Imagining an Education in Crisis Management

The call for papers for this special issue posed some far-reaching questions about teaching crisis management (Comer, 2010). Each article in this volume addresses one or more of these questions of interest. Having spent more than 50 years studying and teaching crises, we thought we would try to answer all the questions in one place. This turned out to be a challenging and humbling exercise. It forced us to stretch our thinking about key crisis management concepts and practices and to reconsider some of the answers that the field has taken for granted. We do not intend for our responses to serve as a comprehensive synthesis of research on key topics; instead, we offer them as personal observations that might help educators to understand what and how they teach their students about crises and crisis management.

Understanding crises and developing crisis management skills have never been more important. We are living in a crisis society, in which all our major systems seem engulfed in crises. We live in the eye of a “perfect storm” of the global climate crisis, the global financial crisis, and the global poverty crisis, all of which interact with one another and various local crises to worsen their effects on all stakeholders. Students need to learn to think about crises in rational–analytical ways, develop and cope with emotional and intuitive feelings about crises, and resolve crisis conflicts morally and aesthetically (Shrivastava & Statler, 2012).

Crisis Management Education is poised at an interesting juncture. When taught within business schools it is part of a curriculum that focuses largely on financial and productivity concerns. Crisis, if addressed at all, is framed as an afterthought, as a remote possibility that one hopes will never happen to companies. This marginalization, if not denial, of the crisis phenomenon makes it difficult to include sufficient crisis-related content to shape students’ thinking. So, the challenges facing crisis management teacher-scholars are not just what they teach and how they teach it, but also the institutional culture in which they teach. The Editor’s questions appear below, followed by our answers. We hope that our comments will provoke dialogue among teacher-scholars and help us to engage our students with crisis issues in more meaningful ways.

The belief that there is a single or universal definition of crisis or crisis management is misguided. There are many definitions of crises and crisis management, varying by discipline, stakeholders, type of crisis, location and social context, and other factors. Nonetheless, definitions are important. They delineate the phenomenon and offer a certain repertoire of crisis management solutions. It matters whether a crisis is defined as a “natural” one or as a “technological” one. Natural disasters are considered unavoidable and randomly occurring with no one to blame. Technological crises, on the other hand, have agents and organizations responsible for causing them. Even more to the point, Bob Bea of the University of California at Berkeley argues persuasively that there are no natural disasters, that all disasters are caused by humans. Bea distinguishes between natural hazards and disasters. Hazards are features of our natural environment that pose risk to life and property. They are part of geological, meteorological, biological systems on earth. Humans do not cause natural hazards, but we do cause disasters through our organizational decisions, social choices, our investments and technologies. Our language and concepts about crises, as well as our explanations of their causes and consequences, shape our crisis planning and the ultimate resilience of human communities. Humans, not nature, make the decision as to what kinds of buildings to build in earthquake zones. Our definitions and concepts matter.

We consider crisis management as including several key elements: an analysis of causes, an understanding of consequences, crisis prevention strategies, and an adjustment to the point of normalization. Definitions of crisis that emphasize process aspects can teach students what to do at each part of the process. One expansive definition views crises not as events but as processes that unfold and spread over time, space, and impacts (e.g., Shrivastava, Mitroff, Miller, & Miglani, 1988; Turner & Pidgeon, 1997). The process begins with preconditions and hidden pathogens that cause low-impact failures. The next stage of the process is a crisis-triggering event that unleashes major damages. It is followed by rescue and emergency management. After the initial, hot phase of a crisis is over, the process may include slow expansion of the impacts of the crisis to additional stakeholders. The process continues with rehabilitation and compensation. Most crises also involve a conflict resolution phase that involves allocating blame and settling liability questions. This phase can also include organizational learning, redesign, and restructuring. This eventually leads to normalization. The new normal may involve fundamental restructuring of the entire system, or it may only be superficial. In either case, the system adjusts to the crisis and public, where organizational attention is diverted away from it.

