Resistance factors in critical incident management

This paper explores resistance and contextual variables which impinge on the successful implementation, adoption and management of critical incidents. Time constraints and uncertainty are two constant and overriding forces within the critical incident framework. These implicit pressures interact within different levels of the culture of the organisation, school or community. Two distinct yet interactive levels are discussed. They are the idiographic or personal domain, and the nomothetic or social system domain. The idiographic dimension includes personality variables as well as the role of the key stakeholders in critical incident management. The nomothetic dimension involves the organisation's social system, which has process variables and linkage mechanisms which need to be understood so that successful critical incident management can be ensured.

Resistance, or refusal to comply, has been a common pervading and often intangible force in schools in relation to the management of critical incidents. My perception of this opposition to the design and implementation of critical incident management plans has been the driving force for me to think about reasons why this is so, to collect research and to write this paper.

On a continuum, resistance and its opposite, acceptance, represent the endpoints of a critical incident management perspective. Opposition or resistance to a new idea, in this case, critical incident management, can be counteracted by guidance, knowledge and involvement. These are the principles of two well known models of problem solving: the Discount Hierarchy used in the NSW Child Protection Program (1988) and the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM, Loucks etal., 1975).