Crisis and Crisis Management

Crises can be classified into three major types:

1. Crises of the physical world, including natural disasters and failures of technology, such as nuclear power
2. Crises of the human climate, including confrontation with adversary groups and malevolent acts of governments, groups and individuals
3. Crises of management failure, arising from mismanagement, skewed values, deception and misconduct

Crisis management is designed to protect an organization and its stakeholders from threats and/or reduce the impact of the threats.

Ethical questions will bear significant consequences for the organization as well as the victims involved.

Mitroff offers a five-stage model for crisis management : “(1) signal detection, seek to identify warning signs and take preventative measures; (2) probing and prevention, active search and reduction of risk factors; (3) damage containment, crisis occurs and actions taken to limit its spread; (4) recovery, effort to return to normal operations; and (5) learning, people review the crisis management effort and learn from it.”