The process view of crises allows students to identify leverage points where preventive and management measures can be most effective. For instance, a process-focused definition of crisis allows students to recognize how and why organizational members (a) put more emphasis on safety after they experience a crisis but after a brief period of safety, begin to trade off safety for efficiency, as they slowly “drift toward failure” (Woods, 2005, p. 289); and (b) discount the importance of an initially small deviation from the norm (such as unexpected o-ring damage after each successful space shuttle flight) and then expand their definitions of what is acceptable risk as subsequent deviations from the norm get larger (Vaughan, 1996). We serve our students well not by focusing on the big bang of a crisis-triggering event, but by opening up their minds to the longitudinal process of crisis evolution.

Scholarship on crises and disasters already has a pragmatic orientation because practitioners are among the main clients of this field. There are many detailed case studies of crises, such as the Presidential Commission reports or other agency reports, which offer suggestions for organizational and policy changes. However, translating these findings into meaningful knowledge for students is not straightforward. Because students typically lack the background for understanding such reports, instructors need to position these documents in their historical, social, cultural, and political contexts. These contexts can be gleaned from books and articles that describe the socioeconomic origins and evolution of crisis-related events. For example, before reading the President’s commission on the Three Mile Island accident, students could be provided summaries of the evolution of nuclear industry, the development of nuclear technologies, the economics of energy production and consumption, among other topics.

Increasingly, we are seeing publications on crisis-related topics, creating subfields in computer disaster recovery, disaster management, business continuity, industrial crises, and crisis communications. Many focus on crisis skill areas in communication, rescue, conflict resolution, negotiation, counseling, and arbitration. Yet training in practical skills is not common in undergraduate or MBA programs and some business educators seem ambivalent about the importance of skills training (Khurana, 2007). So perhaps business programs could focus on developing conceptual skills that would aid in crisis prevention and management. Exercises in brainstorming, improvisation, creative problem solving, and conflict management can improve students’ abilities to deal with crises.

Crisis management lessons can be taken from each of these fields and from other related fields, including risk management, hazard management, communications, and conflict management. In each of these fields, there is a plethora of research findings that we cannot summarize in a short answer.

But beyond these discipline-oriented learnings there is a significant opportunity for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning. Every crisis involves, to a certain degree, many disciplines. In fact, crises are the ultimate interdisciplinary and cross-functional phenomena. Educators must help students gain a holistic appreciation of crises by emphasizing that there is no “basic” discipline that is sufficient to understand and manage the multifaceted complexity and messiness of crises. Students need to see and feel a crisis in its full complexity, to grasp that there are interrelationships among the subcomponents of a crisis and that solving one aspect of the crisis can have unintended and negative impacts on another. An integrated view can lead to more comprehensive strategies for dealing with crises.

Crises are also multistakeholder phenomena. They involve corporations, government agencies, the public, victims, and other actors. Each stakeholder sees the crisis differently. Furthermore, the definitions and redefinitions of a crisis emerge from a stakeholder’s interactions with it. So getting students to understand a crisis from the perspective of different stakeholders can be very valuable in mitigating conflict arising from the crisis.

Just as it is important for students to view crises through transdisciplinary and multistakeholder lenses, they need to consider more than one style or mode of learning. Specifically, we encourage students to go beyond traditional cognitive and intellectual learning to more embodied and experiential learning. Numerous crisis management simulations and drills allow participants to experience elements of crisis decision making and communication (see Wallace & Weber, 2010). Our students have found simulations and drills highly engaging both physically and emotionally. Simulations leave a deep impact on participants and expand their repertory of crisis actions. They also help create a community and build trust among team members, which is vitally important in real crises.

Few undergraduate and MBA programs at universities offer stand-alone courses in crisis management. Yet, given the frequency of organizational crises and the structural financial and climate crises, more stand-alone courses are needed. These courses can be modularized to include relevant management themes and topics. The benefit of such courses is that they can centralize crisis concepts and not treat crisis as some unintended and unlikely side effect. Ideally, we need entire programs devoted to crisis management. But in the current era of budget cutbacks, not many schools can afford to build entire programs, so a single stand-alone course is all that a school may be able to offer.

There are many options to design a course along certain themes, topics, and skill sets, such as courses on “crisis communications,” “disaster management,” “financial crisis management,” or “computer crisis management,” and so on. A stand-alone course can also be done as a survey course that reviews state-of-the-art topics and issues across the field. The field of crisis management has matured to the point that for both of these types of courses there is sufficient high-quality content available. Crisis management educators need to develop students’ skills in three fundamental domains: (a) critical thinking, (b) emotional intelligence, and (c) moral awareness.

