Adaptive Abilities More Important Than Detailed Contingency Plans
The May issue of Harvard Business Review has a special report containing thirteen articles about Preparing for a Pandemic that focus on different areas such as the science behind H5N1, the role of leaders, the importance of communication, and modeling, among others.
However, the article on organizations, Survival of the Adaptive by Nitin Nohria, the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, is particularly enlightening for PR and and other related professionals counseling clients on crisis management. Nohria writes:
"In the complex and uncertain environment of a sustained, evolving crisis, the most robust organizations will not be those that simply have plans in place but those that have continuous sensing and response capabilities…
We know from complexity theory that following a few basic crisis-response principles is more effective than having a detailed a priori plan in place….
The goal is not to create specific rules for responding to specific threats but to practice new ways of problem solving in an unpredictable and fast-changing environment."
Nohria recommends that organizations have a global network of people in place that can help out as needed if internal communications systems break down, or as either human or physical resources are compromised.
He also compares the characteristics of organizations that will be less, and those that will be more, successful in surviving an outbreak:
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Hierarchical vs. networked
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Centralized leadership vs. distributed leadership
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Tightly coupled (greater interdependence among parts) vs. loosely coupled (less interdependence)
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Concentrated workforce vs. dispersed workforce
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Specialists vs. cross-trained generalists
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Policy and procedure driven vs. guided by simple yet flexible rules
(Photo source is Max xx)
Thing is, the Panickers always seem to survive in a disaster by running over the calm and collected on their way out of the exit.
;-p
Big difference between anticipating major world-changing events before they happen and reacting instantly to an accident/disaster.
For the impending doomsday scenario scare, we can also look to the recent turn of the century and the Y2K ’panic‘ that happened over something that, well, never happened.
Which leads to the other kind: responding to disaster that happens out of the blue, (9/11, Katrina, Tsunami, etc.) and the emergence of true leaders – as well as failures.
Good points, but there is much that we *can* do right if this strikes.
As long as you don’t start sucking the blood and snot out of your ckickens’/roosters’ throaths (like they do in SE Asia for their rooster fights - excuse my not so tasty choice of words here, but that’s reality for’ya), I am pretty sure no major outbreaks will occur (that is, at least, one of the most recent theories as to why the disease started out mostly in that part of the world).
Serge,
What a thing to read on a weekend morning! Is this true?
I work for a health organization, and makethelogobigger’s comparison to Y2K preparations is an apt one.
There are a lot of folks who point to Y2K as a costly excercise in scare-mongering perpetrated by tech consultants. Yet if you look at a lot of the work on business continuity planning and emergency preparedness that has taken place since then, you’ll find that a lot of the Y2K plans served as a good starting point for developing and testing responses to other risks.
Even if a pandemic doesn’t happen in the next 20 years, a lot of the preparations being done now can be useful for other health or non-health emergencies.
Thanks for pointing to the report, Andrea.
Thanks for your thoughts, Eric, especially from someone coming from the healthcare side. Like you, I also feel that the preparations we make will, if not now, be useful in some form down the line and aren’t simply futile exercises.