by convective currents and air thermals. At this altitude, swifts do more than sleep. They proactively use the wind to assess how weather systems far ahead might change or evolve. They use signs and signals around them to forecast shifts in their environment high above the planet. In other words, the vesper flight takes swifts to such altitudes that they can read the atmosphere, locate their own position, and plan accordingly.

In an essay published by the New York Times in July 2020, British writer Helen Macdonald mused about what swifts can teach us about making decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather. Most of the time, these birds remain below the boundary layer, she writes. But to find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must “go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm.”

Not all of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper flights because they are occupied with eggs and young — but surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday. To take time to see the things we need to set our courses toward or against; the things we need to think about to know what we should do next. To trust in careful observation and expertise, in its sharing for the common good….

Scanning the environment, seeing the signs, interpreting cues, and making sense of them is something so completely innate in nature, wholly native to migratory animals, and so hardwired in their instinctive behavior and decision-making that it prompts the question: Why do human beings so frequently fail to go higher?

Macdonald’s essay highlights something critically important: The best way to survive a crisis is to watch for it and see it coming before it’s too late. It is about catching sight of the threat soon enough to avert it or contain the worst and giving yourself and your organization the maneuverability to prepare, mitigate damage, and plan efficiently for recovery.

This is the first phase of crisis management.

The Five Phases of Crisis Management

Crises seem to occur instantaneously. But they play out over time. During the last 20 years, as we’ve researched crises, we’ve seen five distinguishable phases that characterize crisis management.

When we think about crises, we tend to think about damage control or limitation. In fact, this is only one element. There are things that happen before we get to the point of firefighting, and things that happen afterward: Scanning, preparing, managing, recovering, and reflective learning all form part of the whole.

Your first step toward becoming a Prepared Leader is to grasp that each of these different phases entails specific skills and behaviors to manage proactively, systematically, and effectively. The key thing is to remember that as a Prepared Leader, you have agency. You can act at each one of these different phases and make a huge difference in the end result.

Phase 1: Early Warning and Signal Detection

We know that crises happen. We just don’t know where, when, or how they will strike, or what kind of crisis they will be.

Phase 2: Preparation and Prevention

Once you have detected the signs, the next phase is about enacting proactive measures that can (ideally) prevent the crisis, or at least help you brace for its impact.

Phase 3: Damage Containment

When a crisis does strike, what happens next is critical both in terms of containment and damage control. It also determines how you and your organization will progress to the next phase: recovery.

Phase 4: Recovery

One of your most ambitious goals in crisis management will be to recover: to recoup time, resources, and revenue lost and to bounce back—or, actually, to bounce forward, better than before. Business recovery is your North Star.

Phase 5: Learning and Reflection

Reflecting and finding ways to leverage the crisis experience will lead to the prevention or mitigation of future crises.

Breaking crisis management down into these five phases will help you rationalize what is at stake and what you need to do at each phase.

Knowing that crises unfold across these phases, you can also pinpoint the kinds of skills you need to progress from one phase to the next. Because effective crisis leadership requires several critical competencies that go beyond day-to-day general management aptitudes.

Simply put, in a crisis, more is expected of your leadership.

Prepared Leadership is the ability to lead under these amplified pressures and demands. It is the capacity to confront threats and take the right risks, precisely at the moment when our human tendency is to defend, retreat, and avoid threats. During times of crisis, Prepared Leaders need to be able to expand their skill set to meet these new demands and leverage positive change for themselves, others, their organizations, and their communities.

Excerpted from The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before , by Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten, copyright 2022. Reprinted by permission of Wharton School Press.

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Business Continuity and Crisis Management Consultants

Key Strategies for Effective Decision-Making in Crisis Management

December 12, 2023 By //  by  Lydia Harper

In today’s volatile business landscape, crises disrupt stability and challenge organizational resilience . At the core of crisis management lies the pivotal role of decision-making—a compass steering an organization through turmoil.

Crises, stemming from various sources, demand swift, calculated actions underpinned by astute decision-making. In this turbulent environment, decisions wield immense influence—guiding resource allocation, communication, stakeholder relations, and overall resilience.

This article explores the intricate dynamics of decision-making in crisis management—dissecting influential factors and their far-reaching effects on organizational resilience, reputation, resources, and long-term strategy.

It outlines strategies like foresight, diversity, preparedness, and continuous learning, essential for effective crisis decision-making.

Understanding Crisis Management

Before delving into the profound effects of decision-making in crisis scenarios, it’s essential to grasp the essence of crisis management itself.

Crisis management is the art of navigating tumultuous waters with clarity, composure, and strategic action. It involves the ability to swiftly grasp the gravity of a situation, analyze its intricacies, and implement effective measures to mitigate its impact.

Understanding crisis management goes beyond mere reaction; it encompasses proactive planning, decisive leadership, and empathetic communication. It demands a blend of foresight, adaptability, and a deep comprehension of both the immediate challenges and long-term consequences.

Ultimately, crisis management is about fostering resilience amid chaos, steering through adversity with a steady hand, and emerging stronger from the storm. The way to ensure all of this is through effective decision making.

The Role of Decision-Making in Crisis Management

Effective decision-making in crisis management requires a blend of rational analysis, quick thinking, and an acute awareness of the human element. Decisions made during crises are not just about problem-solving; they carry the weight of ethical considerations, potential ramifications, and the need to balance immediate actions with long-term repercussions. Leaders must evaluate risks, consider various scenarios, and make choices that align with the organization’s values and objectives.

Moreover, decision-making in crises often involves collaboration among diverse stakeholders, necessitating consensus-building, negotiation, and the ability to navigate conflicting viewpoints.

The quality of decisions made under duress profoundly impacts an organization’s ability to weather the storm, adapt to changing circumstances, and emerge with trust and credibility intact.

Factors Influencing Decision-Making in Crises

Time sensitivity.

In crisis scenarios, the urgency to act swiftly often means decisions need to be made in compressed timeframes. This time pressure can be both a catalyst for effective, decisive actions and a pitfall leading to rushed, ill-informed choices.

Effective crisis management involves recognizing the critical balance between responding promptly and ensuring decisions are grounded in sound analysis rather than impulsive reactions. It’s about optimizing the available time to gather essential information while not succumbing to the paralysis of indecision.

Information Deficiency

Crisis situations are breeding grounds for ambiguity and incomplete data. Decision-makers operate within this fog of uncertainty, relying on available information, experience, and intuition to make informed judgments.

The challenge lies in managing the inherent risks stemming from incomplete information. It’s crucial to continually seek, assess, and validate data as it becomes available, adapting decisions as the situation evolves.

Effective crisis decision-making involves acknowledging the limitations of available information while actively seeking to fill those gaps to minimize blind spots.

Stakeholder Dynamics

Understanding and managing stakeholder relationships amidst a crisis is paramount. Decisions made in these critical moments have far-reaching implications on various stakeholders—employees, customers, shareholders, communities, among others.

Effective crisis decision-making involves not only considering these diverse interests but also communicating transparently and empathetically to build and maintain trust. Stakeholder engagement and feedback mechanisms play a crucial role in shaping decisions that align with the collective interests while addressing individual concerns.

Risk Assessment and Management

Crisis decision-making necessitates a thorough evaluation of risks and potential outcomes. It involves assessing the probability and impact of various scenarios, balancing immediate actions with long-term consequences.

Effective risk management in crisis situations requires a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s vulnerabilities, the external environment, and the interconnectedness of various factors.

This understanding enables decision-makers to implement measures that mitigate risks while maintaining flexibility to adapt to evolving circumstances.

The Effects of Decision-Making in Crisis Management

Impact on organizational resilience.

Decisions taken during a crisis serve as critical determinants of an organization’s resilience. Thoughtful and well-considered decisions can significantly enhance an organization’s capacity to adapt, rebound, and glean valuable lessons from the crisis.

Effective decisions made in the face of adversity lay the groundwork for improved systems, processes, and strategies, fortifying the organization’s overall resilience to future challenges.

Reputation Management

The decisions made amid crises are pivotal in managing an organization’s reputation. Choices made under pressure can either mitigate or exacerbate reputational damage, profoundly influencing public perception and trust.

Effective crisis decision-making involves not only resolving immediate issues but also safeguarding the organization’s image and credibility through transparent communication, ethical actions, and a proactive approach to addressing concerns.

Resource Allocation and Utilization

In crisis management, decisions regarding resource allocation play a crucial role. The judicious use of available resources—financial, human, technological—can significantly impact an organization’s ability to mount an effective response and recover efficiently.

Strategic decision-making involving resource allocation balances the immediate needs of crisis resolution with maintaining essential operations, ensuring sustainability even amid challenging circumstances.

Long-term Strategic Implications

Decisions made during crises extend their influence into the long-term strategic landscape of an organization. They shape the trajectory and direction of the organization, potentially influencing future policies, procedures, and preparedness strategies.

Analyzing the implications of decisions taken during crises allows organizations to learn, adapt, and fortify themselves against similar challenges in the future, integrating these experiences into their long-term strategic planning and vision.

Strategies for Effective Decision-Making in Crisis Management

Establishing clear protocols and procedures.

Having well-defined protocols and procedures in place for crisis management is foundational. These frameworks outline roles, responsibilities, and clear escalation pathways, ensuring a structured approach to decision-making during tumultuous times.

Protocols provide a roadmap for swift action while maintaining consistency and coherence within the organization. Regular review and updates to these protocols based on real-world experiences and evolving risks are essential to ensure their relevance and effectiveness.

Utilizing Diverse Perspectives

Embracing diverse perspectives within decision-making processes is invaluable. A variety of viewpoints from individuals with different backgrounds, expertise, and experiences can challenge assumptions, uncover blind spots, and generate innovative solutions.

By fostering an inclusive environment that encourages open dialogue and respects diverse opinions, organizations can enrich their decision-making, leading to more robust and well-rounded strategies to address crises.

Scenario Planning and Preparedness

Engaging in proactive scenario planning and preparedness exercises is a proactive approach to crisis management.

By envisioning various crisis scenarios and simulating their impact, organizations can anticipate challenges, identify vulnerabilities, and craft effective strategies in advance. This proactive stance allows decision-makers to be better prepared, making more informed and calibrated choices when facing actual crises.

Regularly updating and refining these plans based on emerging trends and insights ensures their relevance and applicability.

Continuous Learning and Adaptation

After-action evaluations serve as invaluable learning opportunities. Analyzing both successes and failures offers insights into the effectiveness of decision-making strategies deployed during the crisis.

This reflective process facilitates continuous improvement, allowing organizations to refine their approaches and decision-making frameworks for future crises.

Embracing a culture of continuous learning and adaptation empowers organizations to evolve, becoming more resilient and agile in navigating future challenges. Incorporating these learnings into updated protocols and procedures enhances the organization’s crisis readiness.

In the turbulent landscape of crisis management, effective decision-making stands as the linchpin for organizational resilience and success. Decisions made in tumultuous times echo far beyond immediate actions, shaping an organization’s adaptability, reputation, and long-term strategies.

Crafting clear protocols, embracing diverse perspectives, proactive planning, and continuous learning form the bedrock of robust decision-making in crises. These strategies not only guide immediate responses but also fortify an organization’s ability to weather storms and evolve stronger from challenges.

Ultimately, adept decision-making during crises signifies an organization’s capacity to navigate chaos with foresight, agility, and a commitment to emerge not just intact, but more resilient and prepared for whatever the future holds.

Want to work with us and learn more about crisis management?

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About Lydia Harper

Lydia Harper is a communications specialist with experience in communications strategy, interpersonal communications, public speaking, and problem-solving.

Prior to joining Bryghtpath, Lydia was a facilities manager at a rock climbing and CrossFit gym. She aided in developing employee policies, creating social media content, event planning, and corporate finance.

Lydia holds a Bachelor of Communications in Strategic Organization Communications as well as a certificate in Data Analytics, both from Brigham Young University.

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MICHAEL G. KAVAN, PH.D., THOMAS P. GUCK, PH.D., AND EUGENE J. BARONE, M.D.

Am Fam Physician. 2006;74(7):1159-1164

Patient information: See related handout on crisis management , written by the authors of this article.

Author disclosure: Nothing to disclose.

Family physicians often treat patients who are experiencing psychological or medical crises. Any event perceived as overwhelming by the patient may trigger a crisis reaction consisting of psychological and physiological symptoms. Physicians are encouraged to assist patients who are experiencing a crisis by: (1) providing reassurance and support; (2) evaluating the nature of the problem and determining the patient’s mental, psychiatric, suicidal or homicidal, and medical statuses; (3) ensuring the safety of the patient and others; (4) assisting the patient in developing an action plan that minimizes distress, and obtaining patient commitment to the plan; and (5) following up with the patient and other relevant persons to ensure follow-through, assess progress, and provide additional assistance and support. Medication or referral for psychiatric or psychological counseling may be necessary for patients with continuing problems.

Physicians often are required to assist patients in crisis. An estimated 4 percent of visits to primary care physicians involve psychiatric or social crises. 1 , 2 Numerous additional visits and telephone calls involve persons who are experiencing medical crises or are presenting with physical symptoms caused by acute stressful events. Although crisis management is not a major part of a physician’s routine, when it does occur it requires time and resources. Proper assessment and intervention are essential to ensure the safety of the patient and others, to assist the patient in coping effectively with the problem, and to empower the patient to confront future life events successfully.

Definition of a Crisis

A crisis occurs when a person is confronted with a critical incident or stressful event that is perceived as overwhelming despite the use of traditional problem-solving and coping strategies. 1 Often it is not the event itself that causes the crisis; rather, it is the appraisal of the event as serious, uncontrollable, and beyond the patient’s resources for coping that triggers a crisis response. 3 , 4 Persons who are unable to cope using traditional strategies can develop affective, behavioral, cognitive, or physical difficulties 3 that may cause them to seek physician assistance. Patients may present to the physician in a variety of settings (e.g., the physician’s office, the hospital, via telephone) with problems ranging from minor setbacks to acute, highly stressful events, psychiatric problems, or medical crises. Examples of critical incidents that may precipitate a crisis are listed in Table 1 . 1 , 3

The Physician’s Role in Crisis Management

Patients experiencing a crisis often rely on their physician for support and advice. Although each patient and situation is different, there are several general steps that physicians can follow to respond effectively to a patient’s crisis 3 , 5 ( Table 2 ) . These include providing reassurance and support to the patient, assessing the situation, ensuring the safety of the patient and others, and teaching the patient strategies that will assist him or her to cope more effectively with the current incident and related symptomatology as well as with future critical incidents. An algorithm for effective crisis management is provided in Figure 1 .