With respect to critical thinking, students need to think creatively about crises; expose and challenge underlying, taken-for-granted assumptions; identify all stakeholders, including the marginalized (Hart & Sharma, 2004); integrate as many disciplines and fields as possible; and tackle complex problems.

Because crises are emotionally charged events, high emotional intelligence is necessary to deal with them. Effective management of crises requires high levels of awareness of one’s self, others, and the environment, as well as high levels of tolerance for complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty (Cohn, Carley, Harrald, & Wallace, 2000; Fineman, 2000).

High moral awareness is necessary because crises prompt questions about the legal and ethical responsibilities of corporations and managers to their immediate stakeholders as well as to the larger social system, the natural environment, and even future generations. The social, emotional, and economic costs of crises are enormous and incalculable; thus educators ought to emphasize that being unprepared for crises is irresponsible and unethical (Speth, 2008).

Instructors designing a crisis management course should consider

We see great potential in integrating crisis issues into all functional areas. Like many other integrative topics, such as sustainability, ethics, and corporate social responsibility, the field of crisis management is best incorporated with other related topics. Crises can be triggered by failures in any of the functional areas—production/operations, supply chain, marketing, design, finance/accounting, information technology, and so on. Our students should learn about crises in these various contexts. Crisis management is also synonymous with strategic management. In fact, a business strategy that addresses critical issues in different functional areas but fails to address crisis management is flawed, because, to say the least, organizational survival is nothing but strategic.

In addition, we need to provide overarching frameworks that explain the risk/crisis potential of the entire corporation, and the risk dynamic underlying modern, urban, and industrial societies. Corporations today are simultaneously engines of production and destruction. In the process of creating economic wealth, they consume natural resources and have destructive impacts on the environment. Corporations that use complex, tightly coupled, and hazardous technologies are prone to errors of many kinds (Perrow, 1984), including the Three Mile Island accident. Japan’s nuclear crisis and BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are two more recent examples.

The conflict between production and destruction, hope and despair, and progress and collapse highlights the fact that humanity is walking a tightrope. Nowhere else is this fact more evident than in the context of large-scale crises. In The Day the Earth Stood Still a science fiction film shot in 1951, a messenger from a different planet visits Earth and expresses the concern among other planets’ inhabitants that humanity’s violent nature, fueled by its recently developed and very powerful, but not completely understood nuclear war technologies, threatens the well-being of all civilizations in the universe (Wise, 1951). The messenger also delivers a warning: Earth will be destroyed if humans use their new technologies in space. A similar concern is valid more than 60 years later. We do have the technology to threaten the well-being of the Earth and its residents. (We witnessed this everyday through BP’s Live Feed placed near the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.) Yet we also have the technology to prevent such devastation. The problem appears to be technical, but it is human. Thus, the topic of crisis management (similar to the topics of ethics and aesthetics) must be incorporated into our discussions of strategy, decision making, organizational designs and technologies, and other matters perceived mostly as technical. Ruining an ocean is as immoral and ugly an act as it is an existential one. We should not need a messenger from a different planet to tell us this.

Organizational culture is the set of values and beliefs that guides strategic choices and day-to-day operations (Schein, 2010). It is an organization’s DNA. Crises are novel situations for which there are no ready-made responses. Even companies that have developed some crisis plans cannot be fully prepared for every type of crisis that could afflict them. In crisis conditions it is an organization’s culture, more than any other feature, that shapes its crisis management responses. For instance, when hit by a crisis, does the organization try to maximize shareholder value or does it try to minimize stakeholder losses? Does the organization have a culture of safety and reliability, such as the one Johnson & Johnson nurtured some 30 years ago, or a culture of negligence and recklessness such as that of BP? Despite BP’s espoused culture of safety and care for stakeholders, the culture in practice was negligent of safety and regard for the environment (see Argyris & Schön, 1974). Does an organization accept responsibility for its problems or does it blame others? Is the organization in denial of its problems? Does it constantly suffer from “normalization of deviance” (Vaughan, 1996), ignoring the increasingly more frequent deviations from norms, and moreover, constantly redefining what is unexpected? Does the organization punish or reward messengers of bad news?

