Crisis management deals with unexpected, surprising and very dynamic situations that need to be met with in limited time and with little margin for error. Often crisis management is confused with the need for anticipation, planning, formal structures and "executive choice". But these situations are often more effectively met by a strategy of resilience, decentralised responses, the use of informal networks and dynamic risks assessments.
Crisis management is about those events that somehow escaped all our efforts to preclude errors. Nowadays organisations work in increasingly complex environments that can quickly lose faith in products and services of the organisation when incidents occur. Managing the unexpected is vital.
At the same time organisations are drifting into more unreliable environments and longer value chains that extent to all corners of the globe. Sustaining a steady flow of high quality resources, reliable and trusted primary processes and accepted outputs is becoming harder. Some say crisis- and incident management is now the new normal: 24/7 alertness and high tempo decision-making in crisis mode when a surprise occurs while managing the consquences in highly fragmented networks.