Coombs 6 – Crisis Recognition
Katie Chodil, Paul Jonas & Sooyeon Kim
This reading from Ongoing Crisis Communication will focus on information and communication needs associated with a recognized crisis. The task: You will provide a 500 word comment that summarizes three key points that you don’t want your peers to miss in the chapter and raises at least three questions or discussion points for consideration by the class. Doc students: remember that you, especially, should be looking for theoretical points and not just application.
This reading from Ongoing Crisis Communication will focus on information and communication needs associated with a recognized crisis. The task: You will provide a 500 word comment that summarizes three key points that you don’t want your peers to miss in the chapter and raises at least three questions or discussion points for consideration by the class. Doc students: remember that you, especially, should be looking for theoretical points and not just application.
posted by prteacher at
3/28/2007 06:30:00 AM
1 Comments:
Recognizing a crisis before it hits the fan and harnessing the information process are the two over-arching concepts in chapter six. Crisis recognition revolves around strong information gathering and processing through networks of people and strategic procedures.
Persuading the dominant coalition that a problem is a crisis involves credibility, emotion, and rational. The author’s hypothetical example on page 95 of E. coli contamination in a company’s juice product offers some examples of selling this issue as a crisis to the organization. An interesting discussion question to pose here is: how do messages for internal stakeholders differ from those for external stakeholders? Then, how do they differ from the messages to the media?
Framing and persuasion in a potential crisis situation are important when bringing key members of the organization on board to handle it appropriately and timely. Problems a crisis manager runs in to with these members are based on people’s natural resistance to change. Typically, something needs to change in order for a crisis to be solved and individuals may resist change because:
- Fear of going from the known to the unknown
- Long-term rewards do not appear greater than cost of change
- Satisfaction with status quo
- Loss of power
- Lack of information
- False perceptions of reality
- Lack of motivation
- “This too shall pass” mindset
- Lack of urgency
My question here is: how does a crisis manager pull themselves out of group-think and the culture of the organization to address a crisis situation? Clearly, it is important to maintain an outsider’s perspective when selling “a problem as a crisis to the dominant coalition” (p. 90). I think the author fails to recognize the power of organizational culture here. The crisis manager is as susceptible to the culture and resistance of change just as any other member of the organization. Feeling like part of the team is very important to individual job satisfaction. However, the author discusses the crisis manager’s role as if he or she is isolated from the gravitational pull of organizational culture.
After reading this chapter, I thought it was written backwards. It begins by discussing the importance of convincing the organization that a crisis could or will occur. “A situation becomes a crisis when key stakeholders agree it is a crisis. Unfortunately, some members of management may wish to deny that the organization is in a crisis even when stakeholders are screaming it exists” (p. 89). Clearly, framing and persuasion in these situations is important, but I would argue that the “crisis information network” (p. 106) needs to be in place first. Shouldn’t information gathering and processing networks be set up before you worry about selling the crisis to others in the organization?
The end of the chapter discusses two very important information gathering strategies for making it out of a crisis alive: internal stakeholder networks and external stakeholder networks. The internal stakeholder network is comprised of people within the organization who are responsible for putting ‘feelers’ out for important internal information. The external stakeholder network is, in my opinion, even more important. This group could contain “customers, government officials, suppliers, distributors, community members, competitors, and investors” (p. 106). By setting up these information networks, members of the organization may feel more of a buy-in with regard to the crisis management process. I argue that because of this effect, the information networks need to be in place before the crisis manager worries about selling a crisis. If the powers that be feel ownership in the crisis management process, persuading them of a situations importance will be much easier.
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Katie, at 9:44 AM
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