Crisis-Ready Teams

Jade Garratt · Interpersonal Practice, Voice & Silence, Organisational Design, Stories & Cases

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Argues that the decisive work of crisis performance happens long before the crisis, and opens by taking apart the genre that says otherwise: the after-dinner leadership talk, with its man, its mountain and its frostbitten fingers, which locates the heroism at the moment of peak drama. Drawing on Waller and Kaplan's Crisis Ready Teams and the ten studies behind it, nine of them comparing high and low performing teams under crisis conditions, the piece relocates that heroism to the preparation. For teams that already work together, the interaction patterns they will fall back on under pressure are the ones they settled into in ordinary conditions, and pressure does not change them. For swift-starting teams assembled for the emergency itself, experts who may never have met and must immediately perform interdependent complex tasks, what separates high from low performance is how deliberately they set the tone in a very short opening window. The evidence is specific: medical teams with more balanced communication before a resuscitation patient arrived went on to coordinate implicitly, while teams whose lead physician monologued at new colleagues performed worse, and reciprocity and stability in pre-flight conversation predicted performance in the air. Balance is carefully defined against a likely misreading, as everyone having a chance to speak and be heard rather than enforced equal airtime, and reciprocity as contributions being acknowledged and built on rather than landing in silence. The middle section is the one practitioners will argue with, and it inverts a common instinct. High performing multidisciplinary crisis teams were slower to start, spending longer structuring roles and sharing information before deciding, precisely because people from different professional backgrounds draw different conclusions from the same facts and those interpretations have to be voiced to be compared. Lower performing teams reached decision making faster and then meandered, having no shared understanding to decide from. Threat rigidity supplies the mechanism for what goes wrong under pressure: Staw, Sandelands and Dutton's restriction of information and constriction of control, read here as a direct threat to psychological safety and a route into solution fixation, where a team locks onto an early answer at exactly the point the situation keeps moving and few voices can challenge it. The practical findings that follow are unusually concrete. High performing crews moved information between each other earlier and sorted signal from noise faster; mine rescue teams that acted fastest used more closed-loop communication, the message read back and confirmed, which makes visible what was heard rather than only what was said; and they used more explicit coordination, spelling things out rather than leaving them inferred. That apparent contradiction with implicit coordination is resolved rather than dodged: implicit coordination only works when everyone already shares the same picture, which in a novel crisis is exactly what cannot be assumed, so the fast teams say the thing rather than repair the misunderstanding later. This connects the argument to the author's earlier work on low context communication, and to a standing position of this corpus, that explicitness earns its place in ordinary work for reasons of clarity, inclusion and safety, and earns it again under pressure. The closing move is a deliberate anticlimax: less dramatic than the mountain, and more effective.

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Read the full article on psychsafety.com →