Crisis Management

In a crisis-prone VUCA environment, it is no longer a matter of avoiding crises and directing all management capacities toward this goal. Rather, it is about managing crises situationally and through concrete action – action in the sense of damage reduction and problem solving that involves large parts of the workforce. This is necessary in order to prevent the search for the causes of a crisis from being based solely on the observations and assessments of a narrow circle of managers. This would lead to sensemaking, which has the potential to further exacerbate the crisis. In order to overcome crises and even emerge stronger from them, it is necessary to mobilize the company’s internal resources across hierarchies and organizations. This requires a frame of reference that provides orientation without obscuring the view of the causes of crises and ways of combating them. Since crises are fundamentally considered to be communicative constructs, whose extent and direction of development can therefore also be influenced by communication, crisis communication provides important contributions to crisis management.