CRISIS MANAGEMENT VERSUS MANAGEMENT CRISIS
By Dr.William Mallinson
Abstract
This
piercing piece considers the term ‘crisis management’, suggesting that
imprecision of meaning can be, and indeed is, dangerously exploited. The piece
goes on to suggest nitty-gritty methods of dealing with crises, or at least of
trying to stave off their worst effects. It concludes that even a perfect plan
can be rendered useless by inappropriate methods and people.
Key words: crisis, management, imprecision, wishful thinking,
plan.
Thinking
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail
The trendy term ‘crisis management’, that grew out of the post-war
Marshall Plan-inspired business and war propaganda that saw the borrowing by
big business of military terminology, does not really mean very much, although
it can look sexy in an international relations (IR) strategy paper, business
plan (often the hidden part of an IR strategy) or CV. In fact, like the terms ‘business ethics’
and ‘conflict management’, it can even be an oxymoron. After all, a crisis, by
very definition, cannot be managed, because if it can, then it cannot be a true
crisis, in other words, a ‘time of great danger or difficulty’ and/or a
‘decisive moment’. The word ‘management’ can be equally vague and devoid of
intrinsic meaning, particularly since it has invaded the description of almost
every human activity connected to work. Hordes of young people obtain
over-the-counter business degrees from
private colleges, thinking, or rather believing, that they can manage a crisis,
and that they are managers. Even the word ‘manager’ has connotations of
respectability, not to mention the association with power that insecure people,
such as most politicians, need so much. All in all, the whole field of ‘crisis
management’ is laden with linguistic bulimia and pomposity, and can mean
different things to different people. To the PR specialist, or, better put, communications
specialist, it means achieving clarity and emphasising tact, by converting
hostility to understanding. To the business manager, it can mean firing half
the staff. To a Wall Street dealer in the late twenties, it can mean committing
suicide.
Before we
try to inject some common sense into this whole area, let us remember Confucius:
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if
what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone.
In our so-called globalised post-Berlin Wall world of business bliss and
peace-promotion, there is an increasing lack of precision, particularly in
international law, which has in itself been a prime factor in creating crises.
For example, just before the illegal 78-day NATO bombing of a sovereign state,
Yugoslavia (well, virtually), the British Foreign Office-and Ministry of
Defence-friendly Royal Institute of International Affairs published an article by a consultant/lawyer,
which ended with the imprecise, obfuscatory and weasel sentence:
The connection of the legal
justification of humanitarian action with the aim of achieving FRY/Serb
acceptance of the Rambouillet package in its entirety, if it is maintained,
would represent an innovative but justifiable extension of international law.
It should come as no surprise that the author was an adviser to the
Kosovo delegation. Apart from the fact that NATO had almost certainly already
decided to ensure that it would mark its fiftieth birthday, not with its
dissolution, as provided for in the NATO Treaty, but with new members and
illegal bombing, by insisting on a priori
infringement of the FRY’s sovereignty, it actually inflamed the crisis. From then on, in the words of Vasilis Fouscas,
NATO became a consumer of security,
in other words, a force for anarchy and lack of security, promoted by fanatic
neo-cons, who turned out to be the very antithesis of true conservatives, by
throwing away the compass of stability:
the neo-cons conned the world. The whole mentality behind Weller’s
sloppy yet weasel-like language must have George Orwell turning in his grave.
The kind of language used in the article seems designed to dress up simple but
unacceptable statements, so as to lend them an air of academic balance. As Orwell writes, such
language is used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics. And
let’s make no bones about it: international politics (or international
relations) is both a sordid business
and a rough trade. The quote above, apart from being dangerously imprecise and
semantically slimy, leads to our next idea, namely that of ‘wishful thinking’,
in other words the realistic contention that most crises, whether political,
territorial or ethnic (but not natural, obviously), are actually artificial,
since they are consciously created by the express behaviour of human beings.
