Crisis Management training in Lausanne · canton of VaudCrisis management in the canton of Vaud: how can teams coordinate when procedures are no longer enough?
In the canton of Vaud, connections between EPFL, UNIL, medtech, SMEs, Lake Geneva region scale-ups and food industry groups on the Riviera create numerous interfaces between professions and organisations. For SHR's crisis management programme, this raises a managerial question: how can coherent collective action be maintained when events exceed the scope of established procedures?
1. What the literature establishes: a plan alone cannot sustain shared understanding
Karl E. Weick (1993, Administrative Science Quarterly) analyses the Mann Gulch disaster to understand how an organisation can disintegrate when its members can no longer make shared sense of events. His analysis connects the breakdown of roles with the breakdown of collective understanding: knowing what each person should do also depends on understanding what is happening. This case does not demonstrate that procedures are useless; it shows why their existence alone cannot guarantee coordination.
2. A complementary mechanism: coordinating expertise, not just positions
Samer Faraj and Yan Xiao (2006, Management Science) study coordination in a trauma centre facing situations that demand a rapid response. They distinguish expertise coordination practices from dialogic practices that enable teams to address situations departing from expectations collectively. Their work suggests that coordination also depends on mobilising relevant knowledge and discussing competing interpretations, rather than solely on formally allocating tasks.
3. The hasty conclusion: replacing procedures with improvisation
One might conclude that a competent team should be able to dispense with any framework during a crisis. That would confuse coordinated adaptation with a series of individual initiatives: shared reference points remain necessary to make decisions understandable and connect actions. The managerial task is instead to specify what remains stable — responsibilities, safety constraints and traceability — and what can be adapted. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limits: specific settings, not validation for Vaud
A retrospective disaster analysis and an organisational study in trauma care do not establish a universal recipe for businesses in Vaud. The constraints facing a medtech company, a university or an international sports organisation differ, particularly in their regulatory obligations and interdependencies. A successful exercise therefore does not prove that an organisation will manage a real crisis effectively; more modestly, it can reveal coordination breakdowns under explicit conditions.
5. A practical check in Lausanne
In Lausanne, a possible exercise for SHR's crisis management programme would simulate the unavailability of a platform supplied by a Lake Geneva region scale-up during an event involving a university, a medtech company and an international sports organisation: this is a hypothetical scenario, not a client case. Next, introduce information that makes the initial plan unworkable, then ask participants to keep a critical-action log identifying the person responsible, the expertise required and dependencies on other teams. The proposed measure is the proportion of these actions for which responsibility has been explicitly confirmed by the people concerned before execution. Repeating the scenario after a debrief allows participants to compare that proportion and identify handovers that remain ambiguous, without treating the result as a guarantee of performance in a real crisis. To go further: explore the Crisis Management training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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