Critical thinking in crisis management

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which the discipline of critical thinking may help the crisis manager establish situational awareness and impose effective strategy, direction and action in situations that are exceptionally volatile and uncertain. In such circumstances, information available to decisionmakers is likely to be ambiguous. Also, there may be too much of it or too little, and what there is may appear to be unstructured, confusing and possibly contradictory. The situation is likely to be uncertain and suitable courses of action may not be readily apparent, or clear enough to support confident and effective decision-making. However, this may be exactly when urgent choices and critical decisions have to be made. Most experienced crisis managers will recognise these problems as characteristics of crises. They complicate the business of managing information in order to establish situational awareness. This awareness, when shared with the crisis leadership team and key stakeholders, is the essential basis for effective choices of strategy, direction and action. Shared situational awareness implies creating and maintaining a common understanding of what is going on, what that means (in terms of its implications) and what it might mean (in terms of reasonable deductions that can be made about future developments).