The Art of Crisis Management Methods and Treatments
Dr.assad ghali
The world and Iraq have lived through countless crises. The way to solve, avoid or get out of these crises with minimal losses has not been reliable in this country during the past five decades.
Rather, the use of force, and even brute force, was the decisive highway to resolve those crises, leading to new crises or complicating the crisis itself. The crisis in its comprehensive definition means an expected or unexpected serious threat to the goals, values, beliefs, and property of individuals, organizations, and states, and therefore it is the critical moment and the turning point that relates to the administrative, economic or political fate of the organization or state, and often coincides with the element of surprise, which requires a high skill to manage and address it legitimately and legally and not with violent or improvised decisions.
The concept of crisis management
The Administrative Encyclopedia defines crisis management as preserving the assets and property of the organization, and its ability to generate revenues, as well as preserving individuals and employees against various risks, and working to avoid potential risks or mitigate their impact on the organization, in case they cannot be avoided completely," and this also applies to the state and its administrations.
Many researchers find that crisis management is the science and art of managing balances and adapting to different variables and researching their effects in all fields and can also be said to be the process of preparation and systematic and systematic assessment of internal and external problems that seriously threaten the reputation and survival of the organization.
Crisis Management System
Several researchers have listed five stages of the crisis management system, namely:
1- Detection of warning signals: It means the diagnosis of indicators and symptoms that predict the occurrence of a crisis.
2- Preparedness and prevention: this means prior preparations to deal with the expected crisis, with the intention of preventing its occurrence or minimizing its effects.
3 - Containment of damage: It means the implementation of what is planned in the stage of preparedness and prevention and preventing the aggravation of the crisis and its spread.
4 - Restoration of activity: These are the operations carried out by the executive branch for the purpose of restoring its balance and ability to carry out its normal business, as before.
5- Benefit or learning: It means crystallizing and establishing controls to prevent the recurrence of such a crisis and building experiences from lessons and experience to ensure a high level of readiness in the future. It is also necessary to benefit from the experiences of other organizations and countries that have gone through crises and the means they have used. Any solution or response to any crisis is the art of scientific management of the crisis based on the laws and regulations in force, and to stay away from illegal and illegitimate ways to confront it and may require the imposition of the law as a basis for solving a crisis, but this purpose should not be taken as a justification for the use of brute force, the violation of human rights or unjustified economic and political damage.
Crisis Management Team:
Researchers and specialists agree that any crisis requires a working group to manage it, and must represent the highest authority because the crisis requires unconventional reactions limited by time constraints sometimes, situation pressures, and the method of the work team is the most common and used way to deal with crises, and the team must include a number of experts in the field of competence of the crisis and in various other fields related to the crisis. The living example in Iraq now is embodied in the law enforcement plan as a basis for resolving the crisis in Iraq, there is a political team, a military one, a third for services, and another for popular mobilization.
Planning
Planning is a prerequisite in the crisis management process, as in the absence of a planning regulation it is not possible to face crises, and therefore end the crisis itself the way it wants it or those in charge of it not in the way it ends legally and without serious losses to both parties.
The difficult art is when something happens that you don't expect Jerry Sekitic summed up the importance of crisis management planning in his book All Risks when he wrote: No management is well tested except in crisis situations, the leadership must go directly to the workers in their institutions and present the crisis plan to them, asking for the support of each of them, and it must train its workers to test the reality of the solutions developed so that the workers get used over time to dealing with crises as one of the usual work situations and do not focus n on the crisis itself.
The crisis of our administration in Iraq is the failure to adopt the crisis management system and activate it as one of the radical and important solutions in our institutions.
Preventive forecasting:
In the process of crisis management, it is necessary to adopt preventive forecasting through proactive management that adopts the predictive and warning thought to avoid the occurrence of a crisis early by formulating an acceptable preventive system based on initiation and innovation and training workers on it, not to wait for the expected crisis to occur and leave it until it occurs to find solutions or to indulge in studying its solution after it is too late.
There are many crises expected in the current Iraqi situation that must be studied realistically, scientifically, and genuinely by those concerned "researchers, specialists, politicians, clerics” to recommend the bases or foundations of action to solve them and not to wait for their explosion or occurrence!!
There is a huge difference between proactive management that adopts dialogue, negotiations, planning, and solutions to congestion and problems that we may see as small and uncomplicated, but they may become large and complex and not solved at another time.