Crisis Response : Aligning Scripts and Actors

This paper presents an initial discussion on the relevance of ostensive and performative routines as they relate to business resilience, with a specific focus on the responsive resilience routine of crisis management. While it can be argued that across the elements of business resilience there is an importance of alignment between the written script and performance, it is during the management of a crisis that minimizing the gap between the ostensive and the performative routines is vital. At the holistic level, within crisis management response, the crisis management plan and its components form the ostensive routine, which becomes the script for the crisis team to follow. The script is ingrained into team member behaviour through continuous rehearsal, which can be described as the ongoing education, training and process validation that participants on the crisis team undergo in order to ensure that during a crisis, their performance is aligned with the script. That said, what has been observed time and again, is a deviation between the script, the rehearsals, and the actual performative routine. During an actual crisis issues are created when the gap between the performance and ostensive routine grows too large, or, following an acting analogy, where the actors forget what they have practiced in rehearsals and create their own script. During work in the food-manufacturing sector, this deviation has been observed repeatedly and most critically in the first 24 to 48 hours of a response, the period when it is arguably most important for the script to be followed and the correct routines applied