Research


Crisis Management

Crises are a relentless feature of modern life. The Munich Olympics, Tylenol tampering, Exxon Valdez, Asian Currency Crisis, Ford Explorer rollovers, September 11, Northeast black-out, Worldcom, Hurricane Katrina|hardly a day goes by without some sort of crisis in the news. Of course, this is partly media marketing -- tragedy generates better ratings than triumph. But there is no question that the crises are real and involve enormous consequences in human life, ¯nancial costs, environmental impacts and social disruption. As a result, effective crisis management is a challenge that eventually faces most leaders of public and private organizations.

Unfortunately, while routine day-to-day management has been supported by a steadily systematized body of knowledge, consisting of economic theory, statistical tools, operational models, behavioral science, and results from other disciplines, crisis management remains largely anecdotal and ad hoc. As a result, academic courses on the subject are almost exclusively case based and practitioners rely on benchmarking, checklists and contingency plans. While cases are valuable for building insight, they can only go so far in helping to prepare for future events that never fully duplicate the past. Similarly, benchmarks and checklists can help one organization borrow ideas from another, but cannot create new insights.

The OPEM research group brings together (a) the social network approach to model communication and collaboration within an organization, (b) the flow network approach from production systems to model task processing and congestion in the system, and (c) insights from organizational learning and crisis management to inform modeling choices about human problem solving behavior under non-routine conditions. By studying the properties of adaptive response networks, we hope to gain insights into the structural features that facilitate effective crisis management. By modeling organizations as adaptive response networks, we develop diagnostic tools for evaluating their preparedness for crisis situations.

Graduate Students

• Zigeng Yin
• Yao Cheng