Study sheet: Crisis Management Foundations

📋 Course Outline

1. Why Crisis Management Matters
2. Course Assessment and Expectations
3. Team Roles Under Pressure
4. Classifying Organizational Crises
5. Crisis Definition and Types
6. Crisis Phases and Management
7. Course Roadmap and Deliverables

📖 1. Why Crisis Management Matters

★ Must-know

• Crisis is a “when,” not an “if,” because 69% of leaders had already faced a major organizational crisis in the previous five years and large companies averaged roughly one crisis per year. — PwC Global Crisis Survey, 2019

• The Wells Fargo fake-accounts scandal resulted from internal sales-target pressure, was discovered in 2016, and led to a $3 billion federal settlement in 2020.

• The course develops the ability to: identify major social, economic, and technological crises, assess situations and build crisis-management plans, evaluate how technology and culture shape crises, communicate effectively in crisis contexts, recognize behavioral and well-being challenges of crisis leadership

Further detail

• A crisis can affect every organizational function, including finance, operations, marketing, and human resources.

💡 Memory Hook

Crisis management is about when, not if.

📖 2. Course Assessment and Expectations

★ Must-know

• The final grade is divided into:

  • 15% individual participation
  • 25% midterm examination
  • 40% final examination
  • 20% group project

• The plan is graded according to: use of course concepts: 13 points, clarity, feasibility, structure, and attention to detail: 5 points, creativity: 2 points

📌 An unjustified absence results in a zero for that day's participation grade, and missing the final group presentation without justified cause lowers the grade for both the absent student and the group.

Further detail

📌 Generative AI may not be used in class deliverables unless the instructor explicitly states otherwise.

💡 Memory Hook

P-E-G: Participation, Exams, Group work.

📖 3. Team Roles Under Pressure

★ Must-know

• 🔄 The team ice-breaker proceeds through: individual reflection, assigning one crisis-related role to each teammate, preparing a one-slide team introduction, presenting the team in under a minute

Further detail

• The activity uses six roles:
  • staying calm
  • taking charge
  • creating a solution
  • panicking first
  • maintaining morale
  • spotting risks before others

📌 Each teammate must be assigned a role at least once, and the team must justify every choice in at least one spoken sentence.

💡 Memory Hook

Reflect → assign roles → present.

📖 4. Classifying Organizational Crises

★ Must-know

📌 A case is classified as a crisis when it fits one or more crisis types, whereas a routine, planned, or normally tolerated event is classified as not a crisis.

• 🔄 Case classification requires teams to: decide whether the case is a crisis, identify one or more crisis types if applicable, research uncertain cases, justify the classification

Further detail

• Examples classified as not crises include:
  • Apple postponing software features to improve quality
  • Jeff Bezos moving from CEO to Executive Chair
  • Tesla delaying Model 3 production targets while continuing operations

💡 Memory Hook

Crisis versus routine, planned, or tolerated events.

📖 5. Crisis Definition and Types

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Organizational crisis : Seeger, Sellnow, & Ulmer, 1998 — a specific, unexpected, and non-routine event that creates high levels of uncertainty and threatens or is perceived to threaten an organization's high-priority goals
• Potential crisis : A potential crisis is a threat that has not fully materialized yet.

★ Must-know

• The six crisis types are:
  • financial
  • informational
  • destruction of property
  • human resources
  • reputational
  • violent behavior

Further detail

• The course uses these examples:
  • Lehman Brothers' 2008 bankruptcy
  • Equifax's 2017 hack
  • Deepwater Horizon's 2010 explosion
  • Uber's 2017 workplace scandal
  • Volkswagen's 2015 emissions cheating
  • the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack

💡 Memory Hook

F-I-P-H-R-V: Financial, Informational, Property, Human resources, Reputational, Violent behavior.

📖 6. Crisis Phases and Management

★ Must-know

• The crisis timeline has three phases: pre-crisis, crisis event, and post-crisis.

• During the pre-crisis phase, threats grow, warning signs may appear, and organizations prepare for and prevent crises.

• During the crisis event, the majority of the damage occurs and the organization must respond while the situation is unfolding.

• During the post-crisis phase, some order is re-established, explanations are investigated, and the organization learns from what went wrong.

Further detail

• Organizations commonly over-invest attention in the crisis event and under-invest in prevention and learning, even though crisis management is won or lost across all three phases.

💡 Memory Hook

Pre-crisis → crisis event → post-crisis.

📖 7. Course Roadmap and Deliverables

★ Must-know

• The remaining sessions cover:

  • preparedness
  • organizational vulnerability
  • decision-making under uncertainty
  • crisis leadership and communication
  • crisis and culture
  • technology and crisis
  • the post-crisis phase
  • next-generation crisis-management plans

• The semester-long crisis-management plan is built progressively across sessions for an organization selected by each team.

• The final group presentation requires each team to explain how it would manage the crisis facing its chosen organization and forms the culmination of the crisis-management plan.

Further detail

📌 Before the next class, teams must review the final group-project folder and choose an organization, with each team working on a different organization on a first-come, first-served basis.

💡 Memory Hook

Preparedness → vulnerability → uncertainty → leadership → culture → technology → learning → planning.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Six Crisis Types

Type	What it threatens or involves	Course example
Financial	Money, solvency, stock price, or market access	Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 2008
Informational	Critical information or trust in it	Equifax hack, 2017
Destruction of property	Facilities, assets, or infrastructure	Deepwater Horizon explosion, 2010
Human resources	People inside the organization	Uber workplace scandal, 2017
Reputational	Public trust or organizational image	Volkswagen emissions cheating, 2015
Violent behavior	Physical violence involving employees, customers, or outsiders	Charlie Hebdo attack, 2015