STEP 1: REASSURE AND SUPPORT THE PATIENT

The first step in communicating with a patient experiencing a crisis is to reassure the patient that it is safe to discuss the presenting concern and that the physician will be available to assist the patient through this crisis. If the patient is distressed, he or she should be encouraged to use deep breathing techniques and refocus on the problem. The physician should then commend the patient for seeking help and validate the patient’s experience. Validation in this context does not necessarily mean that the physician agrees with the patient’s view and response to the crisis; instead, the physician uses reflective listening to demonstrate understanding and to clarify and amplify the patient’s situation without imposing his or her opinions. 6

The physician also should establish rapport with the patient by using active listening skills (e.g., open-ended questions, encouraging statements) and, if applicable, nonverbal techniques (e.g., speaking at eye level, leaning forward). This will facilitate open and honest communication and will help establish a working alliance with the patient. 3

STEP 2: EVALUATE THE CRISIS SEVERITY AND ASSESS THE PATIENT’S STATUS

As rapport builds, the physician should evaluate the severity of the crisis and assess the patient’s mental, psychiatric, suicidal or homicidal, and medical statuses. It is essential to define the triggering situation precisely and to understand the problem from the patient’s point of view. 3 The physician should determine the nature of the crisis, its precipitating events, how the patient has attempted to cope, and what resources may be available to assist with the problem.

In conjunction with this process, the physician should carefully evaluate the patient’s general appearance, behavior, speech, thoughts, judgment, and affect, and assess whether the patient has recently used substances that could impair his or her judgment. Assessing psychiatric status is important because depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and substance abuse or dependency greatly increase suicide risk. 7 – 10 The patient’s mental and psychiatric statuses can affect the reliability of information given by the patient and the physician’s confidence that any plan will be carried out. If the patient’s mental status is not stable, it may be necessary to contact a family member or close friend to gather additional information and to ensure the patient’s safety and appropriate follow-through; psychiatric referral also may be necessary.

The patient should be evaluated for suicide and homicide risk; this can be achieved by asking the patient directly whether he or she has thoughts or intentions of hurting him- or herself or others. 7 , 10 Although little evidence exists to guide the accurate assessment of suicide risk in primary care patients, 11 , 12 physicians should consider factors that have been associated with an increased risk of suicide ( Table 3 ) . 10 Risk factors for homicide include a history of aggressive behavior to self or others, a history of criminal behavior, a history of experiencing child abuse or witnessing domestic violence, low intelligence, neurologic impairment, hostility, substance abuse or dependency, and perceptions of threat or of someone else controlling one’s thoughts. The latter often is associated with paranoid disorders, schizophrenia, or other thought disorders. 13

STEP 3: ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THE PATIENT AND OTHERS

After obtaining information regarding the crisis and assessing the patient’s mental, psychiatric, and medical statuses and risk for causing harm, the physician may need to ensure the safety of the patient and others. 14 Patients who are suicidal and have comorbid psychiatric or medical problems, a history of violent or near-lethal suicide attempts, a poor response to outpatient treatment, or limited family or social support should be considered for inpatient hospital admission. 10 A family member or close friend may transport the patient; if the patient refuses, local law enforcement should be contacted. 10 , 15 , 16

Patients who have chronic suicidal ideations without a history of medically serious suicide attempts and who are not judged to be in immediate danger may be managed as outpatients if they have a stable and supportive living situation and are able to cooperate with an action plan. 10 These patients should be encouraged to make an appointment immediately with a physician (their own, if possible), a psychiatrist, and/or a psychologist for medication review and counseling. Family members and friends should be encouraged to remove any firearms and potentially dangerous medications from the patient’s environment and to safeguard the patient from other lethal means. Ongoing monitoring of the patient is essential, with appropriate modifications made to the action plan as necessary.

If the patient is homicidal, the physician must ensure the safety of the patient and of potential victims. Again, hospitalization of the patient may be necessary. The case of Tarasoff v. Board of Regents of the University of California mandates that physicians have a duty to warn and protect intended victims of a patient. 17

Patients experiencing a crisis in which they are at risk of bodily harm must be encouraged to remove themselves from the situation immediately. Victims of abuse may be directed to quickly gather their children and necessary personal belongings and go immediately to a shelter or other safe place. The National Center for Victims of Crime has published safety plan guidelines for victims of domestic violence 18 ; these guidelines are available from its Web site at http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbName=DocumentViewer&DocumentID=32452 .

Patients experiencing agitation may be at risk of harming the physician and staff. Clinics should establish policies and procedures for handling agitated or dangerous patients and should provide training to all personnel.

STEP 4: DEVELOP AN ACTION PLAN

When safety issues have been addressed, the physician can assist the patient in developing a constructive response to the crisis. Throughout this process, the physician must emphasize that although the patient may be unable to control the event that precipitates a crisis, he or she can control the response to it. Physicians can help the patient stabilize acute distress, explore options, make a plan, and commit to the plan. 3

First, although some emotional arousal can promote crisis resolution, the physician should help the patient stabilize distress by providing reassurance and support and encouraging the patient to use self-calming methods. Techniques such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation will facilitate self-control over physiology and emotions and will allow the patient to focus on taking active steps to cope successfully with the crisis incident.

Highly distressed patients experiencing acute anxiety, sleep difficulties, and significant impairment of daily functioning may benefit from short-term or intermittent pharmacologic therapy directed toward specific symptoms, 14 , 19 such as anxiolytics for anxiety or hypnotics for insomnia. Patients presenting with acute psychosis, aggression, agitation, or extreme anger should be considered for intramuscular antipsychotic medication. 20 Some patients who experience a crisis develop depression, 5 acute stress disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder; these patients may be treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or other antidepressants. 14 Benzodiazepines are not recommended as monotherapy for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder because discontinuation has been associated with profound exacerbation of symptoms. 14 , 21

Second, the physician can assist the patient in exploring options for dealing with the crisis. These may include obtaining additional information, gathering situational support (e.g., family, friends), employing coping mechanisms (e.g., exercise, hobbies), and using positive and constructive thinking patterns (i.e., those that change the patient’s view of the problem). The use of specific “homework” assignments that involve gathering additional information on the topic of concern; self-monitoring of symptoms, thoughts, or activities; identification of strengths; and experimentation with new coping behaviors can empower the patient to take action rather than feel helpless and remain inert. 1

Third, the physician and patient should develop a specific action plan that includes a short list of realistic, concrete, and positive steps that the patient can begin to implement immediately. The goals of any action plan are to restore emotional stability, increase patient control over the problem, and promote independent functioning. The patient thus becomes an active problem solver and begins to return to a normal routine and lifestyle.

Finally, the physician should ask the patient to summarize the plan and to commit to carrying out one or more steps. This allows the patient and the physician to clarify any misunderstandings regarding the plan, and it motivates the patient to take initial action.

As part of any action plan, the physician should advise the patient against using negative or harmful coping strategies such as denial, avoidance, withdrawal, or dependency on substances. Harmful coping strategies also include the use of negative cognitive processes such as catastrophizing (i.e., overemphasizing the probability of a catastrophic outcome and the possible consequences of such an outcome), 22 which may increase the patient’s anxiety and forestall productive problem-solving efforts. Patients should be encouraged to recognize such thought processes, stop them, and replace them with more rational and solution-focused thinking.

Physicians also may help patients to recognize and use their strengths instead of negative coping strategies. The patient may be asked to recall coping strategies that have worked successfully in the past and to apply these or similar methods to the current problem. The physician can encourage the patient to identify family, friends, and other mechanisms of support, as well as internal strengths and resources that may have been overlooked. 5

STEP 5: FOLLOW UP

Supportive follow-up is recommended to check on the patient’s status and to reinforce his or her positive efforts. 3 The immediacy of the contact should be determined by the seriousness of the problem and the trust that the physician has in the patient and the plan. Follow-up provides patients with a lifeline and improves the likelihood that they will follow through with the action plan.

During follow-up, the physician should assess progress regarding the specific plan of action and reinforce even small therapeutic gains. 1 Reinforcing success increases patients’ resilience, which should allow them to handle future crisis situations more successfully. The physician also may assist the patient to focus on potentially positive outcomes related to the crisis, including improved self-discipline, a feeling of competence, an appreciation of life, and a sense of future ability to cope with adversity.

Patients who have experienced significant trauma, who have a history of crisis, or who continue to experience significant distress despite these efforts may need to be referred to a professional individual or agency that can provide a higher and more intense level of care. The physician should maintain a list of services of this kind that are available in the local community.

Depending on the nature of a patient’s crisis, the physician and office staff may be adversely affected by the surrounding circumstances. Therefore, appropriate follow-up may include meetings to debrief staff and providing counseling as necessary. 3

DiTomasso RA, Martin DM, Kovnat KD. Medical patients in crisis. In: Dattilio FM, Freeman A, eds. Cognitive-Behavioral Strategies in Crisis Intervention. 2nd ed. New York, N.Y.: Guilford, 2000:409–28.

Marsland DW, Wood M, Mayo F. A data bank for patient care, curriculum, and research in family practice: 526,196 patient problems. J Fam Pract. 1976;3:25-8.

James RK, Gilliland BE. Crisis Intervention Strategies. 5th ed. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2005.

Lazarus RS, Folkman S. Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York, N.Y.: Springer, 1984.

Freeman A, Dattilio FM. Introduction. In: Dattilio FM, Freeman A, eds. Cognitive-Behavioral Strategies in Crisis Intervention. 2nd ed. New York, N.Y.: Guilford, 2000:1–23.

Linehan MM. Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York, N.Y.: Guilford, 1993.

American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Psychiatric Emergency Services. Report and recommendations regarding psychiatric emergency and crisis services: a review and model program descriptions. Accessed March 22, 2006, at: http://www.psych.org/downloads/EmergencyServicesFinal.pdf.

Cole SA, Bird J. The Medical Interview: The Three-Function Approach. 2nd ed. St. Louis: Mosby, 2000.

Murphy GE. The prediction of suicide. In: Lesse S, ed. What We Know About Suicidal Behavior and How to Treat It. Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1988:47–58.

Practice guideline for the assessment and treatment of patients with suicidal behaviors. Arlington, Va.: American Psychiatric Association, 2003.

Gaynes BN, West SL, Ford CA, Frame P, Klein J, Lohr KN. Screening for suicide risk in adults: a summary of the evidence for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Ann Intern Med. 2004;140:822-35.

Mann JJ, Apter A, Bertolote J, Beautrais A, Currier D, Haas A, et al. Suicide prevention strategies. JAMA. 2005;294:2064-74.

Otto RK. Assessing and managing violence risk in outpatient settings. JClin Psychol. 2000;56:1239-62.

Practice guideline for the treatment of patients with acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. Arlington, Va.: American Psychiatric Association, 2004.

Gliatto MF, Rai AK. Evaluation and treatment of patients with suicidal ideation. Am Fam Physician. 1999;59:1500-6.

Stovall J, Domino FJ. Approaching the suicidal patient. Am Fam Physician. 2003;68:1814-8.

Tarasoff v. Board of Regents of the University of California, 17 Cal. 3d 425, 551 P. 2d 334, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 (Cal. 1976).

The National Center for Victims of Crime. Domestic violence: safety plan guidelines. Accessed March 22, 2006, at: http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbName=DocumentViewer&DocumentID=32452

Mellman TA, Byers PM, Augenstein JS. Pilot evaluation of hypnotic medication during acute traumatic stress response. J Trauma Stress. 1998;11:563-9.

Crismon ML, Buckley PF. Schizophrenia. In: DiPiro JT, ed. Pharmacotherapy: A Pathophysiologic Approach. 6th ed. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2005:1209–33.

Risse SC, Whitters A, Burke J, Chen S, Scurfield RM, Raskind MA. Severe withdrawal symptoms after discontinuation of alprazolam in eight patients with combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder. J Clin Psychiatry. 1990;51:206-9.

Turner JA, Aaron LA. Pain-related catastrophizing: what is it?. Clin J Pain. 2001;17:65-71.

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• What is a crisis management plan? (6 st ...

What is a crisis management plan? (6 steps to create one)

A crisis management plan outlines how your business will respond if a crisis occurs. In your crisis plan, you’ll determine what crises are most likely to affect your company and what the business impact will be. Planning responses for each crisis will prepare your team and reduce the long-term damage done to your organization.

The majority of the activities will be held outdoors, so when thunderstorms suddenly hit town, you panic! You were so focused on planning the event that you didn’t consider a backup plan for bad weather. Changing things last minute will result in thousands of dollars lost. 

What’s the lesson? Being a good leader requires more than positivity and solid communication skills. Knowing how to plan for both the good times and bad builds trust with your team and shows preparedness.

Crisis management is an essential part of any business plan because without it, your team won’t be prepared when the unexpected happens. In the guide below, we’ll discuss what a crisis management plan is and how to prepare your company for uncertain times.

What is a crisis management plan?

A crisis management plan outlines how your business will react if a crisis occurs. The plan should identify who will take action and what their roles will be. The goal of a crisis management plan is to minimize damage and restore business operations as quickly as possible.

Your crisis management plan is a living document your team can refer to and update frequently. There are various ways to outline your plan, but a typical crisis plan looks like a checklist. When mishaps occur, your team can check off what items need to be done to respond to the crisis.

There’s no way to know what type of crisis may occur and when, but performing a risk analysis can give you a generalized idea of the potential threats your company may face. 

For example, a social media marketing company may be more at-risk for an organizational mishap that requires a public apology, while a tech company may be more at risk for a cyberattack. The industry you’re in can also help you determine potential crises and figure out how to combat them. 

6 steps to create a crisis management plan

To efficiently and effectively create a crisis management plan, break it up into smaller, more attainable steps. This can help you identify likely risks without getting overwhelmed by the potential crisis as a whole. To organize your plan, use a crisis management template with the following six steps:

1. Identify your crisis leadership team

Before you can take the first step in crisis management planning, choose a team of leaders to collaborate with during the crisis planning process. Your team should include the people who will take action during a crisis. Put this team together at the very beginning of crisis management planning so everyone knows the ins and outs of your crisis strategy. 

2. Assess risk

To begin the planning process, have a brainstorming session to assess various risks your company may face. As mentioned above, you can kick off your brainstorming session by looking at risks associated with your job field. 

Use a risk register to identify and analyze the probability of risks occurring. A risk register can eliminate progress delays and prepare for potential setbacks. It can also help you visualize which risks are most likely to occur so you can plan a response for these risks. 

3. Determine the business impact

Once you’ve identified the high-probability risks that could affect your company, determine the business impact of these risks with the help of your crisis leadership team. Each risk can cause different outcomes, so it’s important to analyze them separately. Potential business impacts may include customer attrition, damaged reputation, delayed sales, lost income, or regulatory fines. 

4. Plan the response

Next, take each risk you’ve identified and determine what actions your team would need to take to respond to the threat if it does happen. For example, if you work in software and your company experiences a cyberattack, you may need someone to secure the network, someone to release the news to your customers, and another person to handle damage assessment.

