Opportunity and Threat

Threat

Threat is central to the concept of a crisis. In their survey of the literature of crisis management, Matthew Seeger, Timothy Sellnow, and Robert Ulmer (1998) wrote that a crisis is composed of three distinct notions: surprise, a short response time, and a threat. Among the threats that an organization faces are a diminished ability to accomplish conventional organizational objectives, as well as the real probability of organizational loss. Indeed, Karl Weick (1988) got at this critical component of threat when he defined crises as “low probability/high consequence events that threaten the most fundamental goals of the organization” (p. 305).

Organizations should plan for crises, viewing their likelihood as inevitable, given the variegated threats companies face. Such threats originate from both internal and external sources. Internally, [Page 596]threats take the form of serious accidents, product safety incidents, or corporate misdeeds by senior executives. Organizations face external threats as well; these threats can emanate from activists who challenge a company's environmental record or consumer terrorists—such as Tylenol tampering incidents—as well as natural disasters.

Opportunity

Whereas the threat in crisis situations is selfevident, the opportunity is not. Weick (1988) acknowledged this problem when he concedes that crisis “events defy interpretations and impose severe demands on sensemaking” (p. 305). Yet if crisis managers are to strategically rescue their organizations from a crisis, they need to develop a sense-making process by which novel opportunities are seen, or, using Weick's term, enacted. That is, they have to cognitively re-create the crisis situation by developing a different way of seeing, one that envisions the situation as one in which opportunities are present.

One such opportunity is definitional; crises provide organizational officials wide latitude in managing meanings. A crisis is powerful in that it breaks frames; old ways of viewing problems are rendered obsolete. This gives a crisis manager an opportunity to redefine a situation in a way that was impossible before, and with new definitions come new solutions for problems. In short, a crisis provides a face-saving way to change paths by providing cover for decision makers—a helpful vehicle by which to disentangle oneself from intractable problems. Crises also proffer an excuse to act to bring about desired outcomes—even though the justification may have little to do with the action.

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