myAIPMTo the edge and beyond: How fast-response organizations adapt in rapidly changing crisis situations
Jan Kees Schakel and Jeroen Wolbers | Sage Journals
Abstract
Fast-response organizations excel in mounting swift and coordinated responses to unexpected events. There are a multitude of conflicting explanations why these organizations excel. These range from acknowledging the strengths of centralized command and control structures, towards stressing the importance of decentralized, improvised action. Though this dichotomy is derived from studies offering either structure or action-based explanations, we were able to reconcile these insights by looking into the process of how fast-responders organize themselves during an unfolding crisis. We analyzed 15 high-speed police pursuits crossing multiple administrative units and jurisdictions, and interviewed and observed officers at work in multiple operations centers, police cars, and helicopters. Our analysis uncovered that fast-responders regularly transition between designed, frontline, and partitioned modes of organizing, each characterized by practices that shape command, allocation, and information sharing. Success and failure are rooted in the ability of the responders to adapt their mode of organizing by tacking back and forth between these practices. Based on our findings, we constructed a process model that provides a deeper understanding of fast-response organizing that informs future studies on organizing in extreme contexts.
Introduction
Fast-response organizations excel in mounting swift and coordinated responses to unexpected events by developing standardized responses to many different kinds of scenarios to minimize communication needs (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011; Bigley and Roberts, 2001). Even then, however, events occasionally occur that develop so problematically that standard procedures no longer suffice (Faraj and Xiao, 2006). In such situations, fast-response organizations are required to adapt and operate outside their routines and standardized operating procedures.
Studies of how fast-response organizations adapt in action are predominantly practice-oriented (Nicolini, 2013; Schatzki, 2001), focusing on the work that responders perform in unexpected situations (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011; Bigley and Roberts, 2001; Bouty et al., 2012; Faraj and Xiao, 2006; Lindberg and Rantatalo, 2015). For instance, Bigley and Roberts (2001) describe how fire departments maintain reliable performance by adapting elements of their scalable Incident Command System through structure elaborating and role switching. Similarly, Bechky and Okhuysen (2011) show how police SWAT teams are able to adapt in action by engaging in practices of role shifting and reorganizing routines. Moreover, Faraj and Xiao (2006) identify how hospital trauma teams engage in alternative patient treatment trajectories by identifying sets of expertise and dialogic practices.
The strength of these studies is that they zoom in on how operators adapt specific practices (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011; Bigley and Roberts, 2001) or switch from one practice to another (Schakel et al., 2016), but less attention has been given to adaptations across sets of practices. This is important, because a crisis often involves a more continuous process of adaptation, forcing fast-response organizations to switch back and forth between coherent sets of practices that constitute different modes of organizing. For example, studies of the Breivik terror attack in Norway show how the police had difficulty aligning work practices at the command center with those of the various response units (Bye et al., 2019; Christensen et al., 2015; Rimstad and Sollid, 2015). Switching back and forth between centralized and more decentralized modes of organizing proved troublesome, prolonging the devastating attack for hours (Bye et al., 2019). Similar problematic shifts in modes of organizing are visible in the aftermath of 9/11 (Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2016) and the Stockwell shooting in London (Colville et al., 2013; Cornelissen et al., 2014).
To gain a better understanding of how fast-response organizations adapt their mode of organizing, we focused on police pursuits. Pursuits offer a suitable setting for studying different modes of organizing, as they are characterized by episodes of fast-paced action alternated with periods of relative stability. This presents multiple challenges in terms of how fast-responders, originating from different administrative units and jurisdictions, temporarily form one organization to coordinate action and retain situational awareness, while composition and leadership may change during the pursuit. Learning from such operations is crucial, as patterns engrained through daily operations are thought to influence action in more extreme operations (Bye et al., 2019).
We pose the following research question: How do responders adapt their mode of organizing to match the dynamics of an unfolding crisis? By answering this question, we provide a more complete understanding of the process of fast-response organizing that will be of value to future studies on organizing in extreme contexts in organization and management studies (Hällgren et al., 2018; van der Vegt et al., 2015; Williams et al., 2017).
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To the edge and beyond: How fast-response organizations adapt in rapidly changing crisis situations, Jan Kees Schakel and Jeroen Wolbers, Sage Journals, 2020