On one level, a structural analysis of an organization seeks to identify and define its operational components. In the initial analysis, reviews of the organization’s make-up identify and describe organizational components. At a deeper level, this type of analysis can look beyond apparent or obvious features to reveal aspects of the organization’s very leadership, the thinking behind structure and operations.
To illustrate, assume that the crisis, catastrophe, and disaster each has a “concentration” point, a central element that serves as an identifier for the event state AND its intensity. This point defines the crisis, catastrophe, or disaster. The researcher, investigator, and problem solver will find it also is a point of departure for efforts to describe, classify, or characterize the phenomenon for those expected to facilitate management efforts. Efforts here do not stop with mere classification or labeling activities, however. Those providing descriptions or characterizations also suggest or recommend possible action plans to deal with the phenomenon at hand.
The organizational models offered in the book facilitate their use as planning, organizing, and evaluation tools. They allow for comparisons and speculation regarding how the organization will function over time and when experiencing different conditions and scenarios. Finally, these models provide immediate benefit to on-going research efforts. By providing a baseline they contribute to our understanding of what an organization is experiencing and how those experiences compare with other organizations within and outside of the social network or industry as a whole. This is an important point, especially when viewed in terms of an organization’s social network. The emergence and effects of a crisis, catastrophe, or disaster are not limited to a particular organization in a network. Each network member and indeed the network as an entity are affected.
Researchers have lot of tools at their disposal to examine phenomena like crises, catastrophes, and disasters. This chapter explores the ways the use of the tools can also become a problem for both the practitioner and the client. The restricting or limiting use of some tools prevents their use for much beyond surface-level descriptions. A good description of a phenomenon is a valuable objective but containing an event requires tools that contribute to planning, decision-making, and problem solving throughout the change process launched. Tools, like those described in this book, provide a gateway to understanding the causes or consequences of a crisis and the means to forecast, predict, or speculate on the ways a particular phenomenon may affect an organization’s social network and the stakeholders defining that network. This broader, more inclusive application of the tools described helps illustrate the truly dynamic ways a crisis, catastrophe, and disaster permeate the ecological make-up a social network and its membership.
Unless it is a personal matter or a defined part of your job or role in life, most of the people reading this book will have little, if anything to do with actual, hands-on crisis containment. That is not because they are involved in or contribute to the process; it is just that “ownership” of a crisis or its containment often requires particular skills, competencies, or experience that most people do not have. Doctors perform triage, the police may disarm a criminal, and the plumber fixes the leak under your sink. These people manage adverse states and events to avoid the emergence of a crisis or to treat one should it arise.
As Table 1.1 illustrates, activities that allow us to give and receive advice are associated with our roles and responsibilities. We gather data, do research, and collaborate with others so that we can offer advice, make suggestions, and participate in planning sessions, decision-making or similar activities. In short, we work inside an organization much as consultants might. We can suggest and advise but we typically are not in a position to make the decisions that will lead to crisis containment. This is not to say that the work we do is not important; in fact, it may be a critical part of the overall effort and that is why the material in this book is important.
Table 1.1
Guidelines and tools for the researcher, investigator, and problem solver
What we believe is needed to know for successful event containment efforts | How this book will help you understand successful event containment performance |
|---|---|
1. Organization types: Why there’s no “silver bullet” or meaningful “quick fix” | The typology of organization contains four types of organizations. They are a diverse mix; performance expectations define principle commonalities |
2. Event types and containment demands | A spectrum of events. Everything starts with an event. Successful management is the objective. Failure can lead to disaster |
3. Evident and revealed risk levels | Threats, vulnerabilities, and challenges are part of an organization’s on-going life cycle. Their scope and scale increase dramatically as an event morphs into a crisis stream, or worse, a phenom-stream |
4. Social networks: Now and emerging | Naturally occurring networks are neat and efficient. Network stakeholder swarms contaminate the network, lead to defections, and stimulate rebellions |
5. Relationship between event, crisis, catastrophe, and disaster: Properties and peculiarities of each | Wave theory helps explain what happens, morphing is a way to explain how change happens, energy and the scope and scale of damage are ways to document effects |
6. Designing and matching interventions to the phenomena at hand | Epidemiology SIR models: Addressing what we know and what we learn regarding who is susceptible, who is “infected,” and who is recovering |
7. Calculating damage, harm, injury to people, processes, material, equipment, the organization’s culture, and brand from action or inaction | Immunity is a pipe dream, affiliation, and treatment across organizations and stakeholders is a potential form of bias |
8. Values, competencies, and influence | Leadership and advisory support must demonstrate organization and socially acceptable values, needed competencies, and the capacity to be influential |
9. Effects and consequences | Events, crises, catastrophes, and disasters result in products, outcomes, and impacts that never end; it is a form of outcome bias |
In this book we examine the issues, activities, and “things” that are associated and needed for the treatment of events, crises, catastrophes, and disasters. A key premise in the book is that crises, catastrophes, or disasters in organizations do not just “happen”; these phenomena do not just occur. Rather, we will explore the ways in which mismanagement or miscalculations associated with an adverse state or evident event trigger the “morphing” of an event into a crisis.