Importantly, those irresponsible leaders who create, either by default or
expressly, wars, stress the importance of ‘managing the crisis’, since not to
do so would give the game away. The most obvious recent example is the invasion
of Iraq, not only in contravention of international law, but an international
crime perpetrated on the back of a blatant lie. At any rate, the wishful
thinking solidifies, is presented as a humanitarian crisis (like the Kosovo
‘crisis’), and then continues by becoming in itself a humanitarian crisis, in
other words, the manslaughter of hundreds and thousands of Iraqis. Most
importantly, we see here that ‘crisis management’ can actually entail crisis creation, in order to ‘manage’ it, or ,
more accurately, to achieve a set of
hidden objectives under the label ‘crisis’. Having now attempted to inject some
reality into the whole business, let us nevertheless try and adopt a positive
approach, by getting down to the nitty-gritty. Let us put down a marker now,
and say that what we are really talking about is ‘crisis avoidance’.
Acting
First, in terms of international crises, a plan is inevitably necessary
to help to avoid the worst scenarios, which can equate to a crisis. The moment
a problem is identified, indeed, well before, the following basic process
should be prepared. Remember that failing
to prepare is preparing to fail.
First: observe, consider, consult,
analyse and evaluate.
Second:
clarify the purpose, and define the objective(s), remembering that you
do not necessarily have to have an
objective.
Third: pin-point the audiences, segment, analyse and
evaluate them.
Fourth:
consider and then sculpt the message(s).
Fifth: select your media and techniques
for using them.
Sixth: remember costs, in other words, be
realistic, even if working for the state, since politicians are conscious of
costs.
Seventh: actually begin to do something, provided
that you need to (but bear in mind that inaction can also be most therapeutic
in certain types of crisis).
Eighth: evaluate what you are doing from
the very beginning, and keep comparing your evaluations at different stages.
Post-mortem: if you are still alive, it is
crucial that you look at the whole thing, to see how useful it might be in the
future, and what kind of alterations might need to be made in respect of
different crises.
The above is merely a brief set of simple guidelines to help the whole
process of avoiding a crisis, or at least of coming to terms with it, since avoidance can be almost impossible.
It does not necessarily have to be treated pedantically and chronologically.
For example, you can pin-point your audiences while you are observing, and even
start to execute as you clarify your purpose. The above plan is also useful in coping with unavoidable crises, such
as earthquakes.
Issues Management
There is one rather obvious way of trying to avoid crises, and that is
to follow issues, in other words, to keep your finger on the pulse of what is
going on around you, so that you can nip trouble in the bud. This requires a
sophisticated research capability and capacity. It also requires the right sort
of communication channels being ready when needed. In other words, they need
constant oiling. Does your ministry/department/section have a single spokesman?
Is he acquainted with all topics? Is he in full communication with his overseas
counterparts? Is he in permanent contact with the decision-makers in his own
organisation? Above all, is there a hotline at the highest level? The whole
high-sounding business is in fact extremely complex for the average person. Let
us look at a typical checklist from a typical book:
· Identify and list 100 or more
issues.
· Seek out the concerns of other
managers about other issues.
· Categorise those issues.
· Start a central issue file. Let
people know where it is.
· Determine issues relevant to the
corporation and investigate them in depth.
· Assign priorities to these issues.
· Circulate the issues for management
input.
· Learn what other institutions are
doing.
· List plans to cause action on the
issues.
· Begin a speakers’ bureau.
· Determine whether a formal public
affairs programme is needed to get things rolling.
· Present selected issues at
appropriate meetings, e.g. sales meetings, management meetings, and financial
meetings.
· Encourage issue-oriented speeches
and articles; merchandise them.
· Send letters on the issues to
employees, retirees, and shareholders.
· Contact elected officials on the
issues.
