Crisis management of a critical incident
A critical incident is one that the organisation cannot manage through its normal arrangements. What distinguishes a crisis management team from a group of senior people in a room is that it has a structure, a set of decided questions, and a rehearsed way of working.
Download the paper (PDF, English)What makes an incident critical
The paper uses a working definition rather than a list: an incident is critical when it threatens the organisation's ability to continue operating, involves serious harm or the risk of it to staff or to people the organisation serves, or attracts attention that the organisation cannot control. A road traffic collision involving a single member of staff usually meets the third test and often the second.
Constituting the team
The team is small, has named members and deputies, and has a chair who is not also the person doing the work.
| Role | Function |
|---|---|
| Chair | Owns the decisions, keeps the team to the structure, and is the only person who can change the plan once made. |
| Incident manager | Runs the response, gathers information, and maintains the incident log. Separate from the chair, so that the person deciding is not the person advocating. |
| Family liaison | Contact with relatives. Held by someone senior with the standing to obtain answers, and never by the incident manager. |
| Staff support | Welfare of the people involved and of the wider team, including those not directly affected. |
| Communications | One voice, agreed statements, and control of what reaches the media. |
| Legal and insurance | Notification, claims, and advice on what the organisation must and must not do. |
| Logistics | Travel, visas, accommodation, money and equipment for whoever has to move. |
The questions the team decides in advance
- Who speaks to the family, and what are they authorised to say.
- What the organisation will say publicly, and who signs it off.
- When the team stands down, and who decides that the incident has become a long-term case.
- How the team's own members are relieved, since a crisis lasts longer than one shift.
- What the organisation will do if the response requires a decision the team cannot take, and who escalates it.
Working practice
The paper sets out a discipline that is easy to state and hard to follow. The team meets on a schedule rather than continuously, so that people sleep. Every decision is logged with the time, the reasoning and the name of the person who took it, because the log is the organisation's record and will be read afterwards. Information is shared on a need-to-know basis inside the team, with one person responsible for the version that goes outside it. And the team distinguishes between what is known, what is believed and what is feared, because in a crisis the three are usually mixed together in the first briefing and separated only later.
Standing down
A crisis management team is the wrong instrument for a slow situation. Once an incident becomes a long-term case, an abduction that continues for months or an investigation that runs for a year, the team has to hand over to a smaller group with a defined mandate and a named owner. Organisations that fail to make that transition exhaust their senior staff, lose the decision log, and end up managing a complex case through whoever happens to be available.
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