Crisis Management Assignment: Anticipations And Aversion Of Emergency Within Firm

Question

Task: Choose a topic that you want to talk about. Work out an argument in relation to this topic and create & record a short speech. After you have created the speech, write a critical reflection on the same (please DO NOT record the critical reflection), demonstrating appropriate use of one or more CT models. Like the previous assignment, this one is also an individual task that each student must do on his/her own. However you may discuss your work with other students either in class or online.

Suggested approach: Choose a topic that is familiar to you, identify the key issues, work out a set of coherent arguments for it and provide supporting evidence that is logical and meaningful. Use persuasive reasoning in your speech and comply with the processes for an effective discourse as presented in this unit. Note that the topic should ideally be something that requires persuasion and evidence in order to inform and/or convince your target audience. Although you may choose similar topics to other students, your argument as written in your transcript must be unique to yourself.
The critical reflection on the speech should analyse its components, arguments, evidence and style.

Broad criteria for marking (please see posted rubric for more details on the marking process):

1. Critical thinking used in the development of argument, explanation, inferences, examples, assumptions, and reflection
2. Problem solving – identification of key issues in the topic and defensible resolutions posited
3. Overall flow and presentation of the speech, reflection and transcript, style, use of evidence

Answer

Introduction: I would like to choose the topic “Crisis Management for Managers” in the given task citing some examples regarding to the topic, finding the probable issues with it and find solutions for the mentioned issue. In the present generation we see a lot of new companies coming up and a lot more struggling to stand where they began with. In such a mushrooming state of culture it is really hard for any firm to maintain its stand in the competition and in the process of which come a lot of issues that prove to be hindrances in the path (Booth, 2015). Such situations in the present day are widely termed as Crisis and they have been prevalent everywhere. In this reflection I will discuss about the term vividly and get an insight of it with clarity.

Key Issues: Crisis can be explained as a period of emergency in a firm during which it has to deal with troublesome situations and unanticipated proceedings that can be potential threats to the firm by affecting not only the firm but also shaking the share holders to bits. A situation of crisis threats the organisation to jeopardy, brings in an element of surprise to the firm and also allows with a very short time to decide and take actions to make peace.

Crisis can be of many types like a naturally occurring phenomenon that can bring damage to the organisation, a fault in the technical aspects of the firm that leads to losses in almost all the levels in the functioning, a mutual agreement to fraud or similar wrongful deeds that leads to the reputation of the company put at stake, unlawful activities by the competitors leading to issues in the organisation, a sort of violence taking place between the employees of the firm that causes the decorum of the company to be shaken or terrorist attacks (Bellomo et al., 2016).

All these situations when show up, get a lot of emergencies to a firm and there needs to be some immediate action that can be taken to curb the problem at ease for the rest. At times there are situations when an erroneous information regarding the company is spread across the visible technical surrounding that takes along a wrong name to the firm and leads to a big crisis for the same. As per Drennan, McConnell & Stark (2014), Crisis in all possible terms happen to be sudden issues that come up and thus they cannot be blamed on anyone in particular (Drennan, McConnell & Stark, 2014).

As an example, it so happened recently that a video entertainment company was on its day of launching itself in the market and had arranged a huge press conference for their public appearance. On the very day of the launch of its products, the website that they were linked to crashed and the sole basis of their product went down the trash that led to a real hard time for the entire team to figure out ways to get back on track (Eriksson, 2017).

Ethos: This brings a real bad name to the credibility of the organisation on the investors, shareholders and the employees as well. With such a huge problem on such a huge day of celebration, the failure could be a challenge to the credibility associated with the name of the firm badly. When the people associated with the company from any part learned about the break down, it was evident that they lost their respect and faith over it. that was when the crisis initially begun. It does not just bring the state of the firm into jeopardy but also puts the name of the organisation at a questionable state.

Pathos: The employees working with the firm with all their emotions come with a breakdown of the morale that they gathered during work. It not only shatters them emotionally but also misses out on providing them with logic for working. On the day of such importance and branding, when people as audience witnessed such a dramatic break down, it did not emotionally break the people associated but imagining the situation of the people was painful. Getting into the shoes of the employees, employers and the share holders, it can be a tough situation to even imagine as it is such a difficult phase. People who had given their blood and sweat to the firm could not see the results on the that they had been waiting since a long time! What could be worse than that! It was like a dream getting shattered badly!

Logos: During crisis, logical thinking is very important and hence in the critical thinking methods, it is very important to find logic behind every move. It is evident that the people associated with the firm would be emotionally and psychologically broken. But it needs to be dealt with logic. It is difficult to cope up but to fight back and achieve the dream is the next goal. For the organisation, it might be difficult to get back on the track and achieve the goal but nonetheless it is never impossible. Logically it is the point of attention to think of what was the initial goal and then march ahead towards achieving it.

