Crisis is charaterized by its suddenty, its unpredictability and the gravity of its possible consequences. It forces organization to react quickly in order to protect itself as well at its components and agents.

That implies many things. Decide on the way to react, which suppose to have reliable and exhaustive information. Then manage to deliver orders, which means to be sure everybody will be able to receive an accurate top down information flow. And, as we can expect either the ascending or descending flow won’t work, making it impossible to make the right decisions or to enforce them, cross flows are needed in order to help people to coordinate themselves on their own.

All of that is about twho phenomenons I wrote about earlier : the fact a networked organization is less fragile than a centralized one (read here for the Toyota and al Qaida cases) and the need for an increased visibility on everyone’s activities and informations in order everyone can adapt its own strategy to the other’s without any central coordination.

I’m sure than everybody, by observation or experience,  has the remembering of a crisis situation where no one knew what to to, everybody lacked informations about what what was happening and this lack prevented people from making the right decisions, either at the top or at the bottom of the organization.

By the way…do you know Gustav?

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