Managing change in extreme contexts: Professional Development Workshop

This Workshop addresses theoretical and methodological challenges in understanding organizational change in contexts following abnormal, exceptional, or extreme events. This typically involves attempting to prevent or to reduce the future probability of accident, attack, crime, disaster, disruption, failure, fraud, loss, misconduct, theft, and other adverse, sentinel, untoward or non-routine events. In the aftermath of an extreme event, the focus often lies first with causality (why did this happen?), then with attribution of blame (whose fault was it?), and finally with remedy (how do we stop this happening again). Once the remedy is in place - recommendations or lessons learned from an enquiry - media attention and public debate fade. Research has mirrored this profile of concern. But those lessons are not always implemented, and we do not know why this should be so. We will explore theory: how to explain successful and stalled processes. We will explore methodology: how to sample and use cases which are unique. We will explore practice: how to manage change in extreme contexts. This Workshop will be of interest to research faculty and doctoral candidates seeking research topic inspiration, and to practitioners seeking solutions. One overarching aim is to bridge scholarship from separate but related fields: normal accidents, high reliability organizations, risk and crisis management, sensemaking in crises, the role of public enquiries, change management. A second aim is to create a durable international network, to scope and progress the research agenda, and to develop a theory-based contingency framework for managing change in extreme contexts. Green management matters: Many extreme events raise environmental and social concerns (Bhopal, Katrina, Exxon Valdez), and our ability to understand and to manage the aftermath is fundamental to sustainability. We will focus on the broad category of extreme events, seeking common patterns and significant variances that will contribute to our understanding, and to our ability to manage change following events of this kind.