Continual Improvement

Learning from a Crisis to Effect Change

In the wake of a crisis, enlightened organizational decision makers adopt a learning orientation and draw upon prior experience to develop new and more effective routines and behaviors that ultimately change the way the organization operates. The best leaders are purposeful and skillful in finding the learning opportunities inherent in every crisis situation. In times of crisis, communities and constituencies expect their public leaders to minimize the impact of the crisis at hand. Public leaders have a special responsibility to help safeguard society from the adverse consequences of crisis. Experts in crisis management note that leaders who take this responsibility seriously are attentive to all crisis phases: the incubation stage, the onset, and the aftermath. Crisis leadership then involves five critical tasks: sense making, decision making, meaning making, terminating, and learning. Lessons learned from surviving a crisis often open a window of opportunity for reform in the future.

Contingency and Continuity Planning

Contingency and continuity plans are essential components of a sound and comprehensive crisis management plan. Contingency plans should contain information and guidance that will help decision makers to consider not only the short-term consequences but also the long-term effects of every decision. Each critical function and process that is necessary to keep an organization running must have its own contingency plan in the event of failure or cessation. Business continuity plans can help minimize the disruption to an organization that undoubtedly occurs in a crisis.

Advance planning and practice help ensure that an organization is appropriately and adequately prepared for a crisis. Crisis management teams can rehearse a crisis plan by developing scenarios simulating collapse or interruption of operations and by responding as planned. Testing and rehearsing contingency plans heightens awareness of the possibility of an actual crisis and prepares crisis team members to act quickly and effectively. Fine-tuning the crisis plan can be undertaken to increase clarity, speed, efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness of response from the onset of a crisis to its aftermath and resolution.

Improving Government Efforts

Local, state, and federal governments play a vital part in crisis management, which is considered one of the primary roles of government. Emergency [Page 164]services, such as fire and police departments at the local level and the U.S. National Guard at the federal level, often play integral roles in crisis situations. To help coordinate communication during the response phase of a crisis, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) within the Department of Homeland Security administers the National Response Plan (NRP). This plan is intended to integrate public and private response by providing a common language and outlining a chain of command when multiple parties are mobilized. It is based on the premise that incidents should be handled at the lowest organizational level possible. The NRP recognizes the private sector as a key partner in domestic incident management, particularly in the area of critical infrastructure protection and restoration. The NRP is a companion to the National Incident Management System, which acts as a more general template for incident management regardless of cause, size, or complexity. FEMA offers free Web-based training on the NRP through the Emergency Management Institute. Common alerting protocol (CAP) is a relatively recent mechanism that facilitates crisis communication across different media and systems. The CAP helps create a consistent emergency alert format to reach geographically and linguistically diverse audiences through both audio and visual media.

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