5. Solidify the plan

Once you’ve verbally made sense of the threats your company may face, the business impact, and how to respond, solidify your plan. A crisis management plan is more than a written or verbal strategy. It should include key items such as an activation protocol and emergency contacts, which we’ll discuss in more detail below. You’ll also need to collaborate with key stakeholders so that everyone understands what to do and when.

6. Review and update

Once your crisis plan is complete, review the final product to ensure there are no gaps. Revisit your crisis management plan and update it at least once a year because potential risks can change with time.

What to include in a crisis management plan

Your crisis management plan should include the items below. As you create your crisis management plan, use this checklist to ensure you haven’t overlooked the important details. 

Risk analysis

A risk analysis will physically outline the potential risks your company may face and put them in order of probability. Including risk management in your emergency response plan is helpful because new leaders can refer to it if management shifts. 

Activation protocol

The activation protocol determines when action should be taken if a crisis occurs. For example, you may decide that your team members should hold off on taking action until a crisis reaches a certain level of business impact. Once that business impact occurs, it triggers the crisis management team to respond. 

Emergency contacts

Include the main emergency contact information to speed up the response process for crises that require external help. Your emergency contact list may include local law enforcement, hospital first responders, and the fire department as well as plumbing services, electricians, poison control, and any other services related to the risks you’ve identified in your analysis. 

Response procedures

While an activation protocol defines exactly when your crisis response team should respond to a crisis, the response procedures outline the action plans for each person when triggered. Use a roles and responsibilities matrix , also known as a RACI chart, to clarify the decision-making positions in your crisis response plan. For example, a RACI chart can help the response team determine who’s accountable for communicating with the public and who’s responsible for talking to employees. 

External crisis communication strategy

When a crisis occurs, your internal operations may not be the only things impacted. Once a crisis is widespread enough, you’ll need to explain the situation to key external stakeholders and the public. Your external crisis communication strategy should include details about who will deliver the information as well as who’s in charge of handling feedback. 

Post-crisis assessment

A post-crisis assessment reminds your team to follow up and assess what went well and what didn’t. You can then update your crisis plan with lessons learned to improve your response procedures and reduce business impact. 

Crisis management plan examples

Although there’s no way to predict every crisis, you can generalize types of crises into categories and make plans based on what may happen. Some crisis management examples include:

Financial loss: When your company suffers from a financial loss, you may have to announce bankruptcy or lay off employees. You can plan for this scenario without knowing the initial cause of the financial crisis. 

Technological failure: A technology mishap could leave your customers without access for an extended period of time. This type of crisis affects your reputation and your bottom line, so it’s important to prepare for this situation. 

Natural disaster: You can prepare for some natural disasters based on where you’re located. For example, if your company is in the southeastern United States, you can create a crisis plan for hurricanes that involves evacuations, customer communication, disaster recovery, and more. 

Operational changes: While it may not seem like a traditional crisis, you should have a plan in place to prepare for an unexpected major shift in leadership. Additionally, your operations process may be affected if you have to lay off a lot of employees, and the public may need to know. 

Organizational mishap: There’s always the chance that your company will be accused of misconduct or wrongdoing, and in this crisis situation, you’ll need a plan for how to respond. This crisis plan may involve issuing a public apology and figuring out how to recover.

Why do you need a crisis management plan?

A crisis management plan  prepares your organization for a disaster or unforeseen event. With a plan in place, you can lessen the impact of the crisis on your employees and your business operations. When the team is properly trained for the unexpected, there’s less chance of long-term damage. 

If you’re the leader of an organization, it’s up to you to work with other members of senior management and come up with the emergency management strategy that works for you. You may not know where to start at first, but project planning software can help you navigate this uncharted territory. 

A well-organized crisis management plan could help your company recover after a disaster occurs. 

Prepare your team with crisis management

When you have the right tools at your disposal, it’s easy to create a crisis management plan. Use project planning to structure your action plan like its own project, with team roles, an activation protocol, response procedures, and more. 

Making your crisis plan easy to understand and accessible to everyone in your company can increase preparedness and help with recovery in the event of a crisis.

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Problem Solving in Crisis Management

By Michael Curran-Hays , Kepner-Tregoe

• Leadership Fundamentals Meet leadership challenges using the logical thinking process leaders use to gather, organize and analyze information before taking action. Learn More

Every week we see in the news another example of companies in crisis – customer service crises, critical IT system issues, management crisis and business continuity issues caused by natural disasters. Customers and shareholders may quickly forget the details of what caused the crisis but how you handle the situation will be etched into their memory and shape their perception of you long into the future. For many companies, how a crisis is handled could mean the difference between a healthy recovery and going out of business.

You may not be able to predict when a crisis will occur, or even what it will be – but that doesn’t prevent you from planning ahead and ensuring your leaders and organization know what to do when crisis hits. At its core, a crisis is just a big problem and all the basic problem-solving skills your employees have learned can be applied. There are a few things, however, that make a crisis unique and require you to up your problem-solving game to the next level.

Impact to the organization

In a non-crisis situation, the primary focus of your organization is resolving the issue and getting business back to normal. A crisis situation is different in that it brings with it an added level of complexity related to managing both the issue and long-term impacts to the organization. These impact may be operational, financial or reputational and in most cases a crisis will involve more than one. Quickly assessing the impact of the crisis (and re-assessing frequently) will likely influence (if not dictate) the choices you make, how you communicate and the urgency you place on resolving the issue.

Reputational impact in many cases will out-weigh operational cost considerations when dealing with a crisis situation. News outlets and social media are starving for controversy and companies in crisis are a juicy target, so minimizing exposure is critical. Applying problem solving techniques to the crisis enables you to objectively evaluate the holistic environment and weigh the impacts of different options to make informed decisions for mitigating potential impact.

Time is of the essence

The longer an organization is in a state of crisis, the less likely they are to successfully return to normal business operations. During a crisis, the risk of making a critical mistake increases significantly – as do operational costs. While a crisis environment may be sustainable for a short period of time, fatigue, loss of focus and resource constraints can quickly diminish organizational effectiveness.

By planning ahead and ensuring that key crisis management resources understand the problem management process, are comfortable with the role they need to play and are clear on decision structures – ambiguity and confusion can be reduced once the crisis has begun. Simulation and team based problem-solving exercises can build familiarity with individual personalities, skills and working styles – reducing the potential for stress based conflict and improving problem-solving efficiency.

Effectiveness of solution

Crisis situations often lead companies to set-aside structured governance processes and bypass control mechanisms with an “in case of emergency – break the glass” mentality. While there are clearly times when exceptions to normal operating procedures are justified, it is important not to replace objective reasoning with purely emotional responses. Doing so will often lead to the selection and implementation of “solutions” that don’t actually solve the problem and have a potential to mask symptoms and other information important to the problem-solving effort.

Solutions to crisis situations need to take into account both long and short-term efficacy and impact considerations. Structured problem-solving techniques include methods for objective evaluation of alternatives to guide decision making.

Perception on how you handled the situation

Normal business problems rarely make the news (thankfully) but a leader guiding his/her company through crisis will be subject to play-by-play commentary and instant replays that would rival a professional sporting event. Every action and decision will be questioned and every nuanced statement critiqued for hidden meaning. Regardless of the outcome, it is the perception of how the crisis is handled that becomes the leader and company’s legacy.

An important (and often overlooked) aspect of structured problem-solving is communication. What the company communicates and when plays a large role in shaping customer and stakeholder perceptions on how critical the situation is, whether leaders have it under control, and can inspire confidence in their continued business relationships with the company. Crisis situations require far more sophisticated and deliberate communication plans than normal operations.

It is highly likely that your company will (at some point in its existence) find itself in a crisis situation. Planning ahead along with the application of structured problem-solving techniques could make the difference between success and failure. The problem-solving experts at Kepner-Tregoe understand this and have been helping companies just like yours navigate crisis situations for over 60 years. Don’t wait for the crisis to occur to ask for help.

KT can help your leaders and organizations develop the skills they need for crisis preparedness.

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More From Forbes

14 ways to build a solid crisis management strategy.

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In business, a crisis lurking right around the corner could hit without warning at any time. Because such events are, by definition, unexpected—often impossible to imagine, much less predict—leaders need to develop solid strategies for quickly responding to any crisis that might arise to ensure that their businesses can survive and continue to thrive. 

Crises can come in so many different forms that creating a comprehensive plan to deal with every issue you might encounter isn't a viable option. Fortunately, smart leaders understand how to build a flexible crisis management strategy that can be adapted to meet the needs of swiftly evolving situations.

Here, 14 members of Forbes Coaches Council  discuss steps you can take to design and implement an effective crisis management strategy for your company.

Forbes Coaches Council members give their best tips on building a solid crisis management strategy.

1. Learn Resilience And Accept Vulnerability

To overcome a crisis, leaders need to be agile and learn resilience. This includes making difficult decisions with limited information and being prepared to lead through the outcomes that arise based on these quick decisions. Gaining the confidence to lead your organization and team will be imperative. Embracing vulnerability is also essential, as you must recognize that not all decisions will lead to the desired outcome. -  Reena Sharma ,  Agilis Executive Consulting

2. Practice A 'What Would Happen If...' Exercise

Preparation is key. When I was in a former airline role, our crisis management strategy was to not only document our plans, but also prepare for crisis or disaster by practicing a "what would happen if..." exercise. For a business, that may mean ensuring a pipeline for succession, acknowledging that, as important as process is, people matter even more. During a crisis, act quickly, reassure the team and do what is right, even if it's not easy. -  Denise Russo ,  SAP

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3. Change According To The Times And Your People

Business leaders need to acknowledge that crisis management affects everyone in the company. When developing a strategy, it is important to understand the times you are in and the people you serve. The strategy cannot be based on a situation that occurred 20 years ago because business personalities and the makeup of companies have changed, and so should the approach. -  Tonya Fairley ,  TS Fairley Leadership and Personal Development Co

4. Form A Crisis Management Team

Form a crisis management team made up of stakeholders from various departments, product lines and locations. Include someone gifted in communications, an IT leader, someone representing your talent and someone close to your clients. Gather that group to brainstorm a list of potential crises you may face. Then, prioritize those to identify the most likely crises this group should plan for first. -  Jennifer Wilson ,  ConvergenceCoaching, LLC

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5. Identify Your Key Risks

The primary step toward developing a solid crisis management strategy is determining where you are at risk. In today's environment, the way we conduct business has introduced a far greater field of risk, but it's also brought more options. If you know your key risks, you can create a solid strategy that will keep you in business and out of long-term recovery. -  Kathi Laughman ,  The Mackenzie Circle LLC

6. Prioritize A 'Crisis Focus' With The Team

Meet with your team to create a "crisis focus." Leaders typically juggle too much, and a crisis sucks up attention and resources. This causes balls to drop. Decide what your priority needs to be throughout the crisis. Keep it in line with your long-term vision and values. Identify what balls you will drop or set down and how. Clarify the steps needed to accomplish your priority objectives. -  Christian Muntean ,  Vantage Consulting

7. Forget Traditional Hierarchical Barriers

Rip up the organizational chart and remove traditional hierarchical barriers. Pull in the leaders with the knowledge, experience and passion for the work that needs to be done, regardless of their titles or roles. Then, create a flexible strategy that empowers everyone to do what needs to be done to address the crisis. -  Tonya Echols ,  Vigere

8. Outsource The Development Of A Framework

Outsource the creation of a crisis management framework to experts in the field. This is not your company's core competency. Invest in a framework and a plan, and then get your organization's input. Your teams can provide more detail, identify more potential crises, and help ensure that the plan will meet all stakeholders' needs. Finally, task an internal team with rolling the plan out to all levels of personnel in the company. Be sure to update the plan annually. -  Dana Manciagli ,  Job Search Master Class

9. Plan On Adjusting To Many Unknowns 

A solid crisis management plan needs to cover many dimensions. Ensure that you are evaluating critical infrastructure needs, process impacts and people impacts. Recognize that you cannot plan for everything. A good plan includes monitoring how the crisis itself shifts, and then replanning as details are uncovered. It's not just about the actions you'll take, but also how you plan to adjust to myriad unknowns. -  Faith Fuqua-Purvis ,  Synergetic Solutions LLC

10. Document Processes And Do Drills

Asking tough questions to see what is on the other side of the mountain is essential. Ask yourself about every possible pitfall, problem and detour that can (and will) happen, and then plan for them. Document workflows and processes, role play and do spontaneous drills involving a variety of team members who will take on different lead roles in the crisis to boost their problem-solving momentum and critical thinking. -  Shelley Smith ,  Premier Rapport

11. Work Backward On A Plan To Fail

Define everything you need to fail. Then, determine with your people what's needed to avoid those things that would lead you to fail and work backward. Then, move forward into actions to avoid failure. Watch how your people's creativity helps your efforts soar to success. Then, watch how your team comes together as a result! -  Jay Steven Levin ,  WinThinking

12. Share A Communication Plan With All Teams

Creating a solid communication plan that clearly identifies the team members involved and their roles is one of the most important steps to take in crisis management. This plan should be integrated into an overall contingency plan, and it should be shared with all team members. The desired outcome happens so much faster when you focus on finding effective solutions. -  Izabela Lundberg ,  Legacy Leaders Institute

13. Take Responsibility For Any Crisis

Take responsibility for any crisis that is happening, could happen or might happen. Procrastination and neglect will be costly. Developing a crisis management strategy involves research to inform preparations, leadership and team building to ensure responsiveness and resiliency, and systems and processes to implement the strategy and maximize talents. -  Lori Harris ,  Harris Whitesell Consulting

14. Stress-Test Your Strategy Regularly

A solid crisis management strategy should be stress-tested at least once a year. Have organizational leaders and/or a crisis team review the strategy by conducting a "fire drill" to spot any gaps in the plan. Also, ensure that all new employees, managers and leaders are trained on the key components of the crisis management plan you put in place. They should understand what their roles will be in the case of a business disruption. -  Karan Rhodes ,  Shockingly Different Leadership

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Crisis Management

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Crisis management is the approach an organization takes to handling emerging troubles and rapidly emerging issues of contention, risk, disasters, accidents, emergencies, and characteristically uncontrollable problems. The list of potential crises is almost endless and can vary by industry, so a crisis can be broadly defined as any exigent event that can seriously damage an organization either in its operations, relationships, or reputation and sometimes all of those areas. Crises are considered dangerous complications or turning points in the life cycle of an organization. However, with effective crisis management, the organizations may emerge from the crisis even stronger than they were prior to it because the crisis may contribute to the organizational learning and improvement (Ulmer, Sellnow, & Sellnow, 2013 ). Crises come in a myriad of forms, such as operational difficulties, product failures, tampering, lawsuits, rumors, regulatory changes, employee problems, scandal,...

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Further Reading

Austin, L., & Jin, Y. (Eds.) (2018). Social media and crises communication . New York: Routledge.

