Module 5 Introduction. Why Craft a Typology?

Welcome to our exploration of crisis typologies. What’s a typology? It’s simply an organizing framework that will help us learn about different types of crises based on categories of characteristics. Practitioners and researchers have actually spent quite a bit of time categorically organizing different types of crises to facilitate both their research efforts and their ability to describe what they’ve learned. Unfortunately, as you will see, no one’s been able to develop a single typological framework that effectively illustrates the unique features of all crises types. So in this module, we’ll explore several different typologies that have been proposed for different purposes and for different users.

By the end of this module, you ought to have a pretty good sense of the typology that would work best for your organization. Why consider different typologies? I can think of three reasons that such a pursuit might be helpful as we try to improve our high-stakes leadership effectiveness. First, if we’re willing to accept that there are different varieties of crises, and one of our goals in this module is to make a case for the validity of this assumption, then understanding the differences in various crises situations should help us more effectively develop and execute an optimum customized response for each scenario.

Second, having a working knowledge of different types of crises and some key characteristics of each will help us more effectively understand how crises could impact the interest of each of our stakeholder groups. Armed with this knowledge, we’ll be well positioned to develop effective communication strategies for each of these groups that we can use before, during, and after a particular crisis event. Third, with this understanding of how specific crises types could impact various stakeholders and how we should be communicating with these stakeholders, we should be able to effectively focus our relationship building efforts on, one, establishing sensing mechanisms for crises predicting, a key component of resilience, and two, on setting expectations and developing channels for crises management feedback.

In this module, we’ll explore a number of different perspectives and crisis typology outputs from categorical lists to multivariable matrices, each designed to make it easier for you, the crisis leader, to not only more accurately define the crisis you’re working to prevent or manage, but also to quickly identify key characteristics that can be addressed through preplanned crisis responses. By the end of this module, you’ll understand and appreciate the benefits of having the ability to categorize different types of crises. As I previously mentioned, you’ll also be able to determine the most useful organizing framework for your current, and when the need arises, future leadership responsibilities. Welcome to our module on crisis typologies.