Enabling the decision-making process: Applying experience from Afghanistan to civilian crisis and incident management

When it comes to crisis management, every second counts — whether it is a fire onsite or a reputational crisis, decisions must be made rapidly to protect the company’s people, operations and reputation. This paper gives real-world examples of standing up and running a crisis management process inside the Special Operations Command during the Afghanistan conflict. It highlights the need for fast, flat and accurate communication in order to enable rapid response and recovery. The paper describes the challenges of building an organisational approach to crisis management and establishing the buy-in, process steps and systems solutions for such an endeavour. The paper will review, step by step, how this process was built in Afghanistan and how to bring it to the civilian sector to create a level of intelligence and response that most civilian companies are yet to realise.