| Review of: | The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure by A. Boin, P. 't Hart, E. Stern, B. Sundelius |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Ira Helsloot |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 15, Issue 03, Pages 168-170 |
Book Reviews
The politics of crisis management strives to be a 'comprehensive analysis [in which] the authors examine how leaders deal with the strategic challenges they face, the political risk and opportunities they encounter, the errors they make, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the paths away from crisis they may pursue'. The 150 pages which result from this endeavor are, to start with a conclusion, good reading especially for students, clearly to few to handle the subject at hand precisely and fully and probably too long and scientific to be read by the leaders themselves.
What this book does is bring together the major points of the existing literature on the subject of public leadership in times of crisis. Much of this literature has originally been written or discussed by the authors before so they clearly master the subject. A special feature of this book is the abundance of examples, which accounts in part for the high readability.
The authors describe five 'critical tasks for leaders': sense making, decision making, meaning making, terminating and learning. Each task is then awarded its own chapter in the book. The fact that these tasks are essentially woven for public leaders is reflected in the discussions in the different chapters, which often touch on the themes of the other chapters.
Sense making may be considered as the classical situation assessment step in decision making. This book especially focuses on the barriers to crisis recognition, which often hamper individuals and leaders.
Decision making is, as the authors promise, considered to be both the act of coming to a decision as the implementation of that decision. The book however focuses mainly on the act of making a decision itself. In practice the overwhelming problems of implementing that decision, at least in the acute phase of a crisis, are for the greater part left untreated.
Meaning making refers to crisis management as political communication. Indeed, as is well known, the authors explain that the quality of crisis decision making can be fully independent from the perception of that quality in the media and with the general public.
Terminating a crisis is according to the authors only possible if the public leader correctly handles the accountability question. In their treatment of this 'task' the authors seem a little naive or perhaps I am too cynical. Where the authors speak of possibilities - 'if a post-crisis evaluation identifies failures of prevention' - I myself believe that no crisis nowadays is fully terminated without having pointed at the culprit and public leaders having promised that they will remedy this. Just 'bad luck' is not accepted these days, which by the way is in flagrant contradiction with risk management strategies that by law are usually based on probability calculations. So where the authors point out that 'accountability is hollow when [it] becomes ritualized' I am afraid it already is for the greater part.
In the chapter on learning, the authors in fact take that same stance i.e. actual learning from a crisis is limited. Though as they note, a crisis often opens a window of opportunity for reform for better or for worse. Of course, this theme is home ground for the authors who have published several famous articles and books on this subject.
In their concluding chapter 'how to deal with crisis' the authors, rather than giving tips and tricks, sum up all possible barriers to adequate crisis management. Here, those that would try to improve their crisis management skills by just reversing the mentioned barrier often will face an essential non-accomplishable task. While it is true for example that 'crisis can become uncontrollable when leaders fail to develop a clear picture of the unfolding events' the very essence of a crisis is that this clear picture cannot be developed. The 'uncertainty' element in crisis asks for decision making on the basis of an unclear picture of the crisis at hand.
Let me conclude with just a few words on the impreciseness and incompleteness of the book. It may be just the former mathematician who is disturbed but when on page 2 a definition of crisis is given in terms of threat, urgency and uncertainty it is imprecise to write on the following page that 'crisis typically and understandably
Overall I would say that while it cannot be said that this book is a comprehensive analysis, there however can be no doubt that this book is a good introduction to the theme of public leadership during times of crisis.