Crisis Action Planning

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Crisis Action Planning Questions:
What are the strengths and limitations of organizations and how do these strengths and limitations affect crisis planning and management?

How can appropriate leadership add to crisis management and planning?

Answers

When two or more people get together and agree to coordinate their activities in order to achieve their common goals, an Organization has been born. Its purpose is to create an arrangement of positions and responsibilities through and by means of which an enterprise can carry out its work. Based on this definition, an organization may be formed (may be a group of two or more and may be called a committee, a council, a team, etc.) for the purpose of planning and managing a crisis or a crisis situation.

(Before going further to answer the question being posed, the term crisis must first be understood.) Crisis is a change - either sudden or evolving - that results in an urgent problem that must be addressed immediately. Crisis must be immediately contained because failure to do so shall make the problem grow worse. Three elements are common to most definitions of crisis: (a) a threat to the organization, (b) the element of surprise, and (c) a short decision time, and (d) the need for change. (Wikipedia Free Dictionary).Consequently, Crisis management is the process by which an organization deals with a major unpredictable event that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public.

Planning is a management process (also applies to crisis management) by which goals are identified and the strategies that should be taken in order to achieve these goals. Specifically, planning to address a problem, like a crisis, needs a careful planning, which technically is called Strategic Planning. In strategic Planning, the approach which is popularly used and has been proven effective by organizations, is the SWOT or SWOC analysis. These is an acronym which stands for S=strengths, W=weaknesses, O=opportunities, T=threats. Most recently, in management, the T has been changed to C=challenges.
A SWOT analysis must first start with defining a desired end state or objective (in your problem, this is "to solve a crisis"). Then using a group focused discussion or brainstorming among the members of the organization, including its stakeholders, the following character of the organization should be ...