The next fortnight happened to be a big time challenge for each of them and within the next two weeks they came out triumphant with a much better interface and system. They managed to have a huge launch to their product and a great kick start to have them boosted to work better. The first task they did was make a crisis management team and then formulate ways to get better and reach where they reached on the second launch day (Liu, Shankar & Yun, 2017).

According to the trusted models of Critical thinking, in situations of such emergency and problems, it is advised to have a chronological approach of thinking over the issue and then getting it solved. At the first step it is important to Recognise the assumptions that can be involved in the crisis and for the example of the situation that has been cited here, it was the job of the managers to assume of the probable reasons of the systems getting crashed. After having numerous assumptions the actual reason could be figured out and then was the time to think of the second step of critical thinking model that was followed in the case. It was time for the proper evaluation of the arguments which were raised during the crisis resolution. Assumptions would anyways give way to arguments in many versions that would then give way to coming to a particular decision being taken. In this case, there had been a lot of arguments among the employees about the reason behind the break down. Hence after a lot of arguments it comes to drawing the conclusions out of all the arguments and arguments. Therefore the new team that was assigned got all the departments together and came to a common conclusion which resulted in the huge success of the organisation again with better results. This method of critical thinking and its model is named as RED as it has the sections as Recognising the Assumptions, Evaluating the arguments and the Drawing the conclusions for the situation.

Solution: As per Jin, Liu & Austin (2014), crisis management basically means a circumstance based management system that works on clearing the roles and works related to the company in a very well mannered process. They work on separate segments all together and make sure that the crisis is not just work off but is never allowed to re-appear (Jin, Liu & Austin, 2014). The areas of function of a crisis management team can be many like one department to clear the crisis, one to prevent it, one to assess the entire situation, one to handle the situation and a last department to termination the condition of crisis.

The primary motto behind a crisis management team is to prepare itself well before the situation, make sure that a spontaneous action can be taken in the period of crisis, maintaining proper guidelines for the process of communication during crisis and generate ways and methods to eradicate crisis from the firm on a permanent basis. The crisis management team works on the basis of some of the strategies and guiding principles. They work mainly on the procedures that can be implemented in responding to the crisis situations and the perceiving how big the crisis is. Then the work to establish methods to bring a clear picture of the scenarios around that can be helpful to generate the receptive mechanisms. Finally they work towards getting a proper communication path that can generate the appropriate and desired emergency communication to take place (Williams et al., 2017). All these methods that are made useful the business world and professional work places are termed as Crisis management plans.

There are separate studies allocated to crisis management and meritorious students get into learning all of these strategies in proper. The trustworthiness and status of a company is highly prejudiced by the way they respond to crisis situations. At times it is evident that some firms panic and showcase behaviour of fear and emergency that is untameable. It is obligatory to maintain a rapid responsive action plan ready so that it does not get bad name to the firm. At times of crisis when the entire firm is at a position of anomaly and disturbance, it is importance for someone from the team to take the lead and display leadership during the situation just to make situations better,

This not just brings the adrenaline rush of the employees to a normal, but also helps get a breathing space and think of strategies that can be helpful to get rid of the situation. Hence crisis leadership is a necessity during crisis in any kind of a firm to keep things in control.

Conclusion: Hence in the present situation the number of companies and corporate growing leads to number of crisis as well as they go hand in hand. It is therefore important to discuss about managing them and getting rid of the problem effective immediately.

References
Booth, S.A., 2015. Crisis management strategy: Competition and change in modern enterprises. Routledge.

Booth, S.A., 2015. Crisis management strategy: Competition and change in modern enterprises. Routledge.

Drennan, L.T., McConnell, A. and Stark, A., 2014. Risk and crisis management in the public sector. Routledge.

Eriksson, J. ed., 2017. Threat Politics: New Perspectives on Security, Risk and Crisis Management: New Perspectives on Security, Risk and Crisis Management. Routledge.

Liu, Y., Shankar, V. and Yun, W., 2017. Crisis management strategies and the long-term effects of product recalls on firm value. Journal of Marketing, 81(5), pp.30-48.

Jin, Y., Liu, B.F. and Austin, L.L., 2014. Examining the role of social media in effective crisis management: The effects of crisis origin, information form, and source on publics’ crisis responses. Communication research, 41(1), pp.74-94.

Williams, T.A., Gruber, D.A., Sutcliffe, K.M., Shepherd, D.A. and Zhao, E.Y., 2017. Organizational response to adversity: fusing crisis management and resilience research streams. Academy of Management Annals, 11(2), pp.733-769.