It is only natural that mistakes will happen in crisis management; after all, conditions during a crisis are stressful, decision-making timelines are compressed, and conditions are abnormal. Some mistakes are small and easily overcome. Others exacerbate the crisis and make de-escalation all the more difficult.
Of all the different kinds of mistakes that happen in crisis management, some occur with greater regularity than others. To succeed as a crisis manager, it is helpful to identify what those common mistakes are and how to overcome them. Ten of the most common are as follows:
1. Not realizing you are in the midst of a crisis.
There are various reasons why people do not recognize they are actually dealing with a crisis. Sometimes it is because political leaders treat everything as a crisis, which desensitizes everyone and makes it hard to discern what is really a crisis or not. Other times it is because there is an expectation that a crisis means something much bigger in scale and effect than it sometimes does in practice.
In reality, crises come in many different forms, but whatever form they take, crisis management methods need to be applied in dealing with them. Neglect may allow an emerging crisis to develop into something worse, and failure to employ proper crisis management techniques could inadvertently escalate situations.
To avoid this mistake, it is important to remember the fundamental characteristics of crisis. Those characteristics should be applied when diagnosing situations and deciding how to respond to them.
2. Assuming that someone else will handle the situation.
When a crisis emerges, a natural reaction for many people is to assume that someone else will handle it. At the individual level, this is known as the “bystander effect,” but it becomes significantly more prevalent at the government level because there are so many other offices or organizations that people can point to and say, “They should be managing this.”
This condition often cripples governments in responding to crises. In the hours and days that follow the precipitating event to a crisis, time passes with inaction as people wait for someone else to take the lead in managing it. When the relevant stakeholders do finally realize that someone needs to be dealing with it, blame games over who dropped the ball typically occur, followed by a power struggle for who will take the lead.
The best way to operate when crisis strikes is to respond until relieved. In other words, do not automatically assume that someone else is taking charge; carry out the necessary crisis management actions until a higher level authority tells you to stop. In most cases, if you are successfully managing the crisis, that authority will simply allow you to carry on. If not, you have at least put the successor organization in a better position to handle the situation.
3. Ignoring or abandoning well-established processes or best practices.
If your organization has done its job right, you will have crisis action plans and procedures in place. There should be trained personnel who are ready to respond as a matter of course rather than as ad hoc reactions.
However, a common mistake that occurs when governments realize they are in the midst of a crisis is that they fail to employ the crisis management personnel, plans, and mechanisms that are in place. Sometimes this comes simply from ignorance that those things already exist. Other times, it comes from external officials who parachute into a crisis scenario because the matter is suddenly of importance and interest. When this happens, it causes best practices to be ignored and effective crisis management mechanisms to go unutilized.
To prevent this mistake from occurring, designated crisis managers must educate relevant stakeholders as to what functions they accomplish and why. This can be done through tabletop exercises, strategic dialogues, or direct engagement. It also helps to develop briefings, infographics, and pamphlets to distribute to those stakeholders so that when a crisis strikes, they already know who to turn to and which functions those crisis managers can and should carry out.
4. Fueling escalation through overreactions.
Overreactions occur for myriad reasons, the three most common of which being fear, politics, and false logic. There may be fear that failure to react strongly will invite further escalation from the other side. There may be concern that perceived weakness will affect domestic political standing. There may be false logic at play, where a decision-maker erroneously concludes that escalatory responses are the best courses of action to pacify a crisis.
Whatever the reason, overreaction is incredibly detrimental to crisis management. It often fuels tit-for-tat actions that drive escalation cycles. Further, it increases the risk of misinterpretation and miscalculation because an overreaction that exceeds what might seem reasonable in a scenario begs the questions of why, and what else is at play here?
There are three keys to mitigating overreactions. The first is prior planning. If one considers the various scenarios before they occur, it is much easier to contemplate appropriate responses. The second is fact-finding. When a security incident occurs, dispatching a fact-finding team can slow the decision-making cycle and contribute to better information for those who will be determining responses to the situation. The last is third party involvement. Those third parties may directly influence a party’s decision-making in a crisis, or they may shape it through indirect means.
