Crisis management in the canton of Basel-Stadt: how can critical constraints survive a team handover?

In the canton of Basel-Stadt, the concentration of pharmaceutical and life sciences activities, highly qualified international R&D teams and cross-border connections with Germany and France make some crises particularly demanding in terms of information transfer. The management question is specific: how can an incoming team retain not just the action plan, but also the specialist information on which its validity depends?

What the literature establishes

Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus and Leslie A. DeChurch (2009, Journal of Applied Psychology) identify a positive relationship between information sharing and team performance in a meta-analysis. Their synthesis supports treating knowledge exchange as a component of collective work, rather than merely a documentation task. It does not, however, demonstrate that a longer written briefing improves a crisis handover.

Why shared information can dominate the discussion

Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show experimentally that group discussions can favour information already shared among members over information held by just one person. A summary that attracts agreement can therefore omit something needed for the collective decision. Applied to a handover, this mechanism suggests explicitly checking whether constraints known only to a specialist have been transferred, rather than accepting a coherent account as sufficient.

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that the incoming team must be told everything. That would confuse access to information with the ability to use it: an exhaustive history does not necessarily distinguish what still limits the options from what is no longer relevant. A more measured approach is to separate the current decision, the conditions under which it remains valid and the points still requiring confirmation. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the evidence cannot guarantee

These studies address information sharing and group decision-making, not the effectiveness of a handover protocol in Basel-based companies. They establish neither an optimal handover duration nor a guarantee that accurate restatement will produce a sound decision under pressure. In international R&D, using a common working language does not prove that technical terms have been understood in the same way.

A practical check in Basel

Within SHR’s “Crisis Management” programme, one possible exercise would involve a handover between response groups in a Basel R&D team facing a hypothetical disruption to a Rhine shipment of research materials and an alternative route through Germany or France. The scenario would provide a list of critical constraints, distributed across scientific and logistics functions, and ask the incoming team to restate each constraint, its effect on the options and its confirmation status. The measure would be the proportion of scenario constraints accurately restated and linked to an operational consequence, using an assessment grid prepared before the exercise. A second handover using a structured briefing sheet would allow omissions to be compared, without treating an improvement in this exercise as proof of effectiveness in a real crisis. To go further: explore the Crisis Management training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Crisis Management in Basel

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