Four functions have to be performed in any serious situation. Assigned in advance they are unremarkable. Left unassigned they are performed badly by whoever is nearest, or performed by everybody at once, or not performed at all.
The four
Decider. One person, named, who commits the organization. Not a committee. The reason is not that groups decide badly but that in a moving situation a group cannot be assembled quickly enough, and the attempt produces delay that gets attributed to caution.
Coordinator. Runs the response: tracks what is being done and by whom, chases the things that have stalled, and holds the current picture. This is the role most often omitted, and its absence is why crises produce three people doing the same thing and nobody doing the fourth.
Voice. Speaks externally. One person, and everybody else refers enquiries to them. Multiple voices produce inconsistency, and inconsistency in a crisis is read as concealment.
Recorder. Keeps the log: what was known at what time, what was decided, by whom, and on what basis. The least glamorous and frequently the most consequential, for reasons covered below.
Separate the decider from the voice
The instinctive arrangement is for the senior person to do both, and it fails predictably.
External communication in a live situation is enormously time-consuming: calls, statements, the same explanation to seven parties. A leader doing that is not thinking about the decision, and the decision is the thing only they can do.
Separating them also creates a useful interval. A voice who must check before answering has a natural reason not to answer immediately, which prevents the improvised commitment made under pressure to a reporter or a customer.
The exception is narrow and real. Where somebody has been seriously harmed, the senior person speaks, personally, to the people affected. Delegating that is the one substitution nobody forgives.
The log
Nobody wants this job and it should be assigned to somebody capable rather than to whoever is spare.
Its immediate value is operational. In a situation running over days, with people rotating, the log is the only reliable account of what has been done, and without it work gets repeated and commitments get dropped.
Its larger value arrives later. Every serious situation is examined afterward by somebody: an insurer, a board, a regulator, a court, or simply the organization trying to learn. The question is always what was known and when, and memory will not answer it. A contemporaneous record showing that a decision was reasonable on the information then available is the difference between a defensible judgment and an indefensible one, and it cannot be reconstructed.
The log is a factual record: times, information received, decisions, who was informed. It is not the place for speculation about cause or fault, and anyone keeping one should understand that it may be read by people outside the organization.
Decision rights move
Ordinary authority limits are designed for ordinary conditions and become obstructions at three in the morning.
Two changes should be settled in advance. Some authority moves up, because decisions that would normally be delegated now bind the organization publicly. And some moves down, because a supervisor on site at two a.m. cannot wait for approval to commit money that will limit the damage.
Both should be written as specific figures and specific categories. During a declared crisis, site supervisors may commit up to a stated amount for immediate mitigation without approval. Anything affecting a contract, a person’s employment, or a public statement goes to the decider regardless of size.
A supervisor who has never been told will do one of two things, and both are bad: spend nothing while the damage compounds, or spend freely with no framework and be second-guessed afterward.
Small organizations and rotation
In an organization of twelve, one person will hold two roles. That is workable with one constraint: the decider should not also be the recorder, because the person deciding cannot accurately record their own reasoning while under pressure.
Every role needs a named alternate, and the alternate needs to have been told. A list where the same person appears as primary for three roles and alternate for a fourth describes an organization that has one point of failure and has written it down.
For anything running past about seventy-two hours, rotation stops being a courtesy. Judgment degrades, the degradation is invisible from inside, and a decider on hour sixty is making worse decisions than the alternate who slept. That is a scheduling matter and it has to be arranged by somebody other than the person who needs relieving.
Say the roles out loud
At the start of the first meeting, whoever convenes states them. I am deciding, Marla is coordinating, Tom is the only person talking to anybody outside, Kate has the log.
Fifteen seconds, and it prevents most of what goes wrong in the first hour. It also gives everybody else permission to decline: a person asked something by a reporter now has a clean answer that is not evasion.
Where roles change during a long response, say that too. An unannounced handover produces two people who each believe somebody else has the log.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD