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1 Introduction
The purpose of this study is to describe and interpret the organizational complexity and dynamics in two cases of crisis and emergency operations with a particular view towards how strategies and leadership emerge in situations that are out of the ordinary. The study has sprung from two basic questions: Why did the police react slower than expected to a national terror emergency? Why did the military react faster than expected to an international political crisis?
Although these questions have motivated a comparison of two very different situations of crisis and emergency, the starting point for both cases, and for the organizations involved, was that the events were extraordinary and dramatic, and outside any scenario most people had imagined or for which the organizations had prepared. Clearly, there had to be many differences as well as similarities in the details of the organizational responses, but on the surface, the issue of time stands out as a profound difference between them. This issue also turned out to be the most important differentiator in the public response. Generally speaking, the military effort was hailed as impressive and heroic, and a sign of a high degree of professionalism, while the police effort was subjected to a public inquiry, during which it was condemned as having failed to protect the public against terrorism. In the wake of this public purging, a politically motivated reform emerged to reorganize the entire Norwegian police (Johannessen, 2015). However, no research in the aftermath of the events has attempted to explore the above questions with the aim of understanding the organizational complexity underlying the response times in the two cases.
In this study, the seemingly simple questions of time have necessitated an in-depth examination of the details of the events in order to bring to the forefront the dynamics of organizational breakdown and the simultaneous transformation of formal hierarchical organization into informal network organization during crisis and emergency. In the highly volatile contexts of the events, the meaning of strategy and leadership also transformed, from static formalities of hierarchical levels to a dynamic interaction in which communication, power, identity, and ethics drove, defined, and, above all, differentiated group and organizational practices between different hierarchies, and at the different formal levels of hierarchies.
Although often experienced, the collapse of hierarchical organization and the spontaneous emergence of network organizing in crisis and emergency operations is poorly understood. This raises the general question: why, in the heat of the moment, do some organizations that are responding to crises immediately manage to redefine any pretext they have of authority, organization, and coordination (i.e. strategies and leadership), while others do not? This is a challenge for organizational actors and leaders involved in crisis and emergency operations, but also one for organizational research. The present study aspires to contribute in the search for more knowledge to answer this question.
The study is shaped within a broad field of organizational process research, and in particular, it explores dynamical phenomena of organization and leadership from a complexity theoretical understanding of organizations. As this approach deals specifically with interactions, dynamics, unpredictability, self-organizing structuring of order, and sudden structural breakdown, it seems to be well suited for studies of crisis and emergency operations.
Crisis and Emergency Operations
Research on organizational issues in crisis management and crisis response has been conducted in response to a variety of events throughout history (Rosenthal, Boin & Comfort, 2001; Helslott et al., 2012), from the Mann Gulch fire in 1949, an event that was geographically and historically remote from public scrutiny and academic analysis until light was shed on it much later (Maclean, 1992; Weick, 1993), to more recent spectacular and hugely public events that have undergone intense scrutiny and academic analysis with wide consequences, such as the 1986 space shuttle Challenger accident (Rogers, 1986), the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004; Pfeifer, 2007), the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the USA (Schneider, 2005; Farazmand, 2009; Boin et al., 2010), and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami followed by a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan (The National Diet of Japan, 2012; Kadota, Varnam & Tokuhiro, 2014; Casto, 2014). These events are not characterized primarily by the scale of their destruction and number of deaths â the death toll range from the seven astronauts on Challenger to an estimated 15,000 people in Japan â but rather all events were national traumas that caused a nationwide collective, organizational, institutional, and political state of shock.
This was also the case for one of the studies in this book, the terrorist attacks in Oslo and on Utøya in 2011. For Norway, they fall into the same stream of dramatic national emergency and trauma as the above-mentioned events were for their respective countries.
The second case study falls into a different category, that of international military operations. However, this operation too was a response to a national trauma in Libya, where a brutal civil war was breaking out in the early days of the âArab Springâ uprisings in North Africa in 2011. The case shows the organizational mobilizing response of the Royal Norwegian Air Force as a small part of a much larger and massive rally of mainly NATO military forces in the Mediterranean. The military forces were sent to Libya in response to a UN Security Council resolution to protect civilians from being massacred by Muammar Gaddafiâs forces as part of the crackdown on the rebel forces.
In both cases, and as for other national trauma events, organizational and decision-making processes were later subjected to public inquiries (NOU, 2012; House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, 2016a, 2016b). However, to date, there has not been any systematic research into the issues of the dynamics of strategies, leadership, and organizational complexity in the events, or any attempts to draw specific and general knowledge from comparisons between the two events, hence the purpose of this book.
In contrast to routine emergencies such as those handled by fire departments, hospitals, and police on a daily basis, crises are associated with serious threats to society, life, health, and property, which demand urgent responses in uncertain contexts (Boin et al., 2005). Clearly, there are a great variety of issues and research problems coming out of the immense complexity of large dramatic events, including the responses from a variety of professional organizations. There are issues before and after a crisis, such as public management, policies, strategies, systems, and practices for operational training and preparations, as well as issues to do with inquiries, politics, reforms, learning, and organizational change. During a crisis there will be problems related to leadership and decision-making, crisis communication, and phenomena related to stress and performance in very dangerous situations for the responding individuals, groups, and organizations. Additionally, there are various differentiations, definitions, concepts, and theories, which can be used to approach such a multitude of issues and problems.
Following an extensive literature review, Casto (2014) distinguishes extreme events, extreme contexts, and routine crises. In line with Hannah et al. (2009) he suggests that extreme events must be separated from routine crises since they are of an intolerable magnitude to the organization in contrast to just being a threat to organizational goals. Furthermore, extreme events are distinguished from routine crises by the ambiguity of cause and effect and the means of resolution in combination with low probability. In this sense, the terrorist attacks on 22 July 2011 in Norway clearly were extreme events for the police. However, whether the call for immediate action from the Air Force to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya together with allies was an extreme event for the Air Force is open for discussion.
Moreover, extreme events have a non-characteristic preparation time in the sense that organizations involved in the events are not fully prepared. They may have long preparation time, but will be unprepared for the specific event. This was the situation in the 22 July case. As far as the Norwegian military was concerned, they had long prepared for similar events as the Libya situation, but not specifically for Libya. The crisis ended up being handled both as routine and as a response to an extreme event, the latter specifically concerning the initial attacks on civilians in Benghazi by Gaddafiâs forces. The Libya event, therefore, does not fall neatly into one category but raises interesting questions about emergent strategic response, which are investigated more closely in the case study.
Extreme events can combine with other events or follow closely after one another to form an extreme context of high complexity. One example is the March 2011 context in Japan, in which there was a domino effect of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown at Fukushima, subsequently followed by additional social disaster for thousands of people (Casto, 2014). Other examples of extreme contexts are Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, not forgetting the vast extreme context and total collapse of societies and states catalyzed partly by the Western military response to the 9/11 attacks, in the region of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
The terrorist bomb in Oslo in 2011 was in itself an extreme event, but when it was followed a couple of hours later by a mass shooting 38 kilometres from Oslo, the situation turned into an extreme context, primarily for the police, but also for other emergency responders. Despite the serious nature of the bombing of government buildings, the massacre of young people by shooting arguably transformed the event into the combination of an extreme context and a national trauma. The military mobilization from a coalition of members and non-members of NATO to enforce a UN decision that sanctioned military action on a member country that was rapidly decaying into civil war was clearly a response to intervene in an extreme context and potentially deal with it. In this sense, both operations analyzed in the case studies share the characteristics of being organizational responses to national traumatic events in extreme contexts.
Nevertheless, I emphasize that the two cases are separated by a time dimension and, for some actors, a great difference in the degree of danger. In order to shed light on this distinction, I have chosen to use the terms crisis and emergency, and not extreme events and extreme contexts. Both cases in the book clearly fall into the category of crisis, but an ongoing terrorist attack is an emergency demanding an extremely quick police response.
Although the situation was explosive and the demand for military intervention came sooner than most had expected, the Libya situation emerged over several days, then weeks and ultimately months compared with the minutes to three hours in the police operation on 22 July. The Libya situation was an international political crisis, during which politicians called for swift international military action, but unlike the terrorist attacks in Norway, it was not an emergency. However, I will return to the question of whether the politicians and military confused the crisis with an emergency by overreacting as if the military was a sort of international police force.
Boin et al. (2005) suggest that crisis studies can be separated into those looking at the level of strategic leadership and those researching the operational level of the people directly involved in the crisis. This book crosses these and other abstract levels of organization, and demonstrates what happens when organizations are seen as dynamical interactions and emerging organizational practices performed by people during crises and emergencies.
Theoretical Approach
The theory base of this study is drawn from general complexity theories in organizational studies (Johannessen & Kuhn, 2012). For the purpose of generating a more precise contextualized theorizing on crisis and emergency operations, the view of complexity is energized with a number of theoretical insights integrated into the discussions and referred to throughout the book, some of which concern ideas of organizations as communication and authority (Taylor & Van Every, 2014); power, ideology and group identity (Dalal, 1998); and group dynamics and behaviour in circumstances of high organizational stress (Weick, 2001). Among the ideas I have found particularly helpful within organizational complexity theory are those of Stacey (2010) and his sources in social theory, namely George Herbert Mead (1934) and Norbert Elias (1939; 1991).
Based on these sources of inspiration, I have developed a complexity theoretical framework for studying organizational practices during crises and emergencies. I propose that organizations responding to crisis and emergencies consist of a number of conflicting organizational practices that are differentiated by the practitionersâ understanding of communication, power, identity, and ethics. The different practices are defined by acts of inclusion and exclusion, and the insider-outsider dynamics constructed by them. Most importantly, the interactions between operational, bureaucratic, and political practitioners before, during, and after a crisis are crucially important for how strategy, leadership, and organization are understood and performed as practice by different organizational practitioners.
One central idea of this book is to explore how the multiple meanings of strategy and leadership anchored in the different organizational practices deeply influence how organizations respond to crisis and emergencies. A key problem is that of coordination in unpredictable and dynamic contexts. To uphold standardized procedures and decision-making at the same time as creative improvisation emerges from many actors who lack certainty and relevant information in local situations inevitably means that coordination and collaboration across local contexts becomes a great challenge. As a theory problem, this is at the core of what complexity theorists have been exploring for many years, particularly in the form of computer model simulations of complex adaptive systems (i.e. networks of small units (agents) that interact on the basis of local information or rules) (Kauffmann, 1993; Holland, 1998; Allen, 1998).
In simulations of complex adaptive systems, the interactions tend to form widespread and changing organized patterns without following overall instructions for how the patterns should be organized. To name the systems complex means that they are unpredictable, non-linear, self-organizing, and emergent, while being adaptive means that the different agents constrain and adapt their behaviour in relation to other agents. Such computer simulations have provided important theoretical insights into the dynamic behaviour of groups of agents that operate without any central control and with only very simple and local information. By the help of these insights researchers have studied how less advanced living creatures can produce advanced organized patterns, such as ant colonies, schools of fish, and flocks of birds. The results have become part of a wider new paradigm of thought about the complex dynamics of nature, life, and society (see Prigogine & Stengers (1984); Prigogine (1997); and Mainzer (1997) for thorough examinations of the scientific and philosophical foundations, and the implications of complexity thinking).
Since the 1990s, a number of organizational researchers have explored human organizing in terms of complex adaptive systems (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998; Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey, 2007). However, many of their assumptions overlook important differences in reality between the models, organization in nature, and human organization. Clearly, the organized patterns of behavi...
