Crisis Management training in Basel · canton of Bâle-VilleCrisis management in the canton of Basel-Stadt: how can teams prepare cover for an unavailable expert?

In Basel-Stadt, the concentration of pharmaceutical and life sciences activities brings together highly qualified international research teams whose daily work is shaped by proximity to France and Germany. For SHR’s “Crisis Management” programme, this raises a practical question: how can access to critical expertise be maintained when its usual holder becomes unavailable?

What the literature establishes

Diane Wei Liang, Richard L. Moreland and Linda Argote (1995, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) compared groups whose members had trained together or separately on an assembly task. Their study shows the value of collective learning in developing transactive memory: a shared understanding of who knows what. It suggests that collective performance also depends on locating expertise, rather than solely on the knowledge individuals possess.

The mechanism: recognising usable expertise

Kyle Lewis (2003, Journal of Applied Psychology) developed and validated a measure of transactive memory in work teams. Her approach distinguishes knowledge specialisation, the credibility attributed to others and the coordination of knowledge use. When preparing cover during a crisis, this invites managers to examine not only who the replacement is, but also whether their expertise is recognised and can actually be mobilised.

The hasty conclusion: naming a deputy is enough

One might conclude that assigning a deputy to each critical expert is sufficient. Yet knowing whom to contact guarantees neither their availability, their access rights nor their authorisation to make a regulated decision. In a pharmaceutical setting, the ability to inform a decision must therefore be distinguished from the authority required to approve it. (our executive and employee training programmes)

The limits of the evidence and of expertise maps

These studies do not demonstrate that mapping expertise reduces the consequences of a pharmaceutical or logistics crisis in Basel. An experimental assembly task and ordinary work teams do not reproduce all the constraints of a supply disruption, a quality incident or an interruption to international R&D. A directory describes declared resources; only a test can reveal whether they are actually accessible in the chosen scenario.

A practical check in Basel

To explore this question within SHR’s “Crisis Management” programme, a hypothetical exercise in Basel could simulate a disruption to a Rhine shipment of materials for an international R&D team, with the usual expert declared unavailable. The team must identify suitable cover, obtain the necessary information and distinguish technical advice from the required quality approval, without bypassing authorisation requirements. The exercise log records the time taken to identify an appropriate replacement and then to obtain actual access to the documents, alongside every language, access or authority barrier. Repeating the same scenario after corrective action makes it possible to check whether the cover works better in the exercise, without claiming to predict the outcome of a real crisis. To go further: explore the Crisis Management training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Crisis Management in Basel

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