Crisis Management Reviewed : Dualities, Principles, and Phased Framework

Following a number of recent crises, including, amongst others, financial crises, COVID-19, global climate change, and the Ukraine War, this article reviews the main principles guiding crisis management. Our first aim is to sum up the main lessons that these crises have taught or reminded us of. The fire that burned Notre Dame cathedral in Paris is used to present the dynamics of crisis and to provide a context to illustrate the principle. What is particularly painful in the crisis – a fact that motivated the writing of this article - is to see that these principles are regularly ignored. Crisis is not a time for learning or reinventing what should already be known. Crisis management is a time for experienced hands, endowed with healthy doses of both science and “facts,” and, on the other hand, intuition. On the science side, not learning from the past, or the present, can be very costly. One of the overarching characteristics that renders crisis management complex is that the manager faces a great number of dualities, such as continuing the fight or retreat. These act as tensions affecting decision making in an already charged context. When poorly addressed, each of these dualities may lead to failure. This complexity appears not to have been well recognized in the literature. A final duality is that perspectives in the crisis management literature are typically either internal and organizational, or external and stakeholder focused. Integration in time and across organizational and stakeholder boundaries is the suggestion for further conceptual development and empirical work. The current article fills this gap by joining both perspectives. It does so by presenting a general framework for crisis management that consists of 5 phases to be implemented following a virtuous cycle. The framework allows several clear conclusions: framing and reframing of the crisis are key, the way one gets into a crisis is typically not the way one exits a crisis, and that the how in crisis management (process) is as important as the what (outcomes)