Coordinating internal crisis management in the event of a serious incident - Strategic level in higher education institutions
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Lene Sandberg
University College Copenhagen (KP) Denmark
lesa@kp.dk
Author(s):
The aim of the presentation is to outline the findings of a fieldwork of how key staff from four Danish University Colleges coordinate their internal crisis management in the event of a serious incident and how practice can be even better. The study’s emphasis is on how the existing knowledge of crisis management for handling and remedying episodes can be developed in interaction with the individual college's practice, framework, organization, and environment.
This study consists of four individual workshops conducted at each of the four University Colleges. At the workshop, selected key staff participated in at simulation exercise. The purpose of the exercises was to give the participants a number of dilemmas that the group had to deal with, and to create a true and fair view of the organization's behavior. Subsequently, the participants should contribute to developing strategies to remedy the episode based on workshops with the strategic crisis management team.
In a previous desktop study, we have investigated written emergency management plans from the same higher education institutions. An interesting result was that institutions tend to be quite specific on operational procedures but less precise on dimensions concerning crisis management on the strategic level.
A final finding is that it is a challenge for all crisis management teams to coordinate the response, especially to define which level of the crisis management team should respond, and it is abundantly clear, that crisis management on the strategic level was not been discussed earlier in their organizations. Another interesting result is that the crisis management teams are untrained in making a situational understanding; the organization lacks the tools to work on crisis management at the strategic level and coordinate across the crisis management levels.
The study is part of a broader study of institutions´ work with emergency management in the Danish public sector, and it takes it´s point of departure in the sector of higher education. There is a specific focus on practices for working with emergency management concerning threats, violence and attacks. One main aim of the study is to investigate how researchers and representatives from the institutions in the sector can co-produce policies, best practices, and guidelines in matters of emergency management to be worked with in the future.
Organizational learning and change during the "Blue Skies"