Planification et gestion de crise (Planning and Crisis Management)

Citation

Richardson, J.G. (2010), "Planification et gestion de crise (Planning and Crisis Management)", Foresight, Vol. 12 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs.2010.27312bae.001

Planification et gestion de crise (Planning and Crisis Management)

Planification et gestion de crise (Planning and Crisis Management)

Article Type: Book review From: foresight, Volume 12, Issue 2

Thierry Fusalba (preface by Didier Heiderich),Harmattan,Paris,254 pp.,€35

If prevention cannot cure

This book is a structured proposal of how to anticipate crises and, once they are on the doorstep, how to re-stabilise order and system: how to emerge, in other words, from disorder and an impasse.

Today’s pressures of over-population, globalisation, far-reaching international law and diminished natural resources make the future uncertain and one wrought with mishap or worse. The author applies his experience as an army colonel to show that any organisation – large, small or in between – in both industry and the rest of civil society can foresee the unforeseeable and prepare for it. Fusalba has pertinent experience, for instance, as Director of Communication for the European Union’s peacekeeping force assigned to the Democratic Republic of Congo, EUFOR, in 2006.

Author Fusalba has apportioned his thesis into six, well-defined compartments:

1. 1.

   analysis of current situation;

2. 2.

   analysis of an anticipated crisis;

3. 3.

   synthesising specific elements of the crisis;

4. 4.

   designing an operational reaction to the crisis;

5. 5.

   implementing its managerial concept; and

6. 6.

   handling communication concerning the crisis.

All of these are intended never to lose sight of the end result sought.

In the case of industrial action undertaken by striking employees, for example, the goal sought is to end the strike and prevent violence while satisfying workers’ demands through negotiation/arbitration. Table I schematises the generic process.

Table I Analysis: factory break-in, with bodily injuries

Colonel Fusalba accords special attention to the role of the media in time of crisis. He believes that through the agency of the mass and specialised media a capable manager can sharpen the intensity of the factors underlying the emergency – even of exacerbating the tensions existing between the sides involved.

A crisis centre of specific nature

Another type of crisis is one that occurred shortly after this book was published – the loss of commercial flight Air France-KLM 447. AF447, an Airbus 320-200 with 228 passengers and crew aboard, disappeared somewhere between the Brazilian coast and that of Senegal during a scheduled flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The weather over the South Atlantic was turbulent, yet the pilots reported no anomalies. Automatic signals from their aircraft communicated to ground installations; however, there was an (unexplained) interruption of certain electronic systems aboard the aircraft shortly after leaving South American shores.

French authorities, notably the Ministry of Ecology and Energy’s Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (Investigations and Analyses Bureau), set up a crisis centre immediately, calling upon technical aid from the Brazilian, Senegalese, and US governments. Limited quantities of debris were found at sea (only 5 percent of the airframe), and the search for the renowned “black boxes” was constrained by the ocean’s depths in the region of the disaster: as much as 7,000 m. (As of the time of writing, the boxes have not been found.) The human complement aboard the Airbus perished – although 51 bodies were recovered, the explanation for the disaster is taking an inordinate time to reach coherent conclusions.

Author Fusalba has compiled a highly useful vade mecum for organising and operating crisis-management centres. He has called on his own military background, to judge from the vocabulary he uses throughout the volume: battlefield, campaign, target, strategy, tactics, and the like. There may be overstatement of this terminology from time to time, but its use translates effectively into the civil idiom. The book as a whole is a practical exercise in foresight and deserves to be translated into as many languages as possible.

Jacques G. RichardsonMember of the editorial board, Foresight