Dealing with a Crisis—What the Police Have Learnt and What Others Can Learn from the Police

摘要

Rob Beckley is Deputy Chief Constable for Avon and Somerset Constabulary. He was previously Head of Race and Minority Policy at New Scotland Yard and Assistant Chief Constable (Crime and Operations) at Hertfordshire Constabulary. Within ACPO, Mr Beckley had policy responsibility for faith issues and led the National Community Tensions Team in its work on community cohesion and public disorder. Julian Birkinshaw is Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School. Professor Birkinshaw writes, consults and teaches on how organizations can become more effective at dealing with changes in their external environment and how they can operate more efficiently on an internal basis. In this article, the authors explain the concept of critical incident management and examine how its introduction into policing has served to foster a set of behaviours that encourage accountability and timely judgement. They argue that despite some high-profile failures, such as in the case of the Soham murders, there have been many more examples where critical incident responses have been successfully applied and managed, so that they never became as prominent or as damaging as the failures.