Crisis Management Resolution - Essay Example

Whereby it is difficult to maintain the old systems of an organization. This leads us to the fourth important characteristic of a crisis, which is the need of initiating a change. If there is no need for a change, it is possible to describe the event under consideration as an incident, or a failure, and not a crisis (Crandall, Parnell, and Spillan, 2010). Crisis management differs from risk management.

Risk management involves analyzing the potential threats, and finding out the best method of avoiding these threats. Crisis management involves analyzing the threats before their emergence, and also after they have emerged. Crisis management is a discipline, within a wider perspective of management (Blyth, 2009). It consists of techniques and skills that an individual needs to identify, understand, assess, and cope up with serious managerial and organizational situations. The skills of crisis management should be put into use, from the time in which the crisis begins to the time at which the recovery process ends. Identifying those threats is an essential process of crisis management (Crandall, Parnell, and Spillan, 2010). It is the occurrence of these threats that the management of an organization will develop a series of plans and strategies to protect the business organization from collapsing or falling. For purposes of reducing uncertainties in the event of an occurrence of a crisis, organizations normally develop a crisis management plan.

A crisis management plan identifies the process which an organization will initiate to solve the problem under consideration. Crisis management has a direct relation with business. Most business organizations normally undergo a crisis in one form or another. A good example is in 1993 when Pepsi faced a crisis in its operations (Gilpin and Murphy, 2008). This is when syringes were found in the cans belonging to Pepsi. The organization advised the stores where these syringes were found to retain the cans until an investigation was completed. It followed this process by releasing a video that showed how difficult it was to introduce foreign objects in the cans and the packaging process of the company. This was aimed at proving the assertion that the syringes were not introduced in the company, but outside the company (Gilpin and Murphy, 2008).  A crisis can lead to the downfall of a business organization, hence the need for proper crisis management plans.

This article analyzes the four stages involved in crisis management. These stages are crisis prevention, incident preparation, response generation, and recovery efforts. Crisis prevention involves preventing the occurrence of a conflict through initiating measures and means of identifying the crisis and developing strategies to prevent it. Incident preparation involves having a plan on how to solve a crisis. Response generation involves how a company will respond to a situation when it emerges. A crisis normally happens within a short time, and hence companies need to have the ability to respond within a short period, to solve the crisis under consideration. The final step is the recovery phase. Under this phase, the company seeks to recover from the crisis that it once suffered. To avoid a crisis, a company should follow the mentioned four steps.