Crisis Stories: Lessons from a Food Poisoning Crisis

Following the announcement of the food poisoning crisis investigation results, mentioned in the previous blog post “176 Guests Fall Ill at a Hotel Chain!”, the crisis management team used the assistance of two consulting firms to solve the issue.

Since the hotel chain management had already conducted a similar crisis management plan (CMP) exercise five months prior this food poisoning crisis, the CEO was confident that it will work perfectly. However, the CMP failed and was not able to protect the chain! Why?

Many people were not able to cope with this crisis and others reacted in a very negative manner;
The level of detail in the planning was misleading: “what looks good in paper does not really work in practice”;
All employees were acting according to a plan; yet, this plan was not good for all the customers;
No training suitable for a typical huge crisis was offered to the property managers and no “crisis culture” was created: “the mere existence of CMPs does not mean that the entire chain is crisis prepared”;
The managers were given a detailed sequence of tasks aiming at “effective crisis response” but in reality, they did not know what to do;
The hotel chain succeeded in articulating the goal; yet, it did not involve unit managers in this process which means that it failed “to make it common”;
The CMP “did not allow any flexibility for the unit managers to act according to their better judgement and deal with the crisis as they felt appropriate”;
The crisis task force (CTF) which was supposed to help managers solve the crisis was instead disrupting them;
Although the reporting system worked well in identifying the crisis at its early stage, the nature of the crisis and the fact that it happened on a Saturday evening did not allow for better preparations;
Although an email communication system and a dedicated crisis website were created to spread information to and from the hotel chain’s headquarters, the website only provided limited information.

So how can hotels in a typical crisis win?

Paraskevas (2006) recommends the following:

Create a common mindset for all the company in terms of what a CMP means and what it is here to do;
Redefine the purpose of the response system by replacing the narrow objectives of the CMP’s tasks with the broader concepts of the organization’s robustness and resilience;
Enable the organization to become resistant to perturbations and enhance its capacity to restore itself after a crisis;
Set a common goal and let it be co‐created with all the actors involved;
Decentralize information flow: two‐way, horizontal as well as vertical;
Remain resilient and flexible especially when dealing with human victims;
Ask for constant feedback network as that is how you can continually detect warning signals and assess the progress of the crisis response;

This crisis has proven that having a plan is extremely vital. Nonetheless, “a detailed CMP does not necessarily guarantee an effective crisis response”. Instead, any company must view crisis response as a living system within a firm, not only a set of procedures.

Source

Paraskevas, A. (2006). Crisis management or crisis response system? A complexity science approach to organizational crises. Management Decision, 44(7), 892-907. Retrieved from https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/00251740610680587/full/html

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