Innovating under Pressure—Towards a Science of Crisis Management

We propose a rigorous modeling framework for characterizing the structural ability of organizations to respond quickly and effectively to unanticipated events. As such, we seek to provide a theoretical basis for improved crisis management strategies. Our framework conceptualizes organizations as adaptive, responsive networks. Most of the existing models of complex social networks to date, however, have not explicitly modeled human capacity constraints or system congestion. As a result, no viable frameworks exist for investigating the responsiveness of various organizational structures under crisis conditions. Our approach proposes to integrate the social network approach to modeling communication and collaboration with the flow network approach from production systems modeling to represent task processing and flow under crisis conditions. By providing analytic structure to decision making environments currently viewed as not amenable to formal methods, this research, we hope, will help improve the performance of various organizations in both the private and public sectors.