Post crisis evaluation and learning

A crisis is an opportunity to rethink and learn, so it can result in a positive outcome. It can hold the power to create a new beginning by helping you re-evaluate your business priorities and put them into practice. You can turn that negative experience into increased sales, increased profits and growth opportunities.

A top-notch approach to enhancing crisis management capabilities involves dedicating time after each crisis — regardless of its scale — to assess successes, pinpoint areas for improvement, and refine both crisis management plans and staff training. This strategy ensures that the experience gained improves the business’s ability as a whole to weather subsequent incidents.

The last section of your crisis management plan includes a section about post-crisis evaluation. If you haven’t downloaded the plan yet, you’ll find the link to it in the topic overview above. 

Crisis evaluation

Crisis evaluation involves an organisation looking back at a crisis to see what went well and what could have been done better. Sources of information include:

• customer feedback and comments
• media coverage
• crisis records

Crises records can provide important information on how the crisis was handled. Information that should be recorded includes:

• how were your notification processes?
• who was notified? When? How?
• were customer inquiries answered? How long did it take?
• were media enquiries delayed or ignored?
• were effective or ineffective messages distributed to customers using the media, social and digital media?
• how was important information processed correctly?

Organisational memory and learning

After a crisis, the insights gained from the experience become part of the organisation’s collective memory, ensuring that valuable information isn’t lost over time. Post-crisis, to learn, an organisation must remember:

• what happened
• how it was handled
• its impact
• customer response

It’s vital to record and retain both successes and failures. People tend to forget and not learn from past experiences, especially if there is little to no post-crisis evaluation or record keeping.

To keep experience gained through previous crises businesses as a whole must spend time:

• evaluating what happened during the crisis and recognise failures in your or other organisation’s responses
• share lessons learned amongst staff
• pass on this knowledge to new employees or they’ll be destined to repeat the failures of the past

This provides an opportunity for businesses to confront their problems. Employees must learn and retain what they can from previous successes and failures, while continuing to embrace the learning process.  This is called organisational learning.

When businesses fail to learn from previous mistakes, we are susceptible to repeating these mistakes.

Four common reasons why organisations fail to learn from their failures:

• failure to look or pay attention to problems, internally and externally
• a lack of understanding of how pieces of information fit together to provide important lessons on avoiding crises
• not sufficiently rewarding people who report problems and take actions to avoid crises
• failure to learn from crises and record important lessons as part of organisational memory