Perhaps the best way to help students understand the relationship between an organization’s culture and the way it (mis)manages the crisis it has experienced is to ask them to reflect on how their families have handled or would handle a family crisis. Very quickly, students will get the point that family culture, which is a function of such factors as personalities, children’s birth order, ethnic cultures, and interpersonal dynamics, is as important as technical and professional skills and the collective knowledge of family members.

Balancing the interests of stakeholders is a key to successful crisis management. Crises are characterized by unique stakeholder circumstances. Stakes are high. Liabilities are large and uncertain. Whereas some stakeholders are powerful and manipulative, others may be very weak. Stakeholder conflicts are common. The balancing of interests among diverse and conflicted groups is both intellectually and ethically challenging. Fair and balanced resolution allows for normalization to occur. In contrast, a crisis with an unbalanced resolution can have repercussions that last for decades. For example, the Bhopal accident at the Union Carbide plant occurred in 1984. By 1987, Union Carbide had settled its lawsuit with the Government of India. Yet the crisis lingered because victims did not receive compensation. Eventually, Union Carbide sold all its assets in 1999 to Dow Chemicals and became defunct as a company. In 2010, a decade after the company’s demise, victims of the accident remained uncompensated and continued agitating against the company.

One of the most fruitful methods of protesting students how to balance stakeholder interests is this simple classroom exercise: give students a crisis and ask them to identify as many stakeholders as possible that can affect or are affected by the crisis. Divide the students into groups and have each group take the perspective of a key stakeholder. Stage a role-play, in which each group defines the crisis from the perspective of a different stakeholder. In a variation of the basic exercise, students can discuss their perspective within their homogeneous groups and then regroup so that each new group has one student per stakeholder. Then, have a role-play in each group or ask one group to stage a role-play that the rest of the class watches. The key is to have students identify each stakeholder’s assumptions regarding the crisis and propose a solution to the crisis. Groups representing different stakeholders also negotiate and bargain over various proposed solutions to the crisis. By the end of the exercise, students have a better understanding of the range of stakeholders that a crisis may touch and their differing viewpoints regarding the nature of the crisis. They also appreciate that the process of balancing stakeholder interests is at least as important as its outcome.

Crises are extreme situations. In times of crises, not only is there a lot at stake—including human lives, financial losses, and organizational reputations—but there is always a demand to respond quickly and with limited resources and incomplete or ambiguous information. In such situations, instead of giving the morally, legally, and professionally correct responses, untrained managers often freeze, avoid responsibility, or give impulsive reactions (Darley & Latané, 1968; Staw, Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981; Weick, 1995). The Exxon Valdez Oil spill crisis is an example of how the company involved, its industry and business associates, and government regulatory and safety agencies all reacted in ways that made the situation worse (Baker, 2011). To avoid such dysfunctional behavior, students must learn to expect and deal with the psychological stress created by crises. Because people tend to respond to crises in the same way they have responded to their earlier traumas, educators may advise students who have endured a significant crisis in their lives to seek some kind of psychotherapy. Students who understand how they react to crises may be able to handle future crises more effectively. Students also need to learn to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Role-playing exercises may be helpful in increasing students’ awareness of the range of thoughts and feelings experienced by victimized stakeholders.

“This could not happen to me” is a form of psychological denial that is comforting for people. They adopt this stance to feel protected. It is also an artifact of the probabilistic thinking our mainstream corporate culture encourages. It is true that crises are rare events. Yet even though they have a relatively low probability of occurrence, they do occur. One way to dissuade it-won’t-happen thinking is to view crises not as events, but instead as processes spread over time and space. A part of the unfolding crisis process can implicate anyone—a supplier, a consultant, a business associate, a customer, financial partner, a government agency, or even someone with only a remote relationship to the crisis company that becomes salient during the crisis. So being prepared for crisis confers better protection than denial.

Emphasizing the consequences of crises is more fruitful than emphasizing the probability of crises. Crises are not as rare as most commonly used statistical distributions predict. More important, the incalculable costs and consequences of crises are life changing. The probability of an oil spill in the Bay of Valdez may be only 1 in 241 years, but its repercussions will be felt for an even longer time period, affecting many generations and species. Students must learn that preparing for a crisis is a moral decision that should not be based solely on a cost-benefit analysis.

