Crisis Readiness Requires Systems Thinking

Understand Your Environment

“It’s not good enough to know your relationships with your partners,” one of the FBI’s executive assistant directors once told me, “You have to understand the relationships your partners have with each other.” She was speaking of a crucial concept in crisis management: organizations don’t face crises by themselves. There are always multiple stakeholders. They may be directly connected to the organization, such as board members and shareholders. They may be in business with the organization, such as suppliers or financiers. Or they could be completely external organizations who have their own equities to meet during the same crisis.

This concept is essential not only in responding to a crisis, but in preparing for one. Understanding the connectivity between organizations allows for better comprehension of the environment we work in and empowers leaders to better navigate environments that are out of balance due to a critical incident.

Everything is Interrelated

The quote above came from a conversation in which we were discussing the challenges faced leading the FBI’s response to the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in September of 2013, a tragic event in which twelve people were killed and three injured. She was describing how the impact of crises cut across the bounds of individual organizations. The interagency response had been chaotic and she faced what leaders frequently deal with during a crisis: a lack of dependable information, limited resources, external stakeholders taking their own actions, and the constraints of time.

The response to an active shooter often involves numerous agencies directly and many more engaged in ancillary efforts. Command and control during such responses is extremely difficult and is made more so with the constraints of time and uncoordinated interagency communications. The actions of each responding organization, to include the media, civic organizations, and local businesses, have an effect on the overall environment. With each action, the overall situation evolves, and there are consequences to uncoordinated action. With so many groups engaged and working towards their own goals (think of media outlets trying to scoop the lead versus investigative agencies trying to secure facts and evidence), the difficulty for leaders can be ever increasing.

What I’ve Learned

The time I invested in building relationships during my career gave me the capital I needed with partners during challenging and chaotic events. Just as importantly, it led me to understand the perspective of each organization that might be affected by a critical incident and, ultimately, how each organization tended to think about responding to crisis.

Early on, my investment was predominantly with the stakeholders I would routinely see: police departments, other federal law enforcement agencies, and fire and emergency medical services. In a jurisdictional landscape as complex as Washington, D.C., I soon learned how leaders in our partner organizations thought about the events that would bring us together. This was invaluable as it allowed me to understand where I could give a bit or offer resources that might not directly align with the immediate objectives of my organization, but might bring us inclusion at a later time or allow me to navigate perceived conflicts of interest.

Once in the executive ranks, my map of interrelated organizations broadened to include those who were not necessarily partners, but had important roles to play and equities of their own. Media is an excellent example. It can be easy to perceive the efforts of reporters as antagonistic to investigative and crisis management efforts. Understanding the necessity of media organizations, how they go about attaining their goals, and their relationships with both one’s partner agencies and each other, allows for cooperative attainment of multiple objectives, including crisis resolution and an informed public.

This came together for me when I was recalled to the Washington, D.C. during the summer of 2020. The civil unrest following the death of George Floyd was taxing the capabilities of every responding agency and the resulting friction was leading to difficulties in communication and disjointed interagency action. Understanding how each agency viewed their role in critical incident response and the application of their resources helped us to restore balance between stakeholders, which led to better coordination of resources and objectives. Expanding that line of thinking more broadly to contemplate the desires of protestors exercising their rights under the first amendment, the objectives of those who took advantage of the chaos to commit crimes, the concerns of local businesses, the efforts of civic organizations, and the needs of community members, allowed for better prediction of the potential adverse consequences of actions and strategies intended to reduce violence and criminal activity. Forecasting negative second order effects allowed for better strategic decision making.

What You Can Do

It took me a career of investing in relationships to understand the value of seeing the environment in which I worked as a system, a system comprised of the public (our customer), our partner organizations, and others who had obligations in the same events we responded to but whose interests didn’t necessarily align with our own. Much of the success I found in navigating difficult situations came from my sensitivity to both the needs and capabilities of those around us. Every organization, and every leader, can benefit from deeper understanding of the relationships between the entities that make up the system in which they work.

Exercise: Draft a list of external organizations with which you commonly engage. Capture your perception of their equities and approach to your shared environment in a few sentences or a bulleted list.

First order thinking, where we solve an immediate problem without much thought to the cascading effects of our decisions, is especially common under the constraints of time. When we find ways to better predict the second order effects of our actions we can enhance positive results while minimizing the negative impacts such actions might have on other parts of the system. Effective crisis management requires second order thinking, and second order thinking is greatly enhanced by mapping the relationships in one’s system.

Exercise: Consider both the areas of collaboration and the points of friction between each of the organizations you previously listed. Identify points where your organization could be a connector and which areas are best avoided. Use this to think through the effects your decisions might have on external organization actions.

Further thoughts:

• Provide opportunities for the leaders in your organization to visualize the relationships that exist in your everyday environment. Today there are many tools available for relationship mapping, whether as simple as diagramming on a white board or as robust as software facilitating a more complex visualization of relationships, resources, and equities.

• From a map of relationships created for your steady state environment, consider what each organization’s likely response would be to a variety of difficult or time-sensitive scenarios. Broaden this to consider all groups that might be affected. For example, in the public sector, one might consider the visual impact of police officers in traditional uniform as opposed to tactical gear and the difference in resulting communications from local business owners to city government. Private sector considerations might include the expectations of customers during a cyber breach as opposed to the demands of corporate directors.

• Invest time in not only building relationships, but understanding how they are interconnected. This makes navigating your organization during steady state operations easier and builds resilience for dealing with the critical incidents that put an organization into crisis.

The Creating Culture newsletter is intended to be an exercise in studying, discussing, and sharing thoughts on topics important to building better teams and stronger organizations. Whether you and your organization are looking to prepare for the unexpected or seize new opportunities, I hope you’ll join me.

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