About Us
When we look at the complex world around us, it is clear that everything is interconnected. From ecological systems to human societies, everything functions as a single entity, consisting of interdependent systems. Systems are everywhere. Think of departments within an organization and organizations themselves. Modules of a software system and software systems themselves. If you start paying attention, almost everything we see and use is made up of interconnected systems, which in turn consist of interconnected systems, ad infinitum.
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Since systems are everywhere, this also applies to crisis management. In this light, crisis management could be defined as managing the situation that arises when the continuity of a system is at risk. For example, the continuity of production in an organization due to inventory issues.
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An inventory problem can arise due to errors made in determining the available inventory quantity, or because a supplier fails to meet agreements regarding the delivery of new inventory. A robust system is one that can maintain certain crucial properties regardless of changes in the system’s internal elements or environment. Not every system needs to be robust, but a certain degree of robustness is crucial for critical components.
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The extent to which production can continue or be quickly restarted depends heavily on the dependencies within the system. Strong dependencies between components can make a system vulnerable.
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In the world of software design , the concept of “loose coupling” is used . The goal here is to ensure that the components of a system are as independent of one another as possible, so that changes or errors in one component have as little impact as possible on another. To ensure effective collaboration, it is crucial to clearly define what assumptions the components are permitted to make. A major added benefit is that an alternative solution is easy to implement, provided the definition is met.
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The downside of “loose coupling” and most other measures that contribute to a system’s robustness is that they make the system less efficient. Consider, for example, Just-In-Time inventory management. Minimal inventory reduces storage issues, but also makes the system more vulnerable to supply problems. In general, it can be said that greater robustness leads to greater complexity within the system.
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When designing a system or as a system evolves organically, it is therefore essential to continuously strike a balance between efficiency and robustness. Insufficient attention to robustness makes the system vulnerable. Insufficient attention to efficiency makes the system unusable.
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In times of crisis, interdependencies within a system often become starkly apparent. A crisis can lead to disruptions in various parts of a system and can quickly spread to other elements. Understanding these dependencies is crucial for crisis management, as it helps identify vulnerabilities, assess the impact of changes, and take effective measures to address issues. This applies to both the cold, preparatory phase and the hot, acute phase.
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It’s worth analyzing the dependencies of critical systems in your organization and applying risk management to them. This can even go as far as it does at Netflix. Netflix has developed “Chaos Monkey,” a piece of software that shuts down a random server in production during normal operations. The image of a monkey running around a data center pulling on cables will likely stay with me for a while. The existence of this Chaos Monkey and the disruptions it causes forces Netflix’s engineers to think about the dependencies within the system and implement robustness. The motto here is one often heard in crisis management: “What you rarely do, you rarely do well.”
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It might be a bit extreme to disrupt a random process within your organization every day, but if it doesn’t bring the organization down, I’d go so far as to say that it will make it a lot more resilient in the long run!
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