Crises are inevitably complicated and elicit strong emotional and moral responses from students. Instructors of crisis management should make their course less threatening by catering to students’ different learning styles. Students who are accustomed to finding the “right” solution to a neatly circumscribed problem in their other courses often have difficulty with the ambiguous and uncertain nature of crises and their possible solutions (Mitroff et al., 2004). Instructors must acknowledge and address this issue at the beginning of the course. Although some students will prefer the familiarity of reading papers, creating summaries, and conducting library work, they must be forced to step out of their comfort zone and engage in role-plays, real-time simulations, group discussions, and other open-ended exercises.

We believe that crises are best understood through experiential and embodied learning. That means that a course in crisis management must take students beyond a cognitive understanding of the issues to physical/somatic, emotive, aesthetic, and even spiritual engagement. These sorts of learning experiences can happen by putting students through training drills or simulations, or having them participate in rebuilding after an actual crisis. For example, schools can involve students in projects like crisis-hit areas (such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) or have them volunteer at crisis-engaged organizations (homeless shelters, domestic violence prevention programs, etc.). These settings offer unique experiential learning opportunities for understanding crises.

We like to use visual media, particularly video clips, to prompt our students to think about and feel what those affected by a crisis—including the managers of an organization and the victims of the crisis—go through as the crisis unfolds. We also like to ask our students to apply the concepts, frameworks, and models they learn in class to a crisis they have experienced or may experience personally in the future. Admittedly, these techniques result in emotionally intense responses and unresolved debates. But it is fruitful for students to learn how they react to threatening situations in the relatively controlled environment of a classroom, rather than in the heat of a crisis.

Our Millennial students are growing up in an environment of “crisis society,” where every major system (economic, social, political, and cultural) is facing crisis and undergoing dramatic transformations. For them crisis is the norm, not an exception. So in some ways it is easier for them to understand the occurrence and causes of crises. But this environment of frequent crises also proliferates anxiety among students; after a while, it may also render students, or anyone else for that matter, emotionally numb or apathetic (Shrivastava & Statler, 2012). A video clip of two planes hitting the World Trade Center creates anxiety, but watching the clips repeatedly turns anxiety into apathy. Especially for this population, we need to address the emotional, moral, and psychological aspects of crisis management.

In 2010, a tenure-track biology professor at the University of Alabama fatally shot three faculty colleagues after learning that she had been denied tenure. More recently, a sophomore at the University of Texas fired an assault rifle on campus and then killed himself, and a Rutgers freshman committed suicide after his sexual encounter was broadcast on social networking sites. A steroids scandal that involved nine players forced the University of Waterloo to suspend its football team for a year. College campuses have also been hit by occasional spills of radiation or other hazardous materials. As a result of the ongoing global financial crisis, many institutions of higher education have seen their budgets cut, endowments shrink, and alumni contributions decrease. These institutions increased tuitions, implemented furloughs, laid off instructors, and postponed construction projects (Alpaslan, Mitroff, & Diamond, 2011).

Institutions of higher education, like our corporate counterparts, can be struck by a broad range of crises. Recognizing that we are not immune is a first and necessary step in convincing our institutions to adopt crisis prevention and crisis management measures. Many universities have instituted internal crisis management teams as part of their campus security systems. Although having such a team in place is important, it is not enough. The crisis management team must meet frequently on a regular basis, learn from the crises that occur on other campuses, fully analyze and debrief all significant incidents on its own campus, and undergo training that uses realistic simulations. Additionally, the team must test its crisis management plan and conduct crisis simulations annually, at the least. These simulations must focus on a broad range of crises (i.e., not just natural disasters) and consider all highly unlikely worst-case scenarios (Alpaslan et al., 2011).

Crisis management team members, along with educational administrators, must also take into account the importance and consequences of the current news environment. All organizations, whether business, not-for-profit, or educational, now operate in a world of instant and constant communications dominated by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, 24-hour news, analysis, and the demand for immediate answers. Because the blame game begins almost as soon as a crisis occurs, a well-designed crisis communication plan must be in place so that it can be enacted at once. It is critical that administrators make available a predetermined point person (or persons) to handle all communications (Alpaslan et al., 2011).