Institute For The Future

Are You Ready for A Future of Crises? NYU Report Says No

A provocative new report from NYU argues that the vast bulk of US government agencies, non-governmental organizations and businesses are not ready to respond to a growing array and frequency of crises. The study, titled Predicting Organizational Response to Crisis: Perspectives and Practices toward a Pathway to Preparedness (holy alliteration Batman!), reports on a telephone survey of 468 organizational leaders conducted for NYU by Princeton Survey Research Associates International.

 

The five big survey findings:

 

1. Government organizations were deemed to be much more ready for crisis than either businesses or nonprofit agencies

 

2. High-performing organizations were more likely to be rated as very ready for crisis, suggesting a tight linkage between an organization’s overall excellence and its crisis readiness.

 

3. High-growth organizations were more likely to be judged as being very ready for crisis than their slower-growing peers, suggesting that growth may generate the resources needed for creating high performance

 

4. Organizations that were perceived as vulnerable to—or had actually experienced—some form of internal crisis, such as a major accident or a financial/funding crisis, were actually less likely to be rated as very ready, suggesting that many organizations simply do not respond to their own perceived weaknesses.

 

5. However, organizations that had experienced some form of external crisis, such as a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, had much higher levels of readinessimately, it appears to be the actual experience of a crisis that motivates greater preparedness, suggesting that advocates of preparedness would be wise to build campaigns for improvement around case studies of the real-world experiences of actual organizations

 

Also, this is the same research center that funded a study I co-authored with Mitchell Moss in 2005, just before joining the Institute for the Future, titled Telecommunications in Disasters: Preparing Cities for Crisis Communications.