Coombs, W. T. (2012). Ongoing crisis communication. Planning, managing, and responding . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lovari, A., & Bowen, S. A. (2019). Social media in disaster communication: A case study of strategies, barriers, and ethical implications. Journal of Public Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1967 .

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Bowen, S.A., Lovari, A. (2020). Crisis Management. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13895-0_18-1

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How to Craft a Strong Crisis Management Strategy

By Andy Marker | May 24, 2020 (updated October 3, 2022)

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Crisis management strategies are the foundation of crisis response planning for organizations. We’ve compiled step-by-step instructions on how to build a strategy, including free templates and tips from experts.  

Included on this page, you’ll find a crisis vulnerability assessment matrix template and a crisis management strategy template , and learn how to write a crisis management strategy .

What Are Crisis Management Strategies?

A crisis management strategy is the collective framework of decisions and choices that an organization makes to respond to a crisis (or the perception of one). The goal of your strategy is to position your organization to withstand a crisis.

There is some confusion about the differences between crisis management strategies and crisis management plans, theories, policies, or tactics. Strategies are high level and represent the broad vision of your approach, while tactics and plans are operational and action oriented. To learn more about crisis management models and theories, see “ Models and Theories to Improve Crisis Management . ”

Your organizational strategy, values, vision, and mission shape your crisis strategy. 

Defining your strategy should precede any other step in crisis management planning, as the strategy lays the foundation for your further planning. 

Because your crisis strategy must adapt to fit a range of unknown future scenarios, a strong strategy enables you to be flexible and agile in a crisis. Once you determine your strategy, identify the capacities and systems that need to be in place to support your strategy.  

The crisis management team, sometimes supported by other departments or external specialists, performs detailed crisis planning. An organization’s senior executives and CEO are typically responsible for the crisis strategy and management of strategic priorities in a crisis. For a complete guide to crisis management plans, see “ Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Crisis Management Plan . ”  

Because public and media relations are the most visible aspects of crisis responses, many people think a PR strategy is the cornerstone of a crisis strategy. That perception is far from reality: Strategic goals also include managing the impact on an organization’s finances; protecting important relationships, such as those with investors, customers, and regulators; and safeguarding an organization’s reputation and public image. 

If your company handles a crisis well, you should emerge with organizational stability, revenues at pre-crisis levels, and customer trust intact.  Crisis strategy is just one dimension of crisis management. For an overview of crisis management, see “ The Essential Guide to Crisis Management. ”

The Importance of Crisis Management Strategies

Without a crisis management strategy, you are more likely to make mistakes that result in financial loss or lasting damage to your reputation and key relationships. Moreover, in the absence of a crisis strategy, your larger organizational strategy is at risk.

Acting strategically requires discipline and objective analysis. For example, you cannot plan for every potential emergency — doing so would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, choose and prepare for only the most likely scenarios. 

When viewed through a strategic lens, the costs associated with purchases (such as stockpiling raw materials in the event of a supplier shutdown) are not just expenses, but also an investment in the resilience and longevity of your business.

Strategic crisis management requires you to analyze both internal and external threats and vulnerabilities, define a strategy, execute this strategy, and update the strategy as conditions evolve. Maintaining open communication and nurturing important relationships are key dimensions of crisis management strategies.

The consequences of not having a crisis management strategy include the potential for bad decisions, incorrect or inconsistent communication, and a longer-than-necessary recovery. To learn more, read about the effects of poor crisis management and communication .

While full recovery is always the goal of crisis management strategies, you should also incorporate some survival strategies. These are ways to keep your organization alive in the face of a hostile environment or an existential threat, and often include cost cutting, layoffs, and access to emergency credit. Creative thinking is an essential ingredient in crafting survival strategies. 

How to Build a Crisis Strategy

Your senior management team should take charge of building a crisis strategy, and the first step is to review your organization’s mission and assess the firm’s weaknesses. Then, establish the items you want to protect in a crisis and those that you consider expendable. Following are the six steps to create a crisis management strategy and address an actual crisis:  

1. Check Core Values and Gather Information: Review your mission and vision, and make sure those values guide your strategy. 

Dave Thompson, Crisis Communication Expert and Media Trainer at C3 Collective , says staying true to your culture is paramount. When an organization is defining its crisis management strategy, “it should change neither its original mission, nor its vision or values,” he explains. 

You should also do a high-level assessment of your organization’s vulnerabilities. Use this crisis vulnerability matrix to rank potential crises by probability of occurrence and severity of impact. The results will rank crisis types, providing your team with priorities for its planning effort. 

Download Crisis Vulnerability Assessment Matrix Template

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To analyze your risks, use this risk assessment matrix template, which allows you to prioritize weaknesses in order to address and assess the effectiveness of your crisis management efforts.  

Download Risk Management Matrix Template

  Excel l Word | PDF |  Smartsheet 

2. Set Goals: While you cannot predict the types of crises you may face, it’s important that you agree on the most important, high-level outcomes, such as maintaining the safety and health of your staff, minimizing delays in customer orders, or maintaining your cash flow. 

Focus on a few objectives, and avoid the temptation to set zero impact as your goal — that’s just unrealistic. 

This crisis management policy template enables you to record the goals you worked on in your strategic planning and add any related information.

Download Crisis Management Policy Template - Word

In addition, decide which of your normal business priorities you can set aside during a crisis. Can you tolerate an increase in your average customer hold time or relax your overtime policies? Identify the areas from which you can divert staff resources and money to support the crisis response. 

Track crisis-related metrics that reflect the objectives you identified as critically important. During a crisis, you can use a simplified dashboard of these key performance indicators to stay informed and maintain focus on your priorities. This dashboard template provides an easy-to-read, graphic view of these high-level KPIs.

Download Executive Dashboard Template - Excel 

3. Form a Team: Keeping your overall goals in mind, designate a crisis management team to plan tactics. This group will write your crisis management plan and execute it when a crisis strikes. 

Provide this team with resources and support from the top. Business continuity planners should work with your crisis management team as well as do their own detailed planning. For details on the role of the CEO and top executives in a crisis, see “ How to Build an Effective Crisis Management Team .” 

4. Take Strategic Actions: You previously identified gaps or weaknesses in your business that you need to address in order to support your crisis management strategy. Now, do the work necessary to address such weaknesses. For example, increase your emergency cash reserve, create a climate of open communication, build a new factory that is earthquake resistant, or establish relationships with backup suppliers. 

It’s particularly crucial to make sure that your finances, stakeholder relationships, and organizational reputation are in good shape — before a crisis strikes. 

5. Make Sure the Right People Handle the Sensitive Priorities During a Crisis: The CEO and senior leaders of enterprises and large organizations are typically not involved in running the operational response to a crisis. Instead, the following sensitive strategic priorities are typically the executive management team’s responsibility:

• Make sure the organization is acting ethically and compassionately.
• Monitor and analyze developments for high-level implications.
• Limit financial damage and generate extraordinary cash needs.
• Clear any high-level obstacles that the crisis team faces, such as a need for more resources.
• Protect the organization’s reputation.
• Evaluate contingency plans.
• Provide leadership when you set a course of action.
• Communicate with key stakeholders (including the media, if appropriate). 

“Even though your organization is in crisis, it is not about you,” Thompson reminds CEOs. “It's about the victims of the crisis, your organization's stakeholders, and your employees. If you take care of them, then you'll be taking care of the organization. If you forget them and think only of the organization and its executives, you could lose it all.” 

For examples of strong and weak crisis management by companies, see “ The Most Useful Crisis Management Examples: The Good, Bad, and Ugly .”

6. Thank and Recognize Your Staff after a Crisis: Thank and recognize your staff for its extraordinary efforts during a crisis. Make sure your crisis management team does a detailed post-crisis review and evaluates its findings. 

• Your senior management team should do a strategic review and consider the following questions:
• Could we have seen the crisis coming? 
• What early indicators did we miss or ignore?
• How well did the crisis management plan and the crisis management team work? 
• Did the organization respond effectively to the crisis?
• What went well and what needs improvement?
• Was our communication clear and consistent? 
• Did our reputation or our confidence in our organization suffer? 

With the aim of making your organization more resilient, revise your strategy based on your answers to the aforementioned questions. These post-crisis lessons may also necessitate changes in staff training, HR policies, operations, compliance, and other areas of your organization. Delegate the implementation of these changes. 

This crisis management strategy template walks you through the steps to make these changes and provides space to summarize the key elements of your strategy.

Download Crisis Management Strategy Template

Word l PDF |  Smartsheet

See “ Free Crisis Management Templates ” to download other templates for management plans, helpful checklists, and tabletop exercises.

To learn more about the effects of poor crisis management and communication, take a look at these crisis management examples .

A Strategic Approach to Crisis Management

According to Crisis Management: Leading in the New Strategy Landscape , a book by Professor of Management William Rick Crandall and two colleagues, building your crisis management strategy requires a strategic mindset, which includes four main attributes:

• The ability to do a thorough analysis of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities
• The ability to think long term, sometimes many years into the future, while simultaneously factoring in your knowledge of your organization’s past and present
• The ability to be opportunistic and take advantage of favorable circumstances, while avoiding internal or external pitfalls
• The willingness to make difficult choices

Similarly, there are four main influences that shape crisis management strategy : 

• Cultural: Cultural influences to an organization can be both internal and external, including prevailing norms in ethics and values.
• Institutional: These are concerns such as regulatory and legal constraints. 
• Behavioral: These influences often include politics (i.e., the ways in which people and groups interact within the organization).
• Environmental: These include economic conditions and technological realities.

Crisis Prevention as a Crisis Management Strategy

The best crisis management strategy is prevention. A lot of crisis management involves preparing to react to an emergency or a disaster, but staying oriented toward prevention keeps you out of a reactive mode.

“If the...tone at the top allows a company to become reactive, meaning it does not anticipate issues, but waits for issues to arise before acting or reacting, this mentality leads to short-sightedness,” notes Braden Perry, Partner at Kennyhertz Perry , LLC and a former federal enforcement lawyer and chief compliance officer at a financial firm.

Here are some ways to become more proactive:

• Improve Communication: Break down communication silos in your organization. Communication failures can compound problems, leading to major crises. Analyses of crises at Nokia, Enron, British Petroleum, and other companies traced the root cause or aggravating factor to the poor flow of information. A Harvard Business Review article recommends promoting a culture of open dialogue, aligning your communication with your organizational strategy, engaging your staff in the communication process, and actively working to get executives and managers closer to employees. 
• Implement Reverse Engineering: Examine in depth the most devastating and common crises to hit organizations in your sector, and draw lessons from them. Work backward to see what changes you need to implement in order to prevent or lessen a similar crisis.
• Audit Risks: Look for vulnerabilities at every level of your organization by talking to each staff member in confidence. Look at real-world risks, not just financial threats. Ask questions such as the following: Do you have 24/7 access to top management executives, in case you need to contact them (anonymously if necessary) about a serious problem? And, if, overnight, your work location became unavailable, would you know where to report to the next day? Talk to key stakeholders about the vulnerabilities they see. Then, evaluate your crisis documents and policies for weaknesses, and develop solutions for any problems you find. 
• Collect Intelligence: Broaden your information gathering beyond competitor activity. Monitor media for warning signs and intelligence that could foreshadow a crisis for your organization. Red flags could include the following: political developments in countries where suppliers are based; regulatory action; activist campaigns; trends in financial fraud and corruption; and climate data. Also, be aware of social media activity around your brand. Create early warning systems for key parts of your operation, such as IT. 
• Maintain Social Responsibility: According to research from Oxford Metrica, companies that — in everyday, non-crisis periods — demonstrated a consistent record of prioritizing employees and communities, rebounded from crises with their stock market value intact. If you are not socially invested before a crisis, then any professions of concern following a crisis will appear insincere — and stakeholders will tend to disregard your apologies. So, transform your culture and values into real-world actions, such as supporting local schools, mentoring minority entrepreneurs, or volunteering for nonprofits. When you engage in community outreach on a regular basis, the public is much more likely to believe your crisis response reflects genuine concern. 

This crisis management playbook will help you identify potential crises, plan your messaging, and record what you learned from an actual crisis.

Download Crisis Management Playbook Template

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What is a crisis management plan? 5 steps with examples

Every once in a while, unpleasant events are bound to happen. Eventually, every organization encounters a crisis.

Knowing how to deal with crises is not just a delicate art, but a necessity for businesses to thrive.

What is crisis management?

Crisis management refers to a company’s ability to deal with disruptive or unexpected critical situations that affect the business’ stakeholders, people, customers, and income. It is the process of identifying, assessing, and prioritizing potential risks and implementing strategies to mitigate them.

What is a crisis management plan?

A crisis management plan might include developing a communication plan, establishing emergency response procedures, and training employees to respond to a crisis.

If business leaders, teams, and individual employees are not properly trained to deal with crises, when they inevitably encounter one, they’re liable to panic and make the situation even worse.

Why is a crisis management plan important?

In my 15 years working in product, I can’t even count the number of crises I’ve faced. Early on, some of them made me panic because I lacked the skills to overcome them.

Crises emerge from unexpected situations. Maybe you can relate to one of the following examples:

• Software deployment — After releasing the latest version of your product, something unexpected happens and puts your product down for hours
• Social Network — A customer is enraged with your product and shares a viral story on their social network
• Competitor — A competing product is taking over your customers and you can’t react fast enough
• Press — A journalist writes a strong critique about your company and you start losing customers, investors, and prestige

Anything ring a bell?

Crises emerge for a wide variety of reasons. You may take actions to avoid most of them, but life is full of unavoidable surprises. That’s why knowing how to face reality, as tough as it can be, is a crucial skill to develop.

Let me share with you my strategy for dealing with crises. It has helped me over the years and may also help you.

To demonstrate how this approach works in practice, I’ll walk you through a painful crisis I faced a couple of years ago.

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‘We screwed up’: A real-world crisis example

It was the beginning of autumn. The weather was cooling down as I headed to work for a big day. We had been working on performance issues for a month to enable us to scale up. That day, we were launching our new interface.

We started earlier than usual. At 7:45 a.m., the release concluded. I checked our shop, and everything seemed fine.

I felt relieved, but something got my attention. As I refreshed the pages, I noticed the pagination numbers decreasing.

I told a team member I felt something was wrong. He checked our queues and noticed an increasing number of requests.

Without hesitation, he looked at me and said, “We screwed up.”

At that moment, I knew we’d face severe trouble. Panic would worsen the situation. I had to understand the size of the problem. But how?

How to manage a crisis mindfully: A 5-step plan

Here is a five-step crisis management plan to help you wrap your hands around any emergency that befalls your product or business:

• Communicate proactively
• Focus on understanding the problem
• Prioritize solutions
• Identify the root cause
• Apply lessons learned

To demonstrate how this works in practice, we’ll refer back to the example crisis management scenario described above.

1. Communicate proactively

Initially, we couldn’t understand what had happened, but soon we realized that our products had been gradually removed from our shop.

