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during and especially after disasters have struck. two recent articles deal with the crisis/disaster/emergency phenomenon. one, “disasters out of the Box: a New Ballgame?” appears in the September 2012 issue of Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. It was written by Hans de Smet (department of economics, Management and Leadership; royal Military academy, Brussels, Belgium); Patrick Lagadec (département d’economie, Laboratoire d’econométrie, l’ecole Polytechnique, in France), and Jan Leysen (also of the department of economics, Management and Leadership; royal Military academy, Brussels, Belgium). the other, “Fractal Crises—a New Path for Crisis theory and Management,” was written by Benjamin topper (UPMC/eNS Ulm, Paris, France) and Lagadec. It appears in the March 2013 issue of Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.

“disasters out of the Box: a New Ballgame?” treats the topic of the ongoing changes and challenges in the nature of disasters, how they are prepared for, and how they are managed. Lagadec says that “crisis management and business continuity are deeply anchored in our emergency culture. Hence, the development of well-studied typologies of risks and crises.”

If we think of a “box” of known and well-used responses and planning for crisis, recent history has shown that we must think “‘out of the box”‘ to deal with twenty-first-century disasters that have the potential to devastate organizations and municipalities with resulting deadly ripple effects. Lagadec points out that in “each box the best instant technical and organizational responses have been crafted. that approach does not operate well anymore except for very small events. Crucial dimensions have emerged and shattered our conventional models: megashocks, global interdependencies, extreme speed and ignorance.” What can be worse, he says, is that “the problem is no longer the ‘event’ as such, but the whole fabric of technologies, economies, societies, etc., exposed to a new dynamic—structural loss of resilience. this new theater of operation must be considered, even if it is difficult to grasp, to understand and to handle.” He says that if we do not make this conceptual leap in how we think about and deal with disaster, we could be

help make sure that metrics used by the organization are meaningful. For example, anthropologists can collect information on client motivation and identity to increase understanding of client behavior.”

although casual observers might not readily associate these professionals with the business world, most people have read about corporate culture in recent years, which of course is directly related to the work of anthropologists. this book contains one chapter in particular examining this topic, “the Changing rhetoric of Corporate Culture,” by allen W. Batteau, associate professor of anthropology at Wayne State University and former director of the university’s Institute for Information technology and Culture.

In a chapter titled “expanding the Field. . .,” Caulkins and Jordan write that there are two reasons for the increased interest in the past couple of decades in organizational anthropology: “the increase in numbers of anthropologists working outside academia; and the significance of globalization in anthropological research.” In addition, they write, “We conclude that the result of all the work anthropologists conduct in organizations is a body of work on complex organizations that is so large, broad-based, and important to our understanding of life in the twenty-first century as to constitute an important subfield in our discipline.”

PreParING For tHe FUtUre

oF CrISIS MaNaGeMeNt

For anyone working in, and especially those managing and leading, today’s organizations the scope of crisis management can be daunting. a crisis (or disaster, or emergency) can strike at any moment. Many businesses spend considerable time, money, and effort on business continuity planning, so that they can operate

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dealing with relatively minor crises) that serious crisis/disaster planning is often given low priority. Yet according to Benjamin topper, “Can leaders really be blamed for acting like that? Major crises are rare events, therefore spending money to prepare against ‘black swan events’ can appear very cost inefficient. Moreover, it’s almost impossible to find literature estimating the cost of a poorly managed crisis situation compared to a well-managed one, simply because the field lacks of standardized norms for such calculations and evaluations. that’s why more research should be done to study complex crises to understand how one’s behavior can affect the fate of an entire structure, and measure its impact.”

For businesses and nonbusinesses (including local, state, federal, and even foreign governments), some cooperation and knowledge sharing between and among organizations and governments could be helpful in order to best anticipate, plan for, and deal with a crisis.

topper says that “governments should encourage the access for researchers to as much data as possible on crisis situations. Companies and governments should keep detailed records of events during crises situations in order for researchers to work with good-quality data and records. In other words, the first step is to get a better understanding of what’s happening!”

Lagadec believes that leaders must change the way they approach the concept of crisis. “Leaders have been selected,” he says, “because they knew the answers better than the others. Now, they have to be open to questions, to draw the future. this is quite another mission.” He says this causes a tendency to avoid the issue of crisis. and though it is necessary to delegate duties to trained professionals, there is another dimension. He says that “leaders tend to appoint people in charge of risk control, crisis management, and business continuity. they have to understand that, when issues are that vital, they have to commit themselves entirely, personally.”

dealing with even higher costs later on, and we would be, in essence, “a crisis behind.”

according to de Smet, “during an emergency or a disaster, the responding emergency managers act with respect to the existing and known (trained) procedures, permitting them to solve the situation in a convenient way. In some circumstances, the standard procedures are no longer suitable to manage the situation in an efficient and effective way.” this turns the crisis into an “out of the box” situation. He says this can have multiple causes:

• The intervening organization is hit directly by the disaster itself and loses some capacities, such as its workers and leaders and working materials.

• Supporting infrastructure (roads, power supply, and so on) can be destroyed, resulting in the work of the intervening organization becoming compromised.

• The disaster is of an inconceivable nature, never seen before.

Such situations cause an organizational crisis for the intervening agencies, thereby complicating the initial disaster. de Smet says it “has been demonstrated that the disaster landscape has changed considerably. a lot of the disasters we face today are of a very different nature (bigger and more complex to manage) than those we have known until recently (e.g., Indian ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, Fukushima, etc.). In these situations, the existing procedures do not give clear answers. therefore emergency managers should focus more on out of the box situations during training sessions. they should use their imagination to think of situations for which the existing procedures do not give a readymade answer. Make people think. teach them to think out of the box to make quick decisions in order to manage emergencies that are completely new for them.”

Many leaders and managers are so caught up in and distracted by day-to-day operations (including