Public authorities face a variety of crises, such as natural disasters and environmental threats, financial meltdowns and terrorist attacks, epidemics and explosions, and information and communication technology (ICT) failures. Crises are not routine events (such as fires or traffic accidents). Crises are inconceivable events that often take politicians, citizens, and reporters by complete surprise. Crises occur when a community of people—an organization, a town, or a nation—perceives an urgent threat to core values or life-sustaining functions that must be urgently dealt with under conditions of deep uncertainty.
These dramatic events create tough challenges for public authorities and their organizations. Critical decisions must be made and implemented under considerable time pressure and in the absence of essential information about causes and consequences. Even if the conditions for effective action are severely impeded, citizens expect governmental leaders and public authorities to safeguard them from the threat at hand.
Two factors make it increasingly hard for these organizations and their leaders to meet this expectation. First, the qualities that increase welfare and drive progress in modern societies make these societies vulnerable to crises. Second, citizens and politicians alike have become at once more fearful and less tolerant of major hazards to public health, safety, and prosperity. The combination of these factors explains why relatively small disturbances can rapidly develop into deep crises and why the effects of crisis management are inherently limited.
Modern society has become increasingly complex and integrated. Complexity makes it hard to fully understand the manifold activities and processes that take place. As a result, emerging vulnerabilities can long go unrecognized; attempts to deal with them often produce unintended consequences (fueling rather than dampening the crisis). Tight coupling between a system’s component parts and with those of other systems facilitates the rapid proliferation of disturbances. Crises may, thus, have their roots far away (in a geographical sense) but rapidly snowball through the global networks, jumping from one system to another, gathering destructive potential along the way.
All this makes it hard to recognize a crisis before its consequences materialize. When a crisis begins to unfold, policy makers often do not see anything out of the ordinary. Everything is still in place, even though hidden interactions eat away at the pillars of the system. It is only when the crisis is in full swing and becomes manifest that policy makers can recognize it for what it is. Once a crisis has escalated into view, authorities can only try to minimize its consequences.
The contested nature of a crisis further complicates the situation. A crisis rarely, if ever, “speaks for itself.” The definition of a situation is subjective; one person’s crisis is another person’s opportunity. For public authorities, this spells trouble: many seemingly innocent events can be transformed into crises. Western citizens have grown impatient with imperfections. They have come to fear glitches and have learned to see more of what they fear. In this culture of fear—sometimes referred to as the “risk society”—the modern mass media plays an amplifying role.
Even if consensus would exist that a serious threat is emerging, the status of this new problem is far from assured. Governments deal with urgent problems every day; attention for one problem takes away attention from another. For a threat to be recognized as a crisis, it must clear firmly entrenched hurdles.
Crisis management has two dimensions. The technical dimension pertains to the coping capacity of governmental institutions and public policies in the face of emerging threats. But there is also a political dimension: crisis management is a deeply controversial and intensely political activity. A combination of these dimensions translates into five critical challenges of crisis management: sense making, decision making, meaning making, terminating, and learning.
A crisis seems to pose a straightforward challenge: once a crisis becomes manifest, crisis managers must take measures to deal with its consequences. However, reality is much more complex. Most crises do not materialize with a big bang; they are the product of escalation. Policy makers must recognize from vague, ambivalent, and contradictory signals that something out of the ordinary is developing. They must appraise the threat and decide what the crisis is about.
Crisis managers often have a hard time meeting this challenge. The bewildering pace, ambiguity, and complexity of a crisis can easily overwhelm normal modes of situation assessment. Stress and organizational problems may further impair the ability to recognize and make sense of a crisis.
Some categories of people are known for their ability to remain cool and to stay clear-headed under pressure. They have developed a mode of information processing that enables competent performance under crisis conditions. Veteran military officers, journalists, and fire and police commanders are known for this. Some organizations have developed a proactive culture of “looking for problems” in their environment. These organizations have somehow developed a capacity for thorough yet fast-paced information processing under stressful conditions. The unresolved question is whether organizations can design these features into existing organizational cultures.
During a crisis, governments and public agencies must decide on critical issues. These can be of many kinds. Scarce resources may have to be prioritized. This is much like politics as usual, except that in crisis circumstances the disparities between demand and supply of public resources are much bigger, the situation remains unclear and volatile, and the time to think, consult, and gain acceptance for decisions is highly restricted. Crises also confront governments and leaders with issues they do not face on a daily basis—for example, concerning the deployment of the military, the use of lethal force, or the radical restriction of civil liberties. Crisis decision making is making hard calls, which involve tough value trade-offs and major political risks.
