Good Crisis Management or Good Luck? You Can Measure the Difference.
Organizations that have survived crises tend to treat that as evidence of competence. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is chance. Knowing the difference is the starting point for systematic improvement.
The Missing Reference Point
A question has stayed with me for more than ten years of crisis management work: when is crisis management actually good?
Initially I focused on the organization of crisis management: structures, processes, roles. One dimension, but only one. Like Plato’s cave allegory: I was treating shadows as the world.
The deeper problem is the absence of a reference point. Very few organizations have a clear picture of what good crisis management actually looks like during a crisis. Surviving a crisis is an achievement — or it is luck. Most of the time, no one is certain afterward which it was.
What Can Be Measured
Over recent months, I worked on the question of how to differentiate between crisis management performance and crisis management fortune.
In an exercise, this was tested concretely for the first time. In the end, it was not sophisticated instruments — it was paper lists and the systematic coding and counting of events and outcomes.
The result: I was able to show a client, using two percentages, that their team had not gotten ahead of the situation but had been chasing it. Two numbers. No more.
That is a limited instrument. But it was something that had not existed before: a measurable picture of actual crisis management quality in a realistic situation.
What Follows
The instrument currently has limited applicability to real crises. With adequate documentation, that could change.
If a data base eventually exists, it would become possible to compare: was the crisis response a performance — or did the team simply feel that it was?
The Dunning-Kruger problem is particularly pronounced in crisis management. Those who have never been in a real crisis and never exercised systematically often rate their own competence the highest. That is not bad intention. It is the absence of a reference standard.
Crisis management quality can be measured. We should start.
Quotable
“Surviving a crisis is an achievement — or it is luck. Most of the time, no one is certain afterward which it was.”
“Very few organizations have a clear reference picture of what good crisis management looks like during a crisis.”
“Crisis management quality can be measured. We should start.”
→ P-DRIVEN: experimental evidence: Intelligence Briefs → Crisis exercises as diagnostic instruments: Services