Supporting Corporate Crisis Management Teams During the Holidays

Ole André Br?ten has a background serving with the United Nations and is an expert in crisis management. He is the host of "Krisepodden" (1), Norway's first podcast dedicated to crisis management. He regularly hosts seminars on crisis leadership, and his website promises responses to inquiries within 48 hours (unless you check the urgency level "request immediate feedback").

This is clearly a man on standby:

"It takes less than 48 seconds from the moment Morgenbladet sends him a text message until he calls back.

'In my field, you have to be on call,' he says."

To understand how a leader manages a crisis by mustering the crisis leadership team, it's essential to figure out what constitutes a crisis.

"In textbooks, a crisis is a situation that is unlikely, arises suddenly, and is perceived as overwhelming. The common denominator is a situation that creates stress," says Br?ten, quickly adding, "What I've learned through working in this field for many years is that what constitutes a crisis is very individual. There is often a discrepancy between what you think is a crisis, what I think is a crisis, and what someone else considers a crisis."

"Aren't we in danger of diluting the concept of a crisis?"

"Unfortunately, I think it's a sign of the times we live in. It's important to have a conscious approach to what situations we call crises. You never want to communicate that something is a crisis unless it really is. On the contrary, you want to downplay a perceived crisis situation."

Ole André Br?ten explains that many leaders contacted him during the pandemic, with several saying something like, "We’ve set up a crisis management team. What do we do? The last time we did this was in 2000."

"Twenty years later, the pandemic came as a shock and gave many organizations a steep learning curve. I received so many inquiries from my clients that I created a podcast," he explains. Thus, Krisepodden emerged in March 2020. Two years later, he published "Handbook in Crisis Management."

While in 2010, it was mainly large industrial companies dealing with production involving some risk that were prepared to set up a crisis management team, today, almost everyone is, according to Br?ten.

"A crisis management team is part of the organizational leadership to handle an unexpected situation. Often, you have a crisis management team ready when the crisis hits, trained to follow some established rules of engagement. The team must respond analytically: what do we do in the first five minutes, the first five hours, and the first five days? But they must also ask themselves, 'What do we do in the next five hundred days?'"

As the term "crisis" becomes a bigger part of our vocabulary, both private companies and public institutions have become increasingly concerned with communicating that they take things seriously, Br?ten believes.

"Is the most important thing to say that you have assembled a crisis management team to deal with the situation?"

"At least it's an easy way to show that you prioritize something. When someone communicates that 'we have set up our crisis management team,' it's also a way to get some breathing room."

But Br?ten is not suspicious of users of the term. He believes organizations that say they have set up a crisis management team do so because they genuinely take the situation seriously.

"By saying it, you also put pressure on yourself and communicate to your stakeholders, 'we don't handle this in the usual way.' It's important for an organization to handle the situation as best as possible by assembling the crisis management team, rather than doing something for appearances' sake."

References:

1

Leadership in Crisis Podcast (Scandinavian)

https://www.oleandrebraten.no/leadership-in-crisis-podcast

2

In the year 2000, one of the major global concerns was the Y2K problem, also known as the Millennium Bug. This issue arose because many computer systems represented four-digit years with only the last two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. There were widespread fears that this would cause software and systems to fail or malfunction when the date changed from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000.

In response, extensive efforts were made worldwide to identify and fix affected systems before the new year. These preparations involved updating software, hardware, and embedded systems across various industries, including banking, utilities, transportation, and government operations. Despite the extensive media coverage and anxiety leading up to the event, the transition to the year 2000 occurred with relatively few significant problems, largely due to the massive global effort to address the issue beforehand.

3

Handbook of Crisis Management - leadership in Crisis

https://www.oleandrebraten.no/handbook-of-crisis-management