Crisis recovery refers to the actions taken long-term in the aftermath of a crisis, to return organizational operations to their previous state and to mitigate the potential effects of a future crisis. This is the post-action and assessment stage of crisis management.
It is important to do a proper analysis of your crisis response and path to recovery as this will help the organization build resilience and stability. Also, useful to note that resilience enhances the ability to integrate what you’ve learned into your recovery and helps you to emerge stronger.
A focused approach to crisis recovery will position your organization to:
- Cultivate the ability to begin to look around the corner, anticipate disruption and reduce shock
- Gain the confidence and courage to handle any crisis that arises, rooted in learning from experience and continuous improvement
- Experience fewer blind spots that can hamper future responses to the crisis
- Earn greater confidence from your leadership, business partners, and other stakeholders
One of the characteristics of successful organizations is that they learn from their losses and their wins and this enables them to integrate every lesson into planning for crisis and crisis recovery, as well as building resilience for the future.
The performance criteria for the Crisis Management (CM) team to manage post-crisis operations include the following:
Restore -The critical stage of the crisis has lapsed, and the company can turn her focus to resuming normal operations and to repairing confidence in the organization and her products.
Return – Actions are taken to return to a normal or even safer situation following the crisis.
Learn – Evaluate the effects by appraising the model with which the crisis was handled.
Upgrade – American researcher, David D Woods, Ph.D., suggests that the final stage of crisis management is when things begin to return to normal. As effective resolutions for the situation are put into action, the incident begins to diminish in attention.