Organizing for Special Forces Interventions: The Key Role of Feedback and Preparation in Developing Chronotopic Competence

This research aims at understanding how organizations facing extreme situations use training and feedback. To do so, we study the RAID, the French police special forces units. The RAID intervenes in major crises and emergency situations when traditional police units are overwhelmed. We found that what matters most in organizing, acting and learning is the ongoing space-time (re)framing of the action in-progress. In order to flesh out this idea theoretically, we draw on Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981; Lorino & Tricard, 2012), that refers to the intrinsic connectedness of time and space, as artistically expressed in literature. The chronotope is the fused and meaningful time-space frame of the collective action in progress. We show how training and feedback are used to build and nurture what we call a chronotopic competence. Chronotopic competence combines the proficiency in the learned motifs with the capacity to face, make sense of and collectively act in response to singular, dangerous and never-experienced situations.