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At 7:45 a.m., we had around 53,000 products available. Fifteen minutes later, we had about 40,000. By 8:07, I had the CEO on the phone with me.

The longer it took us to fix the problem, the more money we lost. Every minute costs us thousands. The CEO was mad and stakeholders were getting irritated. A bad situation for everyone.

In a crisis, you’ve got to be sharp with communication. Here’s my course of action:

• Email — I sent an email to company leadership along the lines of: “ We’re facing a severe issue. All products are removed from the shop. Everyone is concentrating on getting this fixed. You will hear from me in around 30 minutes. Sorry for this situation ”
• All hands on deck — I sat with the team and made it clear that solving this issue was the only priority; nothing else mattered and we needed all hands on deck. I asked them to close their Outlook and MS Teams and vowed on my end to deal with stakeholders
• Face to face — I approached critical stakeholders personally, informed them of the situation, and clarified that we were working on it. I asked them to call me directly and not distract any developer with the trouble because they were entirely focused on solving the crisis

Every 30 minutes, I wrote another email updating leaders on the situation. As the team clarified what was happening, I kept stakeholders in the loop. It was key to let the team focus on the problem while I dealt with business people.

2. Focus on understanding the problem

It took around an hour to understand what happened. The team noticed that the products were removed from the shop because the new interface dealt with product images differently and the shop would remove products without images.

In theory, all products were available in the shop but without images. Therefore, no product could be displayed.

The problem was that the shop had a process to delete images unrelated to products. In other words, more than 500,000 images were deleted. And we knew that processing that amount of images would take long hours.

I had to share the good and bad news with the business. I informed them we had identified the problem, but fixing it would take a while. We were talking about at least 20 hours of image processing.

Stakeholders freaked out because that meant 20 hours without sales. For them, that’s not an option. Yet, we didn’t have a better alternative, so we soldiered on.

3. Prioritize solutions

Developers didn’t know how to fix the problem, but we felt the pressure on our backs. I asked the team if we could gradually fix it. I wanted to get high-runners live as soon as possible.

When you face a crisis, you need to act mindfully. You may not be able to get everything sorted out at once. Prioritization is fundamental to minimize the impact.

I ran some reports and quickly understood that 10 percent of our products brought 90 percent revenue. Those were the ones I wanted to get back to first.

We got together as a team and used our creativity to make those products available in the shop manually. That would buy us time to fix the rest more calmly.

Fortunately, one developer had a card under his sleeve, and in around an hour, we could get that 10 percent live again.

“The secret of crisis management is not good vs. bad, it’s preventing the bad from getting worse.” — Andy Gilman , president and CEO of Comm Core Consulting Group

4.  Identify the root cause

Within the high-runners back for our customers, business people calmed down. With a bit more breathing room, we had time to evaluate the root cause of the problem and fix it.

We understood that running our integration could remove the products again. Therefore, we had to spend time fixing the problem correctly.

That was a long day. We left the office at around 1:33 a.m. and had a solution but decided not to run until the next day. We were tired and didn’t want to risk facing the same trouble again.

The problem turned out to be a stupid image property that we inverted, and the shop couldn’t process it because it had strict validation. A simple mistake that cost the business tens of thousands.

The next day, we triggered the process again at around 7:07 a.m. and, as expected, it took almost 18 hours to get all the products back in our shop.

5 . Apply lessons learned

As the dust settles down, it’s time to get together and learn from the situation. Crucially, I used the word learn and not blame.

You want to ensure the team learns something from the situation, but you don’t want to blame anyone in particular for what happened.

“In crisis management, be quick with the facts and slow with the blame.” — Leonard Saffir , public relations executive

In our case, we learned the following:

• Lack of end-to-end tests — Our tests were mainly unit, smoke, and manual tests. We lacked solid end-to-end tests
• Poor error handling — Our application didn’t deal correctly with the errors reported by the shop. If we had better error handling in place, we’d have avoided all the trouble
• Outdated staging environment — Our production and staging environments were too distinct, meaning running releases on staging would never reflect what could happen in production
• Big bang release is a bad choice — We released a critical process for our whole spectrum of products. We should have released and monitored the results gradually

As we reflected on our learnings, we created actions for our upcoming sprints . I’m happy to share that we never faced this issue again, and despite the problems it caused, we were able to catch up and reach our desired business outcome.

Remain calm in the face of a crisis

Dealing with a crisis is, by default, stressful. There’s no way around that. Yet, I can tell you that your life will get easier once you simplify how your team manages it.

I used to panic and people around me would do the same. That would lead to lengthier crisis management than necessary. The secret is to remain calm, remove distractions, and focus on solving the problem gradually.

“Any deep crisis is an opportunity to make your life extraordinary in some way.” — Martha Beck

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14 Strategies For Effective Crisis Management

Running a business comes with many unexpected, challenging situations that need solving as soon as possible. While there is no one-fits-all formula for handling such scenarios, there are general rules that can help massively. In this article, we’ll list the top 14 strategies for effective crisis management in 2024—number 13 will surprise you.

Why Is Crisis Management Important?

Leaders must create effective plans for promptly addressing any crisis because such events are, by definition, unexpected and sometimes hard to envision much less forecast. This will help guarantee that their companies can survive and grow.

What Is The Best Strategy For Crisis Management?

Crises may take so many diverse forms that it isn't practical to have an all-inclusive strategy to address every problem you might face.

Fortunately, wise leaders know how to create a flexible crisis management plan that can be modified to suit the demands of rapidly changing circumstances.

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The Top 14 Strategies For Effective Crisis Management

This article will discuss the 14 steps you can take to create and implement a crisis management plan for your business—let’s see them one by one.

1. Acknowledge Vulnerability And Develop Resilience

In order to survive a crisis, leaders must develop agility and resilience.

This is part of making challenging judgments with little knowledge and being ready to guide through any results that result from these hasty decisions.

It will be crucial to build your self-confidence so you can lead your group and company. Accepting vulnerability is also crucial since you must understand that not all choices will result in the desired result.

2. Perform A "What Would Happen If..." Exercise

Being prepared is essential. When I previously worked for an airline, our crisis management method was to do a "what would happen if..." exercise in addition to documenting our preparations.

For a company, this may entail creating a succession plan and admitting that people are much more crucial, despite how essential processes are.

Act swiftly, comfort the team, and do what is right during a crisis, even if it is difficult.

3. Adapt To The Needs Of Your People And The Times

Business executives must understand how everyone in the organization is impacted by crisis management.

Understanding the circumstances you find yourself in, and the target audience is crucial when formulating a plan.

Because business personalities and the make-up of firms have evolved, the strategy cannot be based on an event that happened 20 years ago.

4. Establish A Crisis Management Team

Stakeholders from multiple departments, product lines, and locations should form a crisis management team. Include someone with communication skills, an IT leader, a talent representative, and someone who knows your clients well.

Get that group together to come up with a list of probable emergencies you could encounter.

Then, order those to determine which emergencies this group should begin preparing for.

5. Recognize Your Primary Risks

Knowing where you are at risk is the first step in creating a strong crisis management plan.

The way we conduct business in the current climate has increased risk significantly while simultaneously providing additional possibilities.

Knowing your main risks can help you develop a sound plan that will keep you operating and out of long-term rehabilitation.

Read more How To Motivate Your Team: 7 Of The Best Practices

6. Set A "Crisis Focus" Priority With The Team

Create a "crisis focus" with your team during a meeting.

Leaders frequently juggle too many tasks, and a crisis consumes time and resources.

Choose your priorities for the duration of the crisis. Maintain alignment with your values and long-term goals.

Decide which balls to drop or place where and how Outline the measures necessary to achieve your top priorities.

7. Disregard Normative Hierarchical Barriers

Dismantle established hierarchical boundaries and the organizational chart.

Regardless of their titles or duties, bring in leaders who have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm for the task that needs to be done.

Create a flexible plan of action that enables everyone to take the necessary action to handle the issue.

8. Contract Out The Framework Development

Hire subject-matter professionals to create a crisis management framework. This is different from your company's primary area of expertise.

Get input from your company after investing in a structure and a plan.

Your teams can offer more information, spot more potential issues, and guarantee that the strategy will fulfill the demands of all stakeholders.

Finally, assign a team inside the organization the responsibility of communicating the strategy to all staff members. Every year, make sure to update the plan.

Learn more about: 7 Tips For Building Business Partnerships

9. Be Prepared To Adapt To Many Unknowns

A comprehensive crisis management strategy must address numerous factors.

Consider the consequences on people, processes, and key infrastructure.

Realize that nothing can be planned for in advance.

A solid strategy involves tracking how the crisis itself changes and then replanning it when new information comes to light.

It's not only about what you'll do; it's also about how you'll deal with all the unknowns.

10. Perform Drills And Document Processes

It is crucial to pose difficult questions to see what is on the other side of the mountain.

Consider every potential stumbling block, issue, and diversion that could arise before making a plan to deal with them. To increase the team's capacity for problem-solving and critical thinking, document workflows and processes, role-play, and conduct impromptu drills with a range of team members who will assume various leadership responsibilities during the crisis.

11. Develop A Failing Plan Backward

Define all the requirements for failure. Then, decide with your team what has to be done to prevent those factors from making you fail and work backward.

After that, take measures to prevent failure. Watch how the ingenuity of your team propels your efforts to succeed. Then see how your team functions as a consequence.

12. Provide All Teams With A Communication Plan

One of the most crucial actions to take in crisis management is developing a strong communication strategy that clearly defines the team members involved and their duties.

This strategy should be incorporated into a larger contingency plan and distributed to the entire team. When you concentrate on coming up with practical answers, the intended result comes about much more quickly.

13. Assume Ownership Of Any Crisis

Accept responsibility for any problem that is occurring, may occur, or may not occur. Neglect and procrastination will cost money. It takes research to guide planning, leadership, and team development to guarantee responsiveness and resiliency and systems and procedures to implement the strategy and make the most of its strengths.

14. Regularly Stress Test Your Strategy

At least once a year, a sound crisis management plan should be put to the test.

Conduct a "fire drill" with company executives and a crisis team to assess the strategy and identify any holes.

Make sure that the major elements of the crisis management plan you implement are taught to all new workers, supervisors, and leaders.

They ought to be aware of their responsibilities in the event of an interruption to the company.

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Collaborative crisis management: a plausibility probe of core assumptions

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Charles F Parker, Daniel Nohrstedt, Julia Baird, Helena Hermansson, Olivier Rubin, Erik Baekkeskov, Collaborative crisis management: a plausibility probe of core assumptions, Policy and Society , Volume 39, Issue 4, December 2020, Pages 510–529, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2020.1767337

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In this article, we utilize the Collaborative Governance Databank to empirically explore core theoretical assumptions about collaborative governance in the context of crisis management. By selecting a subset of cases involving episodes or situations characterized by the combination of urgency, threat, and uncertainty, we conduct a plausibility probe to garner insights into a number of central assumptions and dynamics fundamental to understanding collaborative crisis management. Although there is broad agreement among academics and practitioners that collaboration is essential for managing complex risks and events that no single actor can handle alone, in the literature, there are several unresolved claims and uncertainties regarding many critical aspects of collaborative crisis management. Assumptions investigated in the article relate to starting-points and triggers for collaboration, level of collaboration, goal-formulation, adaptation, involvement and role of non-state actors, and the prevalence and impact of political infighting. The results confirm that crises represent rapidly moving and dynamic events that raise the need for adaptation, adjustment, and innovation by diverse sets of participants. We also find examples of successful behaviours where actors managed, despite challenging conditions, to effectively contain conflict, formulate and achieve shared goals, adapt to rapidly changing situations and emergent structures, and innovate in response to unforeseen problems.

It is a central precept of good governance to prepare for predictable risks as well as unthinkable contingencies and to invest the necessary resources to minimize the impacts on people and society from catastrophic events when they occur (Ansell, 2019 ; Widmalm, Parker, & Persson, 2019 ). To effectively prepare for and respond to complex crises, such as natural hazard events, terrorist attacks, pandemics, or, other large-scale accidents and emergencies, an array of responsible organizations must be able to collaborate across sectors, disciplines, jurisdictions, territorial boundaries, and levels of authority (Ansell, Boin, & Keller, 2010 ; Bynander & Nohrstedt, 2020 ; Nohrstedt, Bynander, Parker, & ‘t Hart, 2018 ; Parker & Sundelius, 2020 ).

Supplying societal security – safeguarding citizens from harm, protecting critical infrastructure, and ensuring the capability of government and civil society to function under stress – necessitates a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, and often even a ‘whole-of-society’ approach, which in turn necessitates collaborative governance and collaborative crisis management capacities (‘t Hart & Sundelius, 2013 ; Ansell & Gash, 2007 ; Sundelius, 2006 ). From this viewpoint, the provision of safety and security requires the active involvement of a variety of actors and stakeholders engaging in collective action across organizational boundaries to rapidly furnish expertise and capabilities, both of which are essential for managing events that surpass the capacity of individual organizations.

Scholars of crises, disasters, and emergencies have long been sensitive to the collective-action challenges related to preparing for and responding to risks, threats, and extreme events. Social science research, dating back to the disaster sociology of the 1960s, has zeroed in on studying the related phenomena of coordination, cooperation, and collaboration (Drabek, 2007 ). More recently, developments in collaborative public management and policy networks have advanced our understanding of collaboration in crisis management (Ansell & Gash, 2007 ; Choi & Brower, 2006 ; Kapucu, Arslan, & Demiroz, 2010 ) and as collaborative governance research flourished, so did scholarship on collaborative crisis management (Bynander & Nohrstedt, 2020 ; McGuire, Brudney, & Gazley, 2010 ; Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ). However, mirroring the pattern we see in collaborative governance more broadly (Douglas et al., 2020 ), the existing research on collaborative crisis management is dominated by case-studies and small N comparative case-studies with limited effort to explore the generalizability of core assumptions. Past empirical research has also been biased toward North American and European cases (Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ).

In this article, we conduct a comparative case-study involving seven suitable cases ( Table 1 ) of collaboration in crisis management selected from the Collaborative Governance Databank. These cases, covering events in Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa, specifically represent instances of collaborative governance, defined by the Collaborative Governance Databank (Douglas et al., 2020 ) as ‘a collective decision-making process based on more or less institutionalized interactions between two or more actors that aims to establish common ground for joint problem solving and value creation’. We focus here on a subset of collaborative governance cases pertaining to episodes or situations characterized by a level of urgency to act, combined with a threat to core societal values, and uncertainty considering the nature of the situation and the viability of different courses of action (Boin, ‘t Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2017 ).

Overview of Collaborative Crisis Management Cases

* Domains predefined by the Collaborative Governance Databank (Douglas et al., 2020 , see specifically coding item #9) and indicated by case coders. Multiple domains possible.