As important, in addition to examining the emergence and subsequent treatment of a crisis are concerns for two other phenomena: catastrophes and disasters. This is an important addition for a book with an emphasis on a crisis’ impact on organizations. Typically, when the words “catastrophe” and “disaster” are used, they tend to be associated with natural disasters and some large, typically government organization charged with handling the conditions associated with them. So the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) will be involved with an airplane crash. The Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) can lead in addressing circumstances related to national catastrophes like hurricanes, the Red Cross might provide support across a variety of calamities, and so forth. What makes our treatment different is that we know that the emergence and treatment of a crisis may not mark the end of trouble for an organization or its stakeholders.
Demonstrating how a crisis can morph into a catastrophe and, if not managed, how a catastrophe can morph into a disaster for an organization and its stakeholders is a prominent theme in the following chapters. The media are filled with examples so we’ll draw on those to illustrate the nature and characteristics of these but will take those discussions on further by examining how and why this “morphing process” can occur. These are important discussions for our readers because just imagine how your advice, opinions, thoughts, and recommendations might change when you are being asked about a crisis versus a catastrophe or a disaster. What new information will you need? Conversely, in what ways will you have to revise or enhance the information you have as you watch this morphing occur?
Keep in mind, too, that we also want to understand the effects on stakeholders during this evolutionary process. How are the stakeholder needs, wants, and desires that they had when the crisis emerged affected as the crisis morphs into a disaster? What responses do you need to prepare? What new communications need to be developed? What new information or knowledge do you need and who and how are what is offered or used to manage conditions around these phenomena being evaluated, if at all?
Our initial interests focus on how crisis, catastrophe, and disaster phenomena emerge from particular events. How and why, for example, a simple event such as an infidelity, an attempted robbery, a routine traffic stop, or a misspoken word can trigger the emergence of a crisis is of particular interest for two reasons. First, mismanaged events serve as triggers for the emergence of a crisis. The event is that point where a “random” traffic stop (the event) changes if a black driver is roughly treated, or worse, killed. Now investigations, demonstrations, protests, calls for action signal the emergence of a “management catastrophe” for the police or local politicians. Then, as tensions rise and charges are leveled, as demonstrations become violent, and property is damaged or more lives are lost, in what ways is the catastrophe not becoming a disaster? In other words, mismanagement of an event can trigger a crisis-stream if activity localizes at that level or a phenom-stream if a mismanaged crisis triggers a catastrophe and a subsequent mismanaged catastrophe a disaster.
Events are a central focus for another important reason; they are every part of everyone’s life. Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s book, What is an Event, neatly captures this point.
Events “are literally unremarkable. In fact,” she writes, “we must move through our days and spaces more or less automatically, or else find ourselves either tripping over our feet and our categories or paralyzed by uncertainty. We need what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the ‘motor habit’ of perceptual habituality. While the forces generating this habitual state of inattention, or thoughtlessness, might be variably understood by social commentators as benign or oppressive, affording or hegemonic (and accordingly configured as habit or habitus), I would argue that this state is the necessary precondition for events. The reason: it’s a crucial aspect of event that they seem to erupt ‘out of nowhere.’”1
We are not promoting the idea that there is a direct, linear relationship from a mismanaged event to a disaster but, at the same time, we are not ruling out that the way disasters emerge is traceable to or rooted in things that happened early in the treatment of an event. Take this progressive idea out yourself and apply it to the demonstrations occurring in Ho...