The very act of calling an event or situation a “crisis” is an exercise of power that closes down an expected future (Wilkinson and Ramirez 2010). Organization theorist Bill Starbuck, who has extensively studied how people learn (or don’t) in crises (2009), noted that the emotional aspects in cognition make it difficult for people to leam from events considered “one-off exceptions” or “rare.” As he put it, “reactions to the uncertainty (of and in rare events) include wishful thinking, substituting prior beliefs for analysis, biasing probability distributions towards certainties, searching for more data, acting cautiously, and playing to audiences. (But sometimes people leam in crises, see Box 3.4 on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.)
The OSPA suggests that scenario planning can be used to support better shared sensemaking. In crisis situations this shared sense often does not have the time to arise. Because scenario planning allows disagreeing views, it can reveal, compare, and test alternative framings that can help to prevent premature foreclosure on the crisis problem definition, and to instead promote learning as inquiry and reflection
Change during a time of crisis is so interesting. My experience is that people tend to jump straight to (prior) solutions and what we already know. The challenge with this is that they may no longer be applicable. On the flipside, Steve Collis also talks about the risk of trauma about changing too much too fast. Rafael Ramirez and Angela Wilkinson’s discussion of scenario planning and sense making reminds me of Venkatesh Rao’s comparison of map-makers and sense-makers. Rao actually suggests that the notion of something being ‘weird’ is “a sense-making failure in response to a shock.”
John Johnston