Although it is often said that each crisis is unique, in our view, collaborative crisis management involves a set of common challenges that demand further comparative research. Therefore, we aim to broaden the scope of inquiry in relation to previous studies that explore assumptions concerning collaborative crisis management in single cases. Clearly, the seven cases examined here are still far too limited and eclectic as an empirical basis for conducting reliable validity ‘tests’ or reaching robust generalizations (George & Bennett, 2005 ). Instead, we start by utilizing the suitable cases that now exist in the Databank to conduct a ‘plausibility probe’ in an effort to make an empirically informed judgment whether more ambitious and systematic tests of the assumptions are warranted (Eckstein, 1975 ). The areas investigated in the article include starting-points and triggers for crisis management collaborations, formal planning versus emergent collaborations, level of collaboration, bottom-up and top-down processes, the upscaling dilemma, goal-formulation, adaptation through intra-crisis learning, the involvement and role of non-state/governmental actors, and the prevalence and impact of political infighting.

Collaborative crisis management can broadly be defined as the collective efforts of multiple autonomous actors working across organizational boundaries, levels of authority, and sectors to prepare for, respond to, and learn from risks and extreme events that disrupt our modern society (Bynander & Nohrstedt, 2020 ; Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ). For a crisis – defined as a situation or event that threatens core values and necessitates urgent action in the face of uncertainty – to be managed effectively, decision makers and involved organizations must pull together in order to contribute to the specific phases and activities that make up crisis management including preparedness, mitigation, response, recovery, and learning (Boin et al., 2017 ).

Prior research has examined the factors, institutional arrangements, and processes that enable and constrain collaborative crisis management including starting-points, the jurisdictional level at which the collaboration occurred in various phases, goal-formulation, adaptation, the types of actors participating in collaboration, and the role of political infighting (Choi & Brower, 2006 ; Kapucu, 2006 ; McGuire & Silvia, 2010 ). Other aspects have also been examined, but we concentrate on these areas because they constitute core theoretical assumptions in the literature that are also all covered in the coding framework for the case databank. These theoretical departure points are introduced below.

Starting-points and triggers: formal planning versus emergent CM collaborations

Collaborative governance arrangements emerge under different circumstances, be it externally directed by law or authority, self-initiated by its participants, or independently convened by a third party (Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015 ; Provan & Kenis, 2007 ). Because responsible authorities are expected to protect their citizens and respond effectively when disaster strikes (Ansell, 2019 ; Boin et al., 2017 ; Parker, Persson, & Widmalm, 2019 ), designated emergency management organizations and networks are generally given the responsibility to prepare for and respond to known contingencies, commonly referred to as ‘routine emergencies’. However, when a crisis strikes, due to the scale, novelty, or cascading dynamics of the event, it can require the mobilization of a more diverse network of organizations to respond to and manage the situation (Boin & ‘t Hart, 2010 ; Nohrstedt, 2016 ; Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ).

What remains unclear is whether crises provoke responsible organizations to rely more strictly on previous collaborative arrangements with familiar partners or whether they drive new collaborations that expand the number of involved actors (Bodin, Nohrstedt, Baird, Plummer, & Summers, 2019 ). It has been noted in the literature that emergencies, which require rapid decision-making due to the urgency and time-pressure, are not ideal times for establishing emergent collaborations with new partners or expanding existing collaborative arrangements (Kapucu, Arslan, & Collins, 2010 ). The issue of participation also raises questions regarding the potential costs and benefits related to the scale of collaboration, including transaction-costs, incentives to contribute to the collective effort, and opportunities for frequent interactions (Poteete & Ostrom, 2004 ).

Level of collaboration: bottom-up and top-down processes

Large-scale crises and disasters are often so complex that the management and response of the event will consist of multiple organizations and can involve multiple levels (Boin & Bynander, 2015 ; Bynander & Nohrstedt, 2020 ; Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ). In many systems, collaborative crisis management is organized according to what has been called the ‘principle of disaster subsidiarity’ (Boin et al., 2017 ) or a bottom-up process that is guided by the proposition that local authorities are best situated to plan for and respond to crises and emergencies in their geographical area, but, depending on the situation, or if there is a lack of capacity to cope with the situation, upscaling will be required. This can be a tricky and contentious issue and previous research has identified the ‘upscaling dilemma’ as a key issue in collaborative crisis management (Boin & Bynander, 2015 ). For example, it can be challenging to forge agreement about when higher authorities should get involved, what form their involvement should take, and how they should relate to actors at lower levels of authority (Boin et al., 2017 ; Nohrstedt, Baird, Bodin, Summers, & Plummer, 2020 ).

It should be kept in mind that not all systems are organized according to the disaster subsidiarity principle and some, such as in Vietnam and Turkey, for example, are centrally organized at the national level and have a much more top-down hierarchical character (Hermansson, 2016 ). Nonetheless, the reality that extreme events and crises can overwhelm single actors and cross geographical, organizational, and sectoral boundaries has created the need for organizations, regardless of the level of government, to collaborate and coordinate their efforts, vertically as well as horizontally, to meet these challenges (Ansell et al., 2010 ; Boin & Bynander, 2015 ; Galaz, Moberg, Olsson, Paglia, & Parker, 2011 ; Parker, Stern, Paglia, & Brown, 2009 ; Parker & Sundelius, 2020 ).

Goal formulation

Jointly formulating and realizing shared goals has been identified as an essential aspect of collaboration (Ansell & Gash, 2007 ). At the same time, it has been recognized that a narrow focus on goal-attainment can limit a full understanding of collaboration, which in practice entails complex interactions leading to differential outcomes at the level of individual organizations, networks, and for society at large (Keast & Mandell, 2013 ).

Goal-attainment is crucial, yet also problematic, as a basis for understanding collaborative crisis management. Considerable time and resources are often devoted to establishing structures and routines to support shared problem perceptions and goals during crises. Examples include practices for achieving ‘shared situation awareness’ and ‘joint operating pictures’ to support sense-making among diverse sets of actors (Boin et al., 2017 ). However, focusing exclusively on the ability of actors to articulate and achieve joint goals is insufficient as a basis for assessing effectiveness, especially since the collaborating actors can put up smoke screens with the motive of attempting to make themselves look good after the fact and that might obscure the complexity of setting consensus goals. Clearly, there is more at stake and what is required for judging crisis management as a success or a failure goes beyond narrow conceptions of goal-attainment (McConnell, 2011 ; Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the formulation and attainment of shared goals are key aspects of crisis management. Given transaction costs, one may also expect goal-attainment to be challenging; that is, the collaborative crisis response outcomes may not correspond with goals and ambitions that were formulated at the onset.

Adaptation through intra-crisis learning

Adaptation is a key attribute that can determine the success of collaborative governance arrangements in turbulent environments. This is based on the insight that when faced with complex and uncertain problems, actors are generally better off if they can continuously monitor, review and, if needed, adjust their understanding of problems, their working methods, and solutions. Such adaptive capacity is a defining characteristic of a resilient system capable of renewal (Berkes, 2007 ; Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005 ) and an attribute of well-functioning collaborative governance regimes (Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015 ). Adaptation has also been depicted as a key feature of so-called High Reliability Organizations, which are found in areas where the costs of errors are high (for example, nuclear power, air traffic control, military operations). These organizations are generally able to switch from a normal mode of operation to rapid response and contingency when required (La Porte, 2006 ). These capacities are important in collaborative crisis management as well.

Acute crises provide a unique context in this regard. Most discussion about adaptation concerning complex policy problems usually focuses on adaptation over time, where actors gradually learn and adjust in iterative and incremental cycles through trial-and-error. This is also a common emphasis in collaborative governance studies on learning (Gerlak & Heikkila, 2011 ) and literature on network evolution (Nohrstedt & Bodin, 2014 ). Crises are different, since actors have limited – if any – time to review and reflect upon their plans and actions. Moreover, crises are situations where information is either incomplete or overwhelming, which complicates accurately assessing the situation and evaluating the efficacy of any actions taken. Consequently, actors often resort to ‘fuzzy gambling’ and make decisions under substantial uncertainty and with a limited sense of probabilities (Moynihan, 2008 ).

Despite these difficulties, adaptation is viewed as crucial for successful crisis response (Harrald, 2006 ). More generally, adaptation is depicted as a success factor that explains why (some) collaborative arrangements are effective in addressing complex problems. Collaborative arrangements are particularly important as they support several dimensions conducive to adaptation, including inclusiveness, diversified leadership, knowledge generation and learning, and resources (Emerson & Gerlak, 2014 ). Similarly, learning, flexibility and the ability to improvise are often described as characteristics of an effective crisis response system (Comfort, 2002 ; Wise, 2006 ).

Non-state/governmental actors

Governance, in many modern societies, has undergone a paradigmatic change in which greater levels of power, influence, and responsibility have gradually been transferred from the state to private actors and stakeholders (Peters, 2012 ). Crisis management is no exception to this development, as recognized by the key role of business, non-profit, and voluntary groups in the various phases of planning for, responding to, and recovering from crisis events. Examples of such constellations include various forms of public-private partnerships, for example, critical infrastructure, resilience building, crisis response operations, community physical reconstruction, and collaborative learning (Chen, Chen, Vertinsky, Yumagulova, & Park, 2013 ).

Such arrangements are more or less formalized and range from institutionalized arrangements, such as contractual partnerships, to more informal and emergent ad hoc social networks that form in response to an acute need to integrate and coordinate resources and actions across sectoral boundaries. These collaborative arrangements also vary according to the types of non-state actors that participate, including non-profit organizations, voluntary associations, community actors, and private interests. Multi-organizational approaches based on such cross-sectoral interactions and relationships have been described as an important condition for reducing the risk of natural hazards, such as the ‘whole-of-society’ approach promoted by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction to reduce disaster losses worldwide.

Political infighting

One could imagine that the atmosphere created by a dramatic crisis would bring organizations closer together and temporarily suspend any bureau-political frictions. Although there may be examples of such experiences, findings from crisis management research often seem to point in the opposite direction, recognizing the role of conflict, inter-organizational tensions and infighting – a phenomenon disaster experts have coined the ‘battle of the Samaritans’ (Rosenthal, ‘t Hart, & Kouzmin, 1991 ).

Conflicts are a natural part of collaborative governance more generally and many collaborative arrangements entail mechanisms for mediating and resolving conflicts among the participants (Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015 ), such as developing a conflict management plan, insisting on participation based on good faith, and maintaining transparency (O’Leary & Bingham, 2009 ). During crises, the potential negative effects of unresolved conflicts are many, including the breakdown of channels for vital communication and coordination. For these reasons, the absence of political infighting has been depicted as a condition for effective crisis response networks (Boin & ‘tHart, 2010 ) and why when problems do arise there is a need for some actors to take on leadership roles to resolve or mitigate conflicts between other actors (Sullivan, Williams, & Jeffares, 2012 ).

Case-selection

To select cases for this analysis, we included from the Collaborative Governance Databank all cases featuring episodes or situations characterized by the combination of urgency, threat, and uncertainty. At the time this search was conducted (August, 2019), the databank contained a total of 44 coded cases, out of which seven fulfilled these criteria (Douglas et al., 2020 ). The final selection includes cases from different parts of the world (Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa), which provides valuable analytical variance across cases and contexts regarding, for example, geography, income-levels, democracy, and types of socio-political systems. Furthermore, this subsample includes different types of events; although the cases involve natural hazard events and one disease outbreak (as opposed to so-called ‘man-made’ accidents, such as terrorism or infrastructure breakdowns), there is still considerable variability in event type, spanning geophysical (volcanic activity and earthquakes), hydrological (floods), climatological (wildfires), and biological (epidemic) hazards. Given this variance, we can at least rule out the possibility that theoretical assumptions – if supported in the majority of the seven cases – only apply with regard to certain geographical areas, socio-political contexts, or event types. Table 1 summarizes the seven cases, including time-period, policy domain, and geographical area.

Plausibility probe

Our objective here is to compare these seven cases, to empirically explore the validity of theoretical assumptions regarding collaborative governance in crisis management. This is done systematically as we consistently use the same indicators (coding items) derived from the Collaborative Governance Databank across the seven cases to see whether the evidence confirms core assumptions. Hereby, we expand the orbit of inquiry in comparison to previous studies that explore assumptions in single cases. Nonetheless, it is clear that the seven cases reviewed here are too limited as an empirical basis for conducting a thorough ‘test’ of the validity of the claims examined here. Instead, we aim for a ‘plausibility probe’ in an effort to make an empirically informed judgment whether more ambitious and rigorous tests are warranted.

As originally envisioned by Harry Eckstein ( 1975 , p. 108), ‘[…] plausibility probes involve attempts to determine whether potential validity [of hypotheses] may reasonably be considered great enough to warrant the pains and costs of testing, which are almost always considerable, but especially so if broad, painstaking comparative studies are undertaken’. In this regard, here, the selected assumptions are examined across the seven cases, which, thus, fulfil the role as ‘inductive feedback devices’ for this particular subset of cases (Kaarbo & Beasley, 1999 ). Although the sample is obviously too small to focus on frequency distribution, we seek to establish whether each assumption receives empirical support across the whole subsample, or, if it rather seems limited to one or a few cases, or, if it is not supported at all. Again, following the logic of a plausibility probe, assumptions that receive broad support would be worthy of further investigation in a bigger sample of cases, which we hope becomes possible once the Collaborative Governance Databank accumulates additional cases.

Operationalisations

We reviewed each case, focusing on the codes derived from the coding-framework that were deemed relevant for assessing each assumption respectively. This was done systematically by focusing on the same codes across all seven cases. More specifically, we relied on numeric codes as well as qualitative information (open questions) for each case. Table 2 summarizes these codes by assumption.

Overview of coded elements

Crises are dynamic events that can dramatically change over the course of the episode and one of the advantages of the database is it enables researchers to follow and compare the evolution of collaborations over time (to document change and stability in, for example, jurisdictional level, the type and number of involved actors, and the presence and importance of goals). Nonetheless, as the article that introduces the Collaborative Case Databank acknowledges, while this resource provides new opportunities, it also comes with limitations (Douglas et al., 2020 ). For example, the framework cannot capture all aspects of collaboration and other researchers may want to include different or additional questions and indicators. The ability to accurately capture each dimension of collaboration furthermore depends on the judgement of the coder in applying each coding item to the cases (Douglas et al., 2020 ).

It should also be noted that the cases examined in this article primarily deal with situational crises and the functional dimensions of managing them. Crises, of course, also have strategic and political dimensions, dealing with institutional and accountability issues that, other than examining political infighting, we do not explore in this article. The databank does cover institutional and accountability issues, however, those dimensions were not the focal points of the cases covered here. Hopefully, those dimensions can be looked at in greater depth once the number of collaborative crisis management cases increases in the future.

