Crisis management: synchronising recovery across organisations
A telecommunications outage can force a public administration, a health service and an industrial company to reorganise their activities simultaneously. The managerial question is specific: how can an organisation avoid restarting a service before an essential condition, handled by another organisation, has been met?
What the literature establishes
Samer Faraj and Yan Xiao (2006, Management Science) studied coordination in a trauma centre, where different areas of expertise must be brought together under intense time pressure. Their analysis distinguishes expertise coordination practices from dialogic practices that enable participants to address situations that exceed expectations collectively. It encourages us to view coordination as an ongoing activity, rather than simply the outcome of allocating work in advance.
The mechanism: making dependencies intelligible
In their integrative review, Gerardo A. Okhuysen and Beth A. Bechky (2009, The Academy of Management Annals) identify three conditions that coordination mechanisms help create: accountability, predictability and common understanding. Applied to operational recovery, this framework prompts questions about who provides a necessary condition, when it will be available and what its availability means for others. A shared schedule is therefore insufficient if organisations interpret the term “restored” differently.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all recovery decisions should be centralised in a single crisis management team. These studies do not establish the general superiority of such an arrangement: a shared understanding of dependencies does not require concentrating all expertise in one place. The task is instead to make the conditions for moving between activities explicit, while leaving technical validation to specialists. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not establish
Faraj and Xiao's study concerns a specialised clinical setting, not a disruption affecting several sectors in Berne. Okhuysen and Bechky's review offers a conceptual synthesis, rather than an estimate of the effect of an interorganisational recovery protocol. These studies justify a particular focus of observation, but do not support promises of faster recovery or a quantified reduction in errors.
A practical check in Berne
As a practical application of SHR's “Crisis Management” programme in Berne, a working case could bring together federal administration, public health, telecommunications and precision industry around a network outage. For each critical handoff between organisations, record the required condition, the organisation responsible for validating it, the receiving organisation and the agreed confirmation deadline. Then measure the proportion of these handoffs for which the recipient confirmed, before that deadline, that the condition delivered actually enables it to proceed with its activity. This rate documents coordination at organisational interfaces; on its own, it does not demonstrate the ability to manage a real crisis. To go further: explore the Crisis Management training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Crisis Management in Bern
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