Crisis Management and Effective Decision Making

Learning Objectives

• Acquire an in-depth knowledge of the key aspects of Strategic Crisis Management.
• Learn how to identify incidents and crises so you can cultivate and harness the potential successes of a crisis.
• At the incident site learn how to avoid miss-management and so make a bad situation worse.
• Learn how to generate ownership and responsibility by all stakeholders to ensure your organization responds efficiently and effectively.
• Learn how to recognize and prioritize the issues that are most likely to affect corporate reputation during and after crisis.
• Learn the fundamentals of organizing and managing Crisis or Emergency Control Centers.
• Learn how to plan and manage multi agency exercises – and make them more rewarding and exciting.
• Take away step by step guidance on how to validate plans, to improve staff ownership, to augment training programs and to raise awareness.
• Describe the steps in the decision making process.
• Identify the assumptions of the rational decision making model.
• Define certainty, risk, and uncertainty as they relate to decision making.
• Describe the actions of the bounded rational decision maker.
• Identify the two types of decision problems and the two types of decisions that are used to solve them.
• Define heuristics and explain how they affect the decision making process.
• Identify four decision making styles .
• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of group decisions.

Course Outline

Day 1 - Understanding Crisis Management:

• How to manage a crisis?
• Virtually every crisis contains the seeds of success as well as the roots of failure.
• The Rationale of the Crisis Manager.
• Consider the range of risks: Natural/Environmental; Hazards; Technological - loss of utilities/product/process/plant; Human Error; Sabotage and Terrorism.
• Crisis Managers - Roles & Responsibilities - manage the issue before it becomes a Crisis.

Day 2 - Who decides who sits in the 'hot-seat'?

• Case Studies, why some companies fail and others survive?
• Who owns the mitigation process?

Self-evaluating questionnaires

• Developing and Implementing Emergency Plans

Twelve point check list covering the whole planning process

Mutual Aid arrangements

Company-wide strategic contingency plans

Service or departmental plans

Building evacuation plans

Day 3 - Crisis Management and Communications. Emergency Centre/s

• Developing and implementing a Business Continuity Management (BCM) strategy
• Business Impact Analysis. Case Study and Workshop
• Dealing with a crisis - the 'communications' perspective

• Command and Control Issues

Operational (at the scene)

Tactical (at the forward control point/incident command)

Strategic (boardroom level/emergency operations centre)

• On Scene Crisis Management, essential elements for success

Day 4 - Reputation Management - Managing the Media. 'How to' sessions

• Organizing a Press Conference
• Conducting Radio and Television Interviews
• Case Study Exercise: Crisis Communications Strategy. Develop a crisis communications strategy and action plan based upon a given scenario
• Incident Management & Aftermath
• Alerting and Warning. Case Studies. What can go right and what can go wrong

Day 5 - Potential Psychological & Welfare problems in Crisis Management

• How to improve staff morale and confidence in the process
• The psychological effects during and after an incident involving injuries - and worse
• Looking after yourself and your staff
• Leadership Behavior and Behavioral Safety