Do crises, which demand quick decisions under conditions of urgency and time-pressure, provoke responsible organizations to rely more strictly on pre-existing collaborative arrangements with familiar partners or does it spur new collaborations that expand the number of involved actors? Does what we see in our cases square with claims that crises are not conducive for emergent collaborations with new partners or the expansion of existing collaborative arrangements?

As might be expected in crises being handled by actors with formal mandates and responsibilities, in four of the seven cases the initiation of the collaborations were externally directed by law or authority (the floods in Vietnam, the earthquakes in Turkey, the Canadian wildfire, and the Ash cloud crisis). Two were self-initiated by participants (the Swedish wildfire and the German Foodborne disease outbreak) and one was independently convened by a third party (the Ebola case).

We can see that even if the genesis of collaboration was externally directed, acute crises can give rise to emergent collaborative processes and arrangements. A case in point is the 2010 ash cloud crisis, in which the European Commission gave EUROCONTROL, the organization responsible for safe air traffic management in Europe, the responsibility of proposing a solution to the massive disruption to air travel that had paralyzed the European air space in the wake of the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull (Nohrstedt, 2013 ; Parker, 2015 ). This collaboration produced a temporary solution that unlocked the crisis, led to a revised volcanic ash contingency plan, new Safety Risk Assessment (SRA) guidelines, and the formalization of the improvised collaborative arrangement through the establishment of a European Aviation Crisis Coordination Cell (EACCC). Once activated, the EACCC is chaired by the Commission and EUROCONTROL and participants include the EU Presidency, air navigation service providers, airspace users, airports, as well as other relevant stakeholders (Parker, 2015 ).

Self-initiated collaborations, such as the ones observed in the Swedish wildfire and the German foodborne disease cases, also resulted in emergent collaborative arrangements. As we discuss below, both cases are good examples of adaptation through intra-crisis learning.

Regarding the question of whether crises spur the expansion or contraction of the type and number of actors involved in the collaboration process, in contrast to what might be expected (Kapucu, Arslan & Demiroz, 2010 ), none of the cases exhibited contraction. In six of the seven cases, we saw expansion, particularly in the type of actors involved (public organizations/civil servants, political organizations/politicians, private for-profit organizations, private non-profit organizations, and citizens). In one case (Vietnam floods), the number and types of actors involved were stable throughout the collaborative process.

The coding framework allows us to see at which jurisdictional level the collaboration started and whether and how that changed over time by adding actors from other levels. In our cases, the local level was involved in five of the seven collaborative arrangements. In two cases (the Canadian wildfire and the German foodborne disease outbreak) the collaboration was initiated at the local level and in a third (the Swedish wildfire) the initial collaboration involved the local and regional (subnational) level, but in all three of these cases, the crises escalated so quickly that upscaling occurred. In the Swedish case, the national level got involved along with additional types of actors (Bodin & Nohrstedt, 2016 ; Bodin et al., 2019 ; Nohrstedt et al., 2020 ). In the cases of Vietnam and Turkey, the collaborative arrangements were centrally directed from the national level. Vietnam included the regional and local levels throughout the collaborative process (Rubin, 2014 ), while in Turkey the local level only became involved after the 2011 Van and Erciş earthquakes struck (Hermansson, 2019 ).

The German foodborne disease case is interesting because the collaboration started at the local level but quickly expanded and upscaled to include the regional (subnational), national, and EU (supranational) levels. The collaborative response to the large-scale outbreak of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) in Germany in 2011 brought together the local states, medical authorities, risk assessment authorities, consumer protection authorities, and the European Food Safety Authority to contain and fight the outbreak (Berthod, Müller-Seitz, & Sydow, 2014 ).

The ‘upscaling dilemma’ emerged as a key issue in several of our cases. As discussed earlier, it can be far from clear when higher authorities should get involved, what the scope of their involvement should be, or how they should interact with actors at lower levels of authority (Boin et al., 2017 ; Boin & Bynander, 2015 ). The Canadian and Swedish wildfire cases are good examples of this challenge. The Swedish case illustrates the difficulties involved with making a collective decision concerning the appropriate moment to upscale, which was complicated by divergent perceptions among actors at local and regional levels concerning the need to bring in actors at higher levels (Nohrstedt et al., 2020 ). In the Canadian case, collaboration was initially solely at the local level but, due to the rapidly escalating wildfire, the collaboration quickly upscaled to the provincial level with some federal support. Incident Command System protocols, because of the fire’s severity, mandated collaboration between the local and provincial authorities. Initially, the local authorities were reluctant to relinquish control and the upscaling phase from municipal to provincial leadership was not a smooth transition and the desired configuration of involved actors and at what level was contested. Over time, the municipality became more amenable to a province-led effort and ultimately the collaboration proved successful in achieving its goals of fire containment and preventing loss of life. Furthermore, a study of the involved wildfire responders in both cases found that respondents rated the collaborative effectiveness to be quite high (Bodin et al., 2019 ).

The codes suggest that the local level was not involved in two of the cases in our subset. The absence of the local level in these instances appears to be due to the nature of the crises and the collaboration processes studied. The 2010 and 2011 ash cloud events were transboundary crises involving multi-level collaboration between national, European, and international aviation authorities and the 2014 Ebola case only looked at the international response of the UN and non-affected national governments to raise funds and encourage countries to send health care workers to respond to the epidemic.

Goal-formulation

To address assumptions about goal-attainment in the seven cases, we first look at whether the formulation of shared goals constituted a key ambition driving the collaboration and, second, whether this ambition was achieved. Here it is important to note that the coding framework only captures whether actors were able to formulate shared goals in the form of accomplishing a plan to tackle a shared problem. Hence, this should not be conflated with whether goal-attainment was actually achieved.

The evidence suggests that the formulation of shared goals constituted an important ambition driving collaboration in all seven cases. In fact, the coded cases show that the development of a plan (our proxy for goal formulation) constituted the core ambition for most collaborative arrangements. However, a closer look at case-study material unveils three different scenarios.

In the first scenario, goal-formulation remained the core ambition of the collaboration throughout all phases in the observed period. In these cases – including Ebola, the Swedish wildfire, and Vietnam floods – actors appear to have worked continuously with developing and adjusting joint plans. In the second scenario, as seen in the Turkish earthquakes and the Canada wildfire, formulation of shared goals did not constitute a core ambition. In these examples, other ambitions – such as increasing the effectiveness and legitimacy of the response – were listed by the coders as being more important drivers of collaboration. In the third scenario, the importance of goal-formulation grew gradually as the events escalated. This pattern was noted in the volcanic ash case and the foodborne disease outbreak in Germany. In both cases, the development of shared goals initially appeared subordinated to other ambitions but gradually became the core ambition of the collaboration. We may only speculate as to what may account for these differences. One potentially important factor includes the level of hierarchy (in more hierarchical systems, such as Vietnam, Turkey, and Canada, it may be the case that goal-formulation is more formalized through, for example, chain of command). The scale of the event and if actors have prior experience to draw from may also be important; in large, unprecedented situations – such as the wildfire in Sweden and Ebola – actors may be faced with novel problems that require continuous efforts to formulate shared goals and plans. Yet, these explanations remain speculations warranting future examination.

Turning to whether the formulation of shared goals was achieved in the end, we find that this was an aspect of collaboration that worked well overall. While we miss data for the Ebola case, codes for the other six cases suggest that actors, in general, succeeded in developing a shared plan. Again, the level of success in achieving shared goals varies over time and is also linked to the level of importance attributed to goal-formulation in each phase. In other words, in those cases where goal-formulation was depicted as a core ambition of the collaboration, this was generally achieved.

In our cases, we cannot observe processes of adaptation directly based on, for instance, empirical evidence of individual or collective learning. However, the coding framework enables us to systematically review the cases in search for indications of adaptation, focusing specifically on reported changes in the structure and process of collaboration in the context of crises.

All seven cases reviewed here exhibit some elements of adaptation. First, all cases give evidence of how the challenges and, in turn, the ambitions of the collaborative arrangements evolved. Some of these cases are examples of processes of quick escalation where the number and nature of the challenges changed relatively rapidly. This was particularly evident during the two wildfire cases and the earthquakes in Turkey. Other events escalated more gradually, as in the case of Ebola, the ash cloud crisis, and the Vietnam floods. The specific managerial problems related to these events also changed over time, which provided stimuli for change in the collaborative crisis responder systems. Again, the two wildfire events are illustrative. In both cases, the rapid escalation brought on a range of problems related to, for example, evacuation, public communication, and inter-organizational coordination, which led to a rapid increase in the number of actors involved in the response. This also resulted in the adjustment of the organizational structures from more localized operations to large-scale inter-organizational arrangements. A similar development was noted in the Ebola case, which started as a more limited operation involving NGOs, which was gradually scaled-up to an international response coordinated by the UN and with assistance from many other countries. Another example of how challenges shift is provided by the foodborne disease outbreak in Germany, which initially was focused on more technical aspects that were handled by an ad hoc multi-organizational task force of experts from different authorities. Later on, the focus moved to a political debate regarding the alleged lack of coordination, which swung attention to other actors and expanded the crisis from a functional to a political perspective (Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ).

We also see some evidence that individuals that were involved in the response to these events adapted relatively quickly to emergent organizational structures. In the cases, there are several examples of temporary arrangements that emerged to meet the need for inter-organizational coordination in response to unforeseen problems. Many cases, including the Swedish wildfire, the foodborne disease outbreak, and the ash cloud crisis, gave rise to different types of emergent inter-organizational collaborative arrangements that were necessary to achieve coordination in the absence of pre-existing structures and routines. Interestingly, these arrangements appear to have worked relatively well. For instance, although some tensions arose in all cases, there is evidence that trust among the actors developed within a relatively short time-frame. In the case codes, we see no evidence of tensions or conflicts hampering the responses.

These experiences also corroborate the role of multi-organizational collaborative arrangements as forums for innovation and improvisation, which is conceptually linked to adaptation. In the literature, there has been a surge in interest in the role of collaborative governance in fostering innovation in public policy and services. This work acknowledges the role of diverse experience, resources, and knowledge as a basis for generating innovative solutions and practices (Sørensen & Torfing, 2011 ). During the foodborne disease case, for example, the ad hoc multi-organizational task force was important in developing and implementing a new study method for identifying disease carriers.

Concerning the involvement and role of non-governmental actors, our review of the seven cases confirms that a broad range of non-state actors can become actively involved in major crisis events and that they can play key roles in their resolution by working side-by-side with representatives of political and public organizations. The coding-framework identified three broad organizational categories, including for-profit organizations (business), non-profit (for example, interest groups and other associations), and citizen groups.

Representation of these categories of organizations varied across the seven cases with non-profit and citizen groups being most common. For-profit organizations participated in the response to five of the seven cases, including earthquakes in Turkey, the two wildfire cases in Sweden and Canada, the volcanic ash cloud case, and the foodborne disease case. Non-profits appeared in four cases, including the two wildfires, the earthquakes, and Ebola. Finally, citizen groups appeared in all cases but the ash cloud crisis and Ebola.

One pattern that can be noted across the seven cases is that non-state actors appear to join the response at some point after the acute event erupted. Except for the Vietnam floods, where citizen groups were actively involved at the onset, and the earthquakes in Turkey, where for-profit organizations joined the response early on, these groups mostly became actively involved sometime in the middle of the period observed. Non-profit organizations, however, appeared more frequently in the initial phases of three cases, including the earthquakes in Turkey, the wildfire in Sweden, and Ebola.

The participation of these organizations appears to fade somewhat toward the end of these events. Although non-state actors seem to be more engaged at the end of the observed period compared to the beginning, it appears that their participation fades after the acute phase of the event. However, the evidence suggests that participation during the end-phase differs by organization type, with non-profit organizations participating most frequently (in three cases: earthquakes in Turkey, the wildfire in Sweden, and Ebola) and for-profit organizations being less involved (ash cloud case and Canadian wildfire case). Yet, these trends should be looked at with considerable caution since the participation of these organizations in the collaborative response varies overall (with different organizations being involved in the seven cases).

Overall, the cases reviewed here confirm that non-state actors participate quite actively in different settings and across the different phases of collaborative crisis management. The fact that public organizations participated in all phases across all seven cases (except during the initial phase of the Ebola epidemic) underscores the need to continue investigating conditions for achieving effective cross-sectoral collaboration in crisis management.

Turning to the evidence regarding the prevalence and impact of political infighting, we can infer the level of conflict in the seven cases indirectly by looking at whether containment of conflict constituted a core ambition of the collaboration. In other words, although we cannot directly measure the level of conflict in each case, we can study conflict indirectly by focusing on the weight attached to conflict management within the collaboration.

We find that conflicts were not significant in the seven cases. In two cases (Ebola and earthquakes in Turkey), the codes suggest that conflict seemed to play a limited role in the response. However, in cases where conflicts did occur, the available evidence appears to indicate that these were relatively effectively contained, partially through leadership involvement. Except for two cases (the foodborne disease case and the Vietnam floods case), conflict mitigation was not a core ambition in any of the cases. In fact, in the remaining five cases, the evidence suggests that conflicts played a limited role in the collaborative response or did not occur at all. Also, no clear temporal trends are evident across these cases, which suggest that the level of conflict remained relatively stable over time. One exception was the foodborne disease case, where conflict mitigation was a core ambition in the early stages of the crisis response but became less important as the situation unfolded.

Regarding the role of leadership in effectively resolving conflicts among actors, we only have valid codes from four of the seven cases (the other three reported missing data on this dimension). Therefore, the empirical basis for drawing any conclusions about the role of leadership is quite limited. Looking at the four cases with valid codes (wildfires in Sweden and Canada, Vietnam floods, and the volcanic ash case), the evidence suggests that leadership was only moderately effective in mitigating conflicts between actors. In addition, the level of effectiveness remained relatively stable over time, yet with a small increase towards the later phases. However, we attribute the moderate levels of effectiveness in crisis containment to the fact that conflict resolution did not constitute a core ambition in any of the coded cases. Thus, we conclude (with some caution) that the level of conflict remained relatively low in these cases and that the leadership was relatively successful in containing any tensions when they erupted.

In this article, we compared seven cases of crisis management derived from the Collaborative Governance Databank in an effort to empirically explore the validity of theoretical assumptions about collaborative crisis management. The study hereby contributes to the cumulative effort to advance knowledge about collaborative governance in general and collaborative crisis management in particular.

Our study empirically explores theoretical assumptions concerning triggers, level of collaboration, goal-formulation, adaptation, the role of non-state actors, and political infighting. The seven cases are obviously too limited as a basis for empirically testing and generalizing theoretical expectations. However, this subsample represents a selection of different hazard event types derived from different parts of the world, which enable us to probe the plausibility of assumptions in different countries and settings. Although we cannot verify causal linkages, we can identify and discuss the associations and patterns we saw across the cases.

