There’s no doubt that natural disasters such as the recent earthquake in Haiti cause a great deal of tragic for people. The same is true for terrorist attacks and large-scale accidents, whether it is 9/11 or Madrid train bombings, oil tankers sinking or planes crashing. Notwithstanding the individual pain and grief, these disasters, attacks, and accidents frequently cause organizational crisis, too. Not just any crisis, but one that’s hard — if not impossible — to escape for organizations, just to be clear.
But there is also organizational crisis that is either caused by an organization itself, which makes it preventable in the first place, or accidentally taken to an organization as if the organization were responsible for it. Often enough, both kind of crisis are indistinguishable. Just think of how involved each and every organization is in the current financial crisis …
… one, two, three …
… right, too complex a network to track the inner workings of this mess. Although we speak of the global financial crisis, each and every organization necessarily has it’s own take on the situation. Necessarily, really?, you say. Yeah, because the crisis I’m talking about is not something out there, it’s not an objective reality.
Crisis is what you make of it. An excellent proof of concept are German medium enterprises working on the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. None of them complain about any crisis, but continue to rely on their reputation to deliver quality work. For example, Miele just closed a deal to outfit all 900 suites in the tower with complete kitchens.
The fact that some organizations thrive in the face of crisis isn’t to say that they should ignore the facts, I merely try to make the point that you’re your own luck’s master. And maybe a more critical thinking of classic management science and organization theory is in place. Constitutive theories of organization may be worth a look and a new generation of managers may be better suited to deal with crisis than the ones trained in traditional economic fashion.