All the above is of course easier said than done, and it is perhaps
somewhat naively formulated. It might work fairly well in the US, but would
need considerable modification in Europe. If such a series of instructions were
to get into the hands of an inexperienced graduate, or even an average manager,
he would almost certainly come unstuck pretty fast, and either create a crisis,
or, if one had already appeared, make it worse. The fact is that training
people to handle crises is extremely difficult. The only sure way is to
actually learn during a crisis, cynical though this may sound. The one golden rule in any crisis is clear
and uninterrupted communication with the decision-makers. This is why a good
military intelligence or diplomatic training can be useful.
Conclusions
A planned approach, as long as it avoids dangerous pedantry, is the most
sensible way of approaching this whole semantically loose IR topic of ‘crisis
management’, which has been borrowed, like so much American-oriented IR, from
business management terminology. Planners can become involved in their plans to
the extent of forgetting people. If you forget people, and concomitantly, human
factors such as greed and insecurity, your initial thinking, having developed
into an idea and, possibly, a theory, can become a fixation, then an obsession,
leading finally to madness, which can actually be rather dangerous when
creating/ avoiding crises. Consider the Bush/Blair syndrome, and the amount of rationalisation/cognitive
self-dissonance to which they subjected
themselves, to avoid the fact that they became obsessed and were responsible
for an amount of manslaughter and planned killing that makes a typical
terrorist act (horrible and unacceptable though it may be) look like a
girl-guides’ tea-party. Far from preventing anarchy and terrorist acts, these
alleged leaders actually managed to destabilise the Middle East even more than before,
and introduce totalitarian measures in their own countries unheard of since the
Fourth World War.
As a result of abysmal crisis management, we are now going through a creeping crisis
that only the calmest, toughest and most honest Bismarckians can hope to cope
with. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, the first big mistake was to fuel the
potential crisis by expanding NATO, which was already beyond its shelf-life. In
the words of one expert (a former naval officer and NATO war planner), the 1999
bombing orgy was an example of image taking precedence over substance. It lit the slow fuse of
Russian anger, which began as mere perplexity, and has now reached the stage of
irritation. The second big mistake was to overreact following the twin tower
atrocities, and get bogged down in Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Countless
innocent people died in the name of freedom and democracy, and West became a far dirtier word than it
had ever been before. In the first case, when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO
should have consolidated and changed its statutes to become an essentially
politico-cultural, rather than military organisation, while EC supra-national defence
should have been consolidated, to compensate. At the same time, firmer
sanctions should have been applied on Iraq, following its invasion of Kuwait,
rather than resorting to war only a few months later. But let us not forget
that the US ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, actually told Saddam Hussein a
few days before the invasion that the USA had no interest in Iraq’s dispute
with Kuwait.
Here, of course, an interesting parallel can be drawn with the US’ Balkan
envoy, Gelbard’s, description in February 1998 of the Albanian KLA as ‘without
question a terrorist organisation’, thus fuelling the more
fanatic of the Serb para-militaries. Then along came banker Holbrooke, who suddenly
befriended the terrorists, which was then followed by the build-up to the
bombing.
The rather obvious message from all this shenanigans is that the Bush
Senior crisis plan, and the Bush Junior and Bliar very junior crisis plans were
not proper plans at all, but simply anarchistic macho- greed dressed up as a
plan to look respectable to an increasingly auto-lobotomised and artificially
globalised globe. The only result of the fake plans was to bequeath trouble in
the Balkans and the Middle East for years to come, which is part of the reason
why the world economy is currently collapsing.
Finally, it is worth remembering that it may not be so much a plan that
is wrong, than the way in which it is implemented, and the people involved. A
plan can in fact destroy itself through its own inflexibility and subsequent
coagulation. To be able to handle a crisis means to understand timing and
necessity when looking at issues. Without a sense of when and if, the best laid
plans can actually exacerbate a crisis. Perhaps the Samurai ethic might help:
if one is constantly resigned to the perpetual threat of death, one is likely
to be calm and brave enough to handle both sudden and creeping crises.
