Crisis, Catastrophe, and Disaster in Organizations

Part One: Setting the Stage: The Structural Nature of Organizations and the Role of Events and the Emergence of a Crisis Cascade

Chapter One: An introduction to giving (and receiving) advice. Ensuring those in leadership or decision making positions have the information needed to lead when designing or managing remediation and change processes.

A. Establishing the needs of the decision maker and advisor in the midst of a crisis

Who are your stakeholders? What are their information needs? What are your sources of information? How do you ensure the validity and reliability of the information you collect and offer? What happens if things change, the information doesn't fit, you are mislead or don't get the information you need from ANY stakeholder (up or down in the information chain?)

B. Influential behavior within boundaries, limits and personal competencies. Understanding the situation, the state of affairs. Events and the Physical Nature of Organizations: Examining the role Structure Contributes to Defining Behavior in Organizations and within Social Networks

The structural nature of organizations: The Typology of Organizations The value a separate analysis of the four types of organizations contributes to understanding the impact of a crisis on organizations Organizational type and structure and stakeholder needs, its ideology, the organization's brand, its stakeholders and the role of "social enforcers" Features and benefits of the four types of organizations Modeling the complexity of an organization's ideological profile: The contribution of organizational complexities to the performance and event management processes Using Markov chains to illustrate the integrity of relationships among an organization's social network

On one level, a structural analysis of organization seeks to identify and define its operational components. In the analysis, reviews of an organization's make-up can identify and describe its components and how they function. At a deeper level, this type of analysis can look beyond preconceptions to reveal aspects of the organization's very leadership; the thinking behind structure and operations.

Assume that the crisis, catastrophe and disaster each has a "concentration" point; a central element that serves as an identifier for the event state AND its intensity. This point defines the crisis, catastrophe or disaster. It is a point of departure for efforts to describe, classify or, characterize the phenomenon for those expected to facilitate management efforts. But efforts here do not stop with mere classification or labeling activities. It is as this point that whatever description or characterization is offered these must be accompanied by preliminary recommendations for action.

The organizational models used in the book have, by design, an element of flexibility associated with their use. They allow for current comparisons and speculation regarding how the organization will function over time and when experiencing different conditions and scenarios. Finally, these models provide immediate benefit to on-going research efforts. By providing a baseline from which to look they contribute to our understanding of what an organization is experiencing how those experiences compare with other organizations within and outside of the social network or industry as a whole. This is an important point, especially when viewed in terms of an organization's social network. The emergence and effects o