An effective response requires interagency and intergovernmental coordination. After all, each decision must be implemented by a variety of organizations; effective implementation requires that these organizations work together. Getting public bureaucracies to adapt to crisis circumstances is a daunting—some say impossible—task. Most public organizations were originally designed to conduct routine business in accordance with such values as fairness, lawfulness, and efficiency. However, the management of a crisis requires flexibility, improvisation, redundancy, and the breaking of rules.
Coordination is not a self-evident feature of crisis-management operations. The question of who is in charge typically arouses great passions. In disaster studies, the “battle of the Samaritans” is a well-documented phenomenon: agencies representing different technologies of crisis management find it difficult to align their actions. Moreover, a crisis does not make the sensitivities and conflicts disappear that governed the daily relations between authorities and others before the crisis.
A truly effective crisis response is, to a large extent, the result of a naturally evolving process. It cannot be managed in linear, step-by-step, and comprehensive fashion from a single crisis centre, however full of top decision makers and stacked with state-of-the-art information technology. There are simply too many hurdles that separate a critical decision from its timely execution in the field.
In a crisis, leaders are expected to reduce uncertainty and provide an authoritative account of what is going on, why it is happening, and what needs to be done. When they have made sense of the events and have formulated a strategy, leaders must get others to accept their definition of the situation. If they are not successful, their decisions may not be understood or respected.
Public leaders are not the only ones trying to frame the crisis. Their messages coincide and compete with those of other parties, who hold other positions and interests, and who are likely to espouse various alternative definitions of the situation and advocate different courses of action. If other actors succeed in dominating the meaning-making process, the ability of incumbent leaders to decide and maneuver is severely constrained.
It is often difficult for authorities to provide correct information right away. They struggle with the mountains of raw data (reports, rumours, pictures) that are quickly amassed when something extraordinary happens. Turning them into a coherent picture of the situation is a major challenge by itself. Getting it out to the public in the form of accurate, clear, and actionable information requires a major public relations effort. This effort is often hindered by the aroused state of the audience: people whose lives are deeply affected tend to be anxious if not stressed. Moreover, they do not necessarily see the government as their ally. And preexisting distrust of government does not evaporate in times of crisis.
Crisis termination is twofold. It first requires shifting back from emergency to routine mode and downsizing the crisis-management operations. At the strategic level, it also requires rendering an account for what has happened and gaining acceptance for this account. These two aspects of crisis termination are distinct but in practice often closely intertwined. Government must regain the necessary legitimacy to perform its usual functions. Leaders cannot bring this about by unilateral decree, even if they possess the formal mandate to terminate crises in a legal sense. Formal termination gestures can follow, but never lead, the mood of a community. Premature closure may even backfire. Allegations of underestimation and cover-up are quick to emerge in an opinion climate that is still on edge.
Debates about who is accountable for the management of the crisis can easily degenerate into blame games with a focus on identifying and punishing culprits, rather than discursive reflection about the full range of causes and consequences. The challenge for leaders is to cope with the politics of crisis accountability without resorting to undignified and potentially self-defeating defensive tactics of blame avoidance.
Crisis leaders can be competent and conscientious, but that alone says little about how their performance will be evaluated when the crisis is over. Policy makers and agencies that failed to perform their duties prior to or during the critical stages may manage the crisis aftermath well, thus preventing losses to their reputation, autonomy, and resources. Crises have winners and losers. The political (and legal) dynamics of the accountability process determines which crisis actors end up where.
A crisis offers a reservoir of potential lessons for contingency planning and training for future crises. One would expect all those involved to study these lessons and feed them back into organizational practices, policies, and laws. This does not always happen, however. Lesson drawing is one of the most underdeveloped aspects of crisis management. In addition to cognitive and institutional barriers to learning, lesson drawing is constrained by the role of these lessons in determining the impact that crises have on a society.
Crises become part of collective memory, a source of historical analogies for future leaders. The depiction of a crisis as a product of prevention and foresight failures would force people to rethink the assumptions on which preexisting policies and rule systems rested. Other stakeholders might seize upon the lessons to advocate measures and policy reforms that incumbent leaders reject. Thus, leaders have a big stake in steering the lesson-drawing process in the political and bureaucratic arenas. The crucial challenge here is to influence the feedback stream that crises generate into preexisting policy networks and public organizations.