The findings confirm that crises represent relatively rapidly moving and dynamic events that raise the need for adaptation, adjustment, and innovation in the context of collaboration. Studies of collaborative governance in cases of ‘normalcy’ cannot offer insight into how collective-action unfolds given situational constraints and stressors caused by considerable urgency, uncertainty, and imminent threat to the core values of a system. Past collaborative governance research has depicted crises as one incentive among others that create awareness and pressure actors to engage in collaboration (Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015 ). Building from this study, we can better specify how these incentives play out in practice.

One recurrent observation across the seven cases is that crises do not just create some general pressure for swift and broad collaboration. Rather, demands for collaboration are likely to shift over time, which necessitates adaptation by actors. Such adaptation often takes place in relation to ‘upscaling’ whereby an increase in the scale of an event outstrips resources at lower levels and creates pressure to shift responsibility and steering to organizations at higher levels (Nohrstedt et al., 2020 ). The evidence reviewed here, however, confirms that there is rarely consensus around decisions to move responsibility up the government hierarchy because actors have different understandings of local capacities and the right timing for shifting responsibility. Experiences from the cases also shed light on other adaptive behaviours, including the creation of ad hoc collaborative arrangements and adjustment of organizational structures and ambitions of collaboration. These insights corroborate the observation that collaborative crisis management brings a unique set of challenges characterized by uncertainty, conflicting priorities, and ad hoc behaviours (O’Leary & Bingham, 2009 ).

We have also noted several behaviours and outcomes that can be depicted in terms of success – or at least as more positive experiences. Here we show that actors in most cases were relatively successful in formulating and pursuing a shared plan. Again, it should be recognized that the importance attributed to goal-formulation varied between the cases and also over time. However, in cases where goal-formulation was defined as an important task, it worked relatively well. Another positive observation is that even in the cases in which pre-existing structures for collaboration were initially lacking, actors managed to establish viable collaborations in an ad hoc fashion. These constellations entailed relationships across sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. Although conflicts did occur, the coded cases indicate that actors developed mutual trust within a relatively short time-span and also addressed conflicts in ways that did not hamper the collective response. The level of conflict remained relatively low in all cases and when conflicts emerged, they were, in most cases, sufficiently contained through leadership involvement.

These experiences can help to advance the understanding of performance, effectiveness and outcomes of collaborative crisis management, which has been elevated as an important next step to advance the research agenda around collaborative crisis management (Nohrstedt et al., 2018 ). In this regard, the takeaway message from this study is threefold. First, analysts should be attentive to unexpected success-stories (Di Baldassarre et al., 2018 ). Generally, one would expect that a disruptive crisis creates an atmosphere where productive collaboration is encumbered. This has been confirmed elsewhere through cases of suboptimal inter-organizational relations emerging as a result of, for example, poor communication and strong tribal identities (Boin & ‘t Hart, 2010 ; Parker & Stern, 2002 ). Crisis conditions can furthermore amplify factors that generally constrain collaboration in normal times, including high transaction-costs, self-interested behaviour, and low trust. Identifying and analysing aspects of collaboration that appear to work relatively well under these challenging conditions is clearly a productive path forward.

Secondly, as highlighted in the introduction to the special issue (Douglas et al., 2020 ), an important next step is to draw on insights from larger sets of cases to explore causal relationships. Perhaps we may see progress on that front in the future, which might enable large-N analyses of crises as a particular subset of collaborative governance. The literature offers plenty of suggestions regarding what factors may enable high performing collaboration in this specific context, including coordination, inclusion, and low conflict (Boin & ‘t Hart, 2010 ). Moreover, although we cannot empirically verify causal relationships, the cross-case comparison was useful for identifying more specific patterns worthy of further investigation once the number of collaborative crisis management cases expands in the future. Specifically, it remains puzzling why actors across the cases, despite being faced with large-scale and partially novel challenges, were mostly able to effectively contain conflict, formulate and achieve shared goals, adapt to rapidly to changing situations and emergent structures, and innovate in response to unforeseen problems. Research efforts to find the collective behaviours, structures, and processes that enabled these actions would partially require alternative sources of data, but hold great potential as a next step to push this research frontier forward.

Finally, the seven cases also suggest that some common collaborative challenges are likely to emerge regardless of the event type. For example, the evidence reviewed here suggests that even if the ‘triggering events’ are different, the process of collaboration often involves recurrent problems related to, for example, the mobilization of diverse sets of actors and the coordination of joint activities. Comparative approaches can be leveraged to assess how actors deal with these common challenges in different contexts, under varying amounts of pressure, and in relation to different types of events. Studies could investigate how different types of collaborative arrangements (e.g. self-organized versus hierarchically orchestrated) respond to similar challenges. It can also be valuable to examine how similar collaborative arrangements cope with different types of crises. Another potential line of inquiry is to carry out comparative assessments over time to investigate how collaborative arrangements change (Nohrstedt & Bodin, 2014 ) and the fluctuating levels of overlap between planned or pre-existing networks and emergent crisis responder networks (Bodin et al., 2019 ; Kapucu, 2005 ). Including the temporal dimension is also helpful for unveiling processes of learning and how the outputs of learning, such as new or revised plans and strategies, might affect collaborative crisis management regarding recurrent or similar hazards (Nohrstedt & Parker, 2014 ; Parker, 2015 ).

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article. We are grateful to Scott Douglas, Paul ‘t Hart, Chris Ansell, Eva Sørensen, and Jacob Torfing for spearheading the Collaborative Governance Case Databank project and providing wisdom and inspiration. We also extend our appreciation to the individuals that, in different ways, supported us in conducting the case-studies that contributed the empirics for this article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Charles F. Parker is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Government and serves as the deputy chair of the board for the Center for Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS) at Uppsala University. His research has focused on climate change politics, leadership, crisis management, and the origins and consequences of warning-response problems. His most recent publication is ‘The effectiveness of national and EU-level civil protection systems: Evidence from 17 member states’ in the Journal of European Public Policy.

Daniel Nohrstedt is Professor at the Department of Government at Uppsala University, where he is also research coordinator in the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS). His research interests include public policy, policy networks, collaborative governance, and crisis and disaster management. His research has explored policy change and learning in the wake of disasters, conflict and cooperation in policy processes, and the formation and performance of policy networks in different settings.

Julia Baird is a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Human Dimensions of Water Resources and Water Resilience and an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre and the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies at Brock University. Her research interests in water governance and management have a dual focus on group processes and individual differences and how these may be moved toward more sustainable trajectories. She works within the domain of sustainability science; she has led and participated in multiple partnerships with non-academic partners to co-create and conduct research that is applicable and beneficial to policy-makers and practitioners.

Helena Hermansson is currently working as an assistant professor at the Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm. She has previously published articles covering collaborative governance and network governance in the context of disaster management.

Olivier Rubin is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, and a member of the executive board at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research. He has 15 years of experience in disaster and health crisis research with a focus on the political and bureaucratic dynamics of slow-onset disasters such as famines, climate-induced disasters, pandemics and antimicrobial resistance. Rubin has published widely in international outlets pertaining to disasters, politics and development. He has received several highly competitive multiyear grants on disaster research and is currently managing a 5-year grant (2018-2022) from the Independent Research Fund Denmark on the global policy dynamics of antimicrobial resistance.

Erik Baekkeskov is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He researches government responses to epidemics and other health crises, with specific studies of pandemic influenza, Ebola, antimicrobial resistance, and COVID-19.

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Crisis management essentials: Preparing for the unexpected

What are the key strategies organisations need to effectively prepare for crises, manage stakeholder expectations and protect their corporate reputation?

There has been no shortage of crises in the business world in recent times. From cyberattacks and data breaches to financial collapses and natural disasters, organisations across the globe have faced a myriad of challenges that have tested their resilience and crisis management capabilities.

In this complex landscape of potential crises, effective management and response strategies are more critical than ever. One expert who has been at the forefront of guiding organisations through their most vulnerable moments is Sue Cato, one of Australia’s leading crisis management specialists. With decades of experience under her belt, Ms Cato has helped numerous Australian and international corporations navigate business-critical issues and corporate challenges.

In an interview for The Business Of , a podcast from UNSW Business School, Ms Cato spoke with Dr Juliet Bourke , Professor of Practice in the School of Management and Governance at UNSW Business School, about the importance of preparation, truth-telling and understanding stakeholder expectations in crisis management. Ms Cato’s approach, honed through years of hands-on experience, offers a roadmap for organisations seeking to build resilience and effectively manage crises in an increasingly volatile business environment.

Preparation is key to crisis readiness

While it’s impossible to anticipate every potential crisis scenario, Ms Cato told Dr Bourke that having a solid foundation of preparedness is crucial. This includes identifying key team members, establishing clear roles and responsibilities, and ensuring external advisors are in place before a crisis hits. While organisations might try to prepare for numerous scenarios, the focus should be on having the right people and processes in place.

Ms Cato emphasised the importance of regularly reviewing crisis management plans to ensure they remain relevant and accessible: “People think that you could do 500 different scenarios. Quite frankly, you could do 1000 different scenarios and maybe not map the right one. But what you need to do is actually say, if I do have an issue, who are the people? Are they prepared? Are they the right people? Do you have external advisors in place?” said Ms Cato, who also highlighted the need for crisis management plans to be easily accessible and up-to-date. “And if you do have a crisis management plan, and it’s in the bottom drawer, when was the last time someone read it?”

According to Ms Cato, different types of crises require different teams. “You do have options, but not all of them are going to be relevant,” she noted. “So for instance, if it’s a cybersecurity issue , that’s one specific area, you know. If it’s sexual harassment and bullying, that’s a different team that you’re looking at. If it’s a market performance issue or a safety issue, different people.”

Read more: As cyberthreats evolve, businesses need more than just tech solutions

Not everyone is cut out for crisis management

Not all leaders perform well under pressure, Ms Cato asserted. She recounted an experience preparing a major bank executive who, within seconds of a practice session, demonstrated he was unsuitable to face the media. “I remember prepping a major bank executive on one occasion, and within about three seconds, I had him swearing at the camera. And I literally came out of it and went, ‘He’s never to front the media. Ever, ever, ever, ever,’” Ms Cato recalled.

This anecdote underscores the importance of identifying the right spokesperson and having backup options in place. To help prepare, she advised running scenario tests to identify which team members perform well under pressure and which may need additional support or alternative roles during a crisis. “You know we quite often run scenarios for clients, and it’s amazing – everyone thinks they’re totally prepared, but the moment when you actually test it, you can see the people who should be involved and the people who shouldn’t be involved.”

Ms Cato emphasised that crisis response is not just about having a plan on paper, but about understanding how individuals will react under intense pressure. Some people who excel in their day-to-day roles might struggle in crisis situations, while others may unexpectedly rise to the challenge.

Truth-telling: The foundation of effective crisis management

Throughout the interview, Ms Cato repeatedly emphasised the importance of truth-telling in crisis management. She advised against making assertions without certainty and highlighted the dangers of filling information voids with unverified statements. Making unfounded statements can severely damage trust, making it difficult to recover credibility later, and Ms Cato advocated for transparency, even when full information is not available.

“Don’t say stuff to the media or your stakeholders unless you know it’s true,” Ms Cato cautioned. “And sometimes people feel this desperate need to fill a void and so they’ll go out to the media and or other stakeholders and make an assertion about a situation which is then found out not to be correct. Now, where that gets you is you either didn’t know or you’ve lied, and it’s incredibly hard to get trust back.”

It’s acceptable to acknowledge a situation, outline the steps being taken to address it, and commit to providing updates as more information becomes available. This approach helps maintain credibility and prevents others from filling the information void with potentially harmful speculation. “Often, it’s totally fine to say, ‘This is occurring. This is what we’re doing about it, and you can trust us and we’ll come back to when we know more,’” she said. “You’re not leaving a void, you’re actually getting your voice out there. The other issue that people talk about is if you leave a void, other people will make up their own minds about what’s going on and fill that void very unhelpfully for you.”

Read more: Australia should adopt 'gold standard' in data laws after Optus leak

Managing reputation in crisis situations

Reputation is fundamentally about meeting expectations, and when individuals or organisations behave in unexpected ways, Ms Cato said this can lead to reputational damage. “What reputation is really all about is people have an expectation of how you’ll behave in a certain situation, and it’s when people behave in a manner that’s not expected, is when you get a dislocation,” Ms Cato explained.

“So if someone you expect them is an absolutely shocking human, drug runner, etc, and suddenly turns into Mother Teresa that’s shocking and dislocating. But equally, when you’ve got somebody who expect the most fabulous performance and integrity and all of that stuff and you find out that, in fact, there’s a fatal flaw, that’s when reputations get damaged.”

Ms Cato noted that while rebuilding a damaged reputation can be challenging, it is possible with the right approach. “I used to think that some people’s reputations could never be rebuilt, but actually, as I’m getting more mature I actually think people can be brought back no matter how bad the situation is,” said Ms Cato. “But it depends on being able to embrace what the problem was – acknowledge the issue and be able to give people a reason to believe that it won’t happen again.”

The importance of consistent values in crisis response

How an organisation handles a crisis is a direct reflection of its values, Ms Cato explained. Importantly, if an organisation claims to prioritise certain values, such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles or employee welfare, but fails to live up to these commitments during a crisis, she said its reputation will suffer.

“Once again, it comes back to reputation – if you’re going out there and saying that you are absolutely committed to, you know, ESG and looking staff first and all of those sorts of things and then you don’t actually deliver on that, your reputation, whether you’re an individual or a corporation, will be damaged,” Ms Cato warned.

This underscores the importance of aligning crisis response strategies with an organisation’s stated values and principles. It’s not enough to have values on paper; they must be lived and demonstrated, especially during challenging times. As such, she suggested that organisations should view crises as opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to their values. By doing so, they can potentially emerge from a crisis with a stronger reputation and increased stakeholder trust.

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Proactive risk management to prevent crises

To avoid finding oneself in the midst of a crisis, Ms Cato recommended implementing robust risk management processes. She stressed the importance of creating an organisational culture where potential issues can be flagged early, even if they may not develop into significant problems.

Organisations should encourage their members to voice concerns about potential issues, no matter how small they might seem, according to Ms Cato, who said this proactive approach to risk management can help prevent small issues from escalating into full-blown crises. “I think it’s really important to make sure that your organisation is very aware of where problems can come from and be able to actually flag something,” Ms Cato advised. “So to be able to say, ‘Look bit worried about X, it might go absolutely nowhere, but can we have a look at it?’”

She emphasised that this approach can help organisations address potential issues before they become unmanageable: “So it’s an organisation that wants to know what’s going on, and if you can catch things early, often they don’t become massive problems. So the ability for proper risk management – smaller and bigger risk management – is really critical to actually keeping a calm life.”

This proactive stance on risk management aligns with Ms Cato’s overall philosophy of preparation and transparency in crisis management. By fostering an environment where potential issues are openly discussed and addressed, she said organisations can reduce the likelihood of being blindsided by a crisis.

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