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This article presents the concept of crisis and describes key trends impacting the context of crisis management in contemporary liberal democratic societies around the world. It focuses on the following key questions:List• What is a crisis and how can a rigorous conceptualization of crisis help crisis managers (both official and citizen responders) to make sense of potential crises?• What are some of the key and recurring leadership tasks associated with crisis management (The politics of crisis management: public leadership under pressure, New York, NY, 2005) and how are they affected by the rise of social media and smart devices?The paper concludes with a number of prescriptive reflections for those engaged in the work of improving crisis management capacity for governments and communities.

This chapter discusses the challenges involved in designing crisis management exercises for strategic leaders. It offers a source of reference for countries and collaborating organisations and can be seen as a “toolkit” intended to facilitate reflective and effective future crisis management exercise designs in the future. This chapter first discusses the rationale, types and purposes of strategic crisis management exercises as part of building the right skill set for strategic crisis management. It highlights the main challenges of involving leadership, engaging partners from the private sector, and developing international crisis management exercises. Finally, it presents the parameters and options for scenario development, including case-based scenarios and options for involving and working with leaders.

Though important advances have occurred in recent years, governments are regularly surprised by the emergence of crises and still struggle to identify and understand them. This chapter examines the challenges of early warning and sense-making associated with strategic crises. It explores the multiple contexts - group, organisational, and political - in which leaders and their advisers are embedded. These contexts enable and constrain leaders and their advisors. The role of current and emerging information and communications technology (ICT) is discussed in relation to finding ways to harness technology to increase sense-making capacity and identify potential vulnerabilities and risks. In addition, problems of effectively managing expertise, information, and knowledge with regards to early warning and crisis management are examined. The chapter concludes by presenting a set of critical topics that require further capability development and policy reform efforts.

Strategic leaders — those who sit at the apex of organizations and have primary responsibility for charting the course and achieving positive short and long term results for their various constituencies — play a crucial role in crisis situations. It is increasingly recognized that they, like other key players in crisis management and societal (homeland) security need to be prepared for this responsibility and that training and exercises are a fundamental part of this preparation. While significant attention in recent decades has been devoted to developing techniques and designs for operational training and exercises, rather less attention and ink have been devoted to problems of designing crisis management training and exercises for strategic level leaders in governmental organizations — the focus of this report.

This publication is a result of a unique partnership between academic, private sector, and governmental experts from the United States and Sweden. It was developed through a series of collaborative bilateral workshops held in Stockholm and Washington, D.C. during 2013 and 2014.

Purpose – Taming the complexity of crisis and integrating diverse narratives and sources regarding crisis events is a serious challenge. The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for reconstructing, dissecting, and thematically comparing crisis experiences, using the 7/7 London bombings of 2005 as an illustrative empirical application.

Design/methodology/approach – A cognitive-institutional process-tracing methodology suitable compatible with structured focussed comparison of crisis cases (Stern and Sundelius, 2002; cf. George and Bennett, 2005) is used. This cognitive-institutional process tracing and analysis strategy consists of four steps: contextualization, development of a synthetic chronological narrative, identification and reconstruction of decision occasions, and (comparative) thematic analysis.

Findings – The paper demonstrates the feasibility of applying the methodology to real-world cases in the UK and concludes with reflections about the need for contextualized, systematic post mortem crisis analysis taking into account problem and process complexity, differential crisis performances of individuals and organizations under adverse conditions, and the increasing importance of social media and personal communications devices for crisis research and practice.

Practical implications – The methodology used in this paper has the potential to improve the effectiveness of organizational learning and reform efforts in the wake of crisis experiences.

Social implications – Insights associated with the application of this methodology can lead to improved post-crisis learning and fairer accountability processes, and thus contribute to enhancing societal resilience.

Originality/value – The study not only presents an original methodology developed by one of the authors, but also provides a systematic, relatively comprehensive and theoretically informed analysis of the July 7 London bombings based not only upon the documentary record, but also upon a substantial number of interviews.

Crises are becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon and are—like the example of Hurricane Isaac—typically surrounded by complex social and technical factors beyond the competence of generalist leaders. By their very nature, crises are associated with considerable uncertainty. Knowing this, crisis managers frequently call upon experts to provide relevant information on specific subject matter. During the past decade and a half, a theoretical and methodological field of study has emerged addressing this issue: how to find missing knowledge, transfer it to where it is most needed, and institutionalize it for future use. This subject is called “knowledge management” and is rooted in older theories on organizational knowledge and organizational learning. In fact, these very same organizational learning theories form the foundation for the post-crisis learning perspectives, which are increasingly prominent in the field of crisis management. Hence, one may question why these two management subdisciplines have not been more systematically combined and integrated. In crisis management, learning is often seen as a process that takes place after a crisis has been resolved, in preparation for the next crisis. Yet, knowledge management considers knowledge creation and learning to be a constant process. Ideally, combining these two perspectives could stimulate some kind of “instant learning” during an actual crisis, so that relevant lessons are learned and implemented for the current crisis as well as for future crises.

A potential problem with combining crisis management and knowledge management is the difference in typical time frames associated with the two management subfields. By definition, crises involve a strong element of urgency and thus require immediate action. Knowledge management, however, was born out of attempts to improve consumer product innovation cycles, which can run several months or even years. The possibility of tapping into the knowledge management techniques for finding and accessing new or unfamiliar knowledge (e.g., calling in experts) is very alluring, but the question is if such techniques can fit into the tight timeframe associated with crises.