Crisis Planning: Survey Results From Hurricane Katrina and Implications for Performance Improvement Professionals

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-23-2008

Department

Human Capital Development

School

Interdisciplinary Studies and Professional Development

Abstract

Modern organizations constantly face unparalleled changes and uncertainty in the competitive world, thus requiring strategic planning to mitigate crisis conditions. Underscoring crisis plans are performance interventions that prepare employees, technological systems, and the organizational culture to effectively respond to a crisis event. However, crisis planning has been an overlooked area in the performance improvement literature. In the present study, we review results of a survey on crisis planning conducted by the research team seven months after Hurricane Katrina. Specifically, performance improvement professionals (n=129) employed by organizations located along the western Gulf Coast were surveyed on the existence and composition of their organization's crisis planning before and after Hurricane Katrina. Results indicate that organizations did increase crisis planning during the post‐Katrina period, and that crisis plans consisted of components and activities supported in the literature. We use these results to identify and discuss how performance improvement professionals might leverage their knowledge of human performance technology (HPT) in supporting organizational crisis planning efforts.

Publication Title

Performance Improvement Quarterly

Volume

20

Issue

3

First Page

27

Last Page

51

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