Crisis Management training in Bern · canton of BerneCrisis management in the canton of Berne: when should an emergency decision be reassessed?

In the canton of Berne, federal administration, public health, telecommunications and precision manufacturing face different continuity challenges, often accompanied by demanding transparency requirements. How can a manager revisit a crisis decision while keeping the reasoning understandable and traceable?

What the literature establishes: responsibility can sustain commitment

Barry M. Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) shows, in a resource-allocation experiment, that personal responsibility for an initial choice can encourage further commitment despite negative outcomes. This finding highlights a managerial risk: defending a past decision can take precedence over assessing its current usefulness. It does not, however, demonstrate that all persistence during a crisis is irrational.

A second mechanism: rigidity under threat

Barry M. Staw, Lance E. Sandelands and Jane E. Dutton (1981, Administrative Science Quarterly) propose a model linking threat to restricted information processing and tighter control. Their theoretical synthesis explains why an organisation may favour familiar responses even as circumstances change. This mechanism complements escalating commitment without being identical to it: retaining a measure may also reflect a narrowing of the options considered.

The hasty conclusion: decisions should change more often

Reassessing a decision does not necessarily mean abandoning it. Temporarily retaining a measure may be justified by transition risks, continuity obligations or the absence of a better-supported alternative. The useful distinction concerns the justification: are we continuing to defend the initial choice, or because current information still supports it? (our executive and employee training programmes)

The limits of the evidence and of traceability

The allocation experiment does not reproduce a real crisis, and the rigidity model is not a specific test of organisations in Berne. These studies therefore neither establish a universal reassessment frequency nor guarantee that a decision log improves decisions. A document completed retrospectively may even make a choice appear coherent without capturing the uncertainties present when it was made.

A practical check in Berne

For SHR’s crisis management programme, one possible exercise in Berne would involve a hypothetical telecommunications outage affecting federal services, healthcare institutions and a precision manufacturer, with a bilingual interface in Biel/Bienne. For each temporary measure, participants would record its rationale, a reassessment condition, an owner and a deadline at the time of the decision, retaining successive versions. The debrief would measure the proportion of measures whose review deadline has passed for which retention, modification or withdrawal has a dated justification based on the information available at that point. For measures affecting the Biel/Bienne interface, the check would also assess whether reassessment conditions match in French and German: a test of traceability, not proof of effectiveness in a real crisis. To go further: explore the Crisis Management training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Crisis Management in Bern

• crisis management
• Bern
• research
• training bern