5. Believing that you can’t do multiple things at once.
In general, parties to crisis seek to accomplish three core tasks: deterrence, reassurance, and de-escalation. In other words, they aim to deter the other party from continued escalation; to reassure domestic populations, allies, and partners who are invested in the outcomes of the crisis; and to de-escalate the situation. The common mistake is thinking that those are all mutually exclusive actions and only focusing on one or two of those tasks.
The reality is that all three can be accomplished simultaneously. For example, following a security incident, a party to crisis can conduct a large-scale military exercise to demonstrate readiness as both a means for deterring the other party and reassuring the public. At the same time, that party can deliver prior notification to the other side that the exercise will be taking place, that the intent for the exercise is to deter any hostile action, and that the overall goal is to cease any further escalation from either side.
6. Failing to consider third parties.
Third parties can serve as both pacifiers and antagonists in a crisis. The common mistake is failing to consider who they are and what roles they can play in either ameliorating or exacerbating a crisis. As a result, practitioners increase risk and overlook key opportunities for managing a crisis.
As with other common mistakes, a useful method for overcoming this is prior planning and preparation. Aside from that, it is simply up to crisis managers to dedicate time and attention to international engagement during a crisis, or at least to enlist the aid of other officials or organizations who can do so on their behalf.
7. Failing to adjust midway.
Effective crisis management requires agility to adapt to the ever-evolving conditions in the crisis. Every action and reaction affects the odds for which outcomes are most likely, so it is important to analyze, reassess, and adjust along the way. A common mistake for practitioners is holding firm to their opening decisions throughout a crisis.
This is where having a team of crisis managers, preferably represented by different stakeholder organizations, is so important. Having different perspectives vis-a-vis a crisis enables more agile decision-making as there will be debate over interpretations of signals, assessments of objectives, and available options for responses. While time is often compressed in a crisis, those deliberations are essential for ensuring that adjustments are a consistent part of the crisis management process.
8. Chasing perfection.
This mistake occurs when a party to crisis pursues total control of a situation or perfect information before making decisions. Perhaps they want to ensure that no mistakes are made or that they have total consensus built prior to taking an action. However, those things are impossible to attain; instead, the pursuit of totality or perfection cripples decision-making processes and leaves a party at the whims of however the crisis may play out.
Rather than chasing perfection, the key for crisis managers is to pursue the net positive. That is, the goal is to achieve more good than bad from a situation. Of course, it is desirable to maximize the outcomes, but in a crisis where stakes are high and the danger is real, pursuit of the net positive instead of perfection allows for more agile approaches to crisis management that in turn yields better results.
9. Losing sight of the overall objective.
It can be very easy for decision-makers to forget that the fundamental objective in crisis management is resolving the crisis. Instead, they may fall victim to any of the many obstacles to de-escalation, including opportunism (using the crisis as an excuse to pursue other policy objectives), vengeance (seeking retribution for something that may have occurred prior to or during the crisis), or audience costs (political costs imposed on leaders for appearing weak or ineffective to domestic constituents). When the primary goal is something other than resolution of the crisis, unhelpful decision-making often follows.
Instead, crisis managers must always keep the overall objective in mind to ensure that they are making the right decisions for the right reasons.
10. Forgetting the follow-through.
A key principle of crisis management is that a crisis manager’s work is not done when the situation is resolved; rather, follow-on action is required to mitigate future crises. Crisis managers must take steps to eliminate sources of conflict and address factors that may have triggered the crisis. However, it is all too common for crisis managers to take a break once a crisis is resolved, particularly when there are external stakeholders who parachute in to address that specific situation.
Addressing this mistake simply requires a straightforward after-action plan. Following any crisis, the personnel involved should take time to record what occurred and document their lessons learned. Whoever happens to be responsible for that particular issue area on a day-to-day basis should review those after action reports and adopt appropriate recommendations while seeking to institute any identified countermeasures for addressing the crisis. Naturally, it is important that these actions are not all unilaterally done; instead, continued engagement with the party to the crisis is important.
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No organization is immune to these mistakes. The reason why they are on the list is because at least one of those mistakes is bound to happen in any crisis scenario. As the list indicated though, there are ways to manage them. Prior planning, agility, and a focus on net positive outcomes are all essential in crisis management. If crisis managers can do those things, they can mitigate many mistakes before they happen and move past them quickly when some invariably occur.