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The crisis team must guide the organization and keep the crisis under control. In an ideal situation, the crisis team has a clear picture of the current situation, bottlenecks, decisions, and pending and completed actions. This gives the team the flexibility to think in terms of scenarios: worst-case and best-case scenarios, tomorrow, next week, and next month. A crisis team is then truly in control.
But real-world experience shows that things often turn out differently. This is also evident from the conversations I have every day with crisis managers from all kinds of sectors and from what I’ve observed in dozens of crisis drills. Many crisis teams end up in chaos or perform below their potential. These teams have an incomplete picture of the situation and don’t know what’s happening in the various departments. As a result, they have to search for information, which is a time-consuming process. And frustrating, because the crisis is constantly evolving. Consequently, the team doesn’t get around to scenario planning and therefore doesn’t get “in control.”
And that’s a shame! Because it doesn’t take much to make significant improvements and get those fundamentals in order. The greatest gains can be achieved by setting up your information management system properly.
First and foremost, you need to ensure that the crisis team’s own information process is in order. Make sure that crisis meetings are digitally logged and that the log aligns with the team’s decision-making model. Above all, record decisions and actions and make them as specific as possible. Display the log on a large screen for the crisis team to see. The team can then use the log as a collective memory. All team members will have the same picture. This helps enormously with decision-making.
But the crisis team must also have access to the right information in order to make sound decisions. In practice, I see that a lot of phone calls are made. This is very impractical, because crisis team members are unavailable when they are in a meeting. Moreover, one-on-one communication is very inefficient.
To take the next step in your information management, you need to ensure that you have set up a system that allows departments to share information with the crisis team. First, you need to ask yourself: Who needs what information, and when? And who provides that information? Often, organizations already have the answer in their crisis or continuity plan. Then, you just need to translate this into questionnaires that departments can fill out and send to the crisis team.
In crisis management, we call these situation reports or sitraps. Isn’t it in the crisis plan? No problem! When I ask a crisis team member during a crisis or exercise what information they need from their department, I always get a concrete and clear answer. Those people know exactly what they need. Write that down, turn it into a form, and you’re all set! Now all you need to do is add it to your information management system.
A good information management system is therefore essential for a professional crisis response organization. But don’t get me wrong: it’s not the systems that manage the crisis. It’s people who make the difference: crisis team members, crisis coordinators, team leaders, and staff. Why is that? People can think creatively and work together to solve complex problems. Things only go wrong when people try to do the work of systems. You can’t afford to do that when the continuity of your organization is at stake. Don’t fall into that trap, because you’ll miss information and consequently make mistakes.
Systems are actually good at storing, filtering, searching, sharing, and making information accessible. And if you document plans, protocols, and contact persons in systems and ensure that crisis information is recorded and made accessible in a central location, then people can focus on what they do best: being creative, thinking through scenarios, and collaborating. This allows them to arrive at a good solution to the crisis more quickly and limit the damage. And that is what it ultimately comes down to.
