key: cord-026376-8doxts85
authors: Moorkamp, Matthijs; Torenvlied, René; Kramer, Eric‐Hans
title: Organizational synthesis in transboundary crises: Three principles for managing centralization and coordination in the corona virus crisis response
date: 2020-05-19
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12294
sha: 
doc_id: 26376
cord_uid: 8doxts85

Boin (2019) argues that in transboundary crisis management it is almost impossible to achieve centralization and coordination. This article identifies three principles through which actors in a transboundary crisis can balance centralization with autonomy while shaping coordination along the way. We reanalysed three transboundary cases: the Dutch military mission in Afghanistan, the downing of MH17 and hurricane Irma striking Sint‐Maarten. The principles we found are as follows: (a) reformulating key strategic priorities, (b) flexible adaptation of crisis management protocols and (c) the emergence of multifunctional units. With these three principles, we reflect on challenges in the Dutch crisis response to the corona outbreak and propose improvements for progressing current crisis management efforts.

In transboundary crisis management, there is a dual challenge of centralization and coordination that makes crisis response highly problematic (Boin, 2019) . Boin argues that centralizing decision power in the hands of political leaders does not work because the involvement of many different political actors makes it hard to define a unified "high-command." Coordination between crisis responders is highly problematic as well, because many of them are involved in different activities, without established coordination routines. Boin (2019, p. 99 ) calls for a research agenda that studies conditions under which preparatory and management efforts can be effective in transboundary crises.

Our paper contributes to this agenda by providing three principles for transboundary crisis management. The principles enable crisis responders, across different organizational levels, to successfully develop centralization and coordination during the crisis response.

Based on Thompson's (1967) classic concept of the "synthetic organization," we conceptualize a process of organizational synthesis.

By means of this process, we show how crisis managers balanced centralization with autonomy by quickly reformulating key strategic priorities. Also, crisis workers established coordination through flexible adaptation of existing crisis management protocols and the creation of multifunctional units. We captured these achievements in three principles for transboundary crisis management, visualized in Figure 1 . (Torenvlied et al., 2015) .

The third case is the crisis response on the island of Sint-Maarten after hurricane Irma destroyed most of the island's infrastructure in 2017 (Moorkamp & Wolbers, 2019) . The empirical material gathered for studying the cases is presented in Table 1 .

The three principles of transboundary crisis management are being observed in the Dutch corona crisis response (April 2020). However, important elements are absent, and this has consequences, we argue here. In that light, we first briefly reflect on the Dutch crisis response to the outbreak. The third and fourth sections of this paper detail the support for the three approaches, both theoretical and empirical.

In the initial Dutch crisis response, key priorities were reformulated multiple times (Wallenburg & Helderman, 2020) : from containing the virus outbreak through location-specific measures in the most affected North-Brabant province-to a much contested "herd immunity" priority protecting frail elderly while keeping open schools-then to an "intelligent lock-down" priority closing universities, schools, bars, restaurants and "contact" jobs. These reformulations are informed, foremost, by expert advice from the Outbreak Management Team (OMT) initiated by the Dutch national institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM)-enabling coordination between hospitals across the country.

The ability to include different perspectives and crisis domains into the way strategic priorities are reformulated is, however, a challenge in the present crisis response. Experts argue that the primary focus on health care seriously jeopardizes economic stability and social security (see e.g., Crisislab, 2020) . Including multiple perspectives in prioritizing future responses to the corona virus outbreak is important as a recent

Harvard study foresees intermitting recurrence of the virus until 2022 (Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, Grad, & Lipsitch, 2020) , which necessitates alternating between medical, economic and societal priorities.

In the Netherlands, national-level crisis protocols allow for some flexibility (Torenvlied et al., 2015) . A newly formed centralized national coordination platform for spreading patients (LCPS 1 ) became responsible for moving COVID-19 patients from overcrowded hospitals to other (less affected) parts of the country. The LCPS is a good example of an ad hoc adaptation to national-level crisis management protocols as this platform did not exist as such in present national-level crisis protocols. 

The newly established central LCPS has some multifunctional characteristics as it consists of medical specialists, actors from the Ministry of Defense that support command and control and logistics, and civil servants from the ministry of health, welfare and sports. The previously mentioned OMT, however, appears to lack multifunctionality to the extent it consists only of closely related specialisms such as virologists, epidemiologists, clinicians and other medical specialists. In relation to the first point on reformulation of key priorities, reliance on mono-disciplinary advice may seriously jeopardize the ability of the transboundary crisis response organization in managing the crisis in time. The moment we have entered the "warm phase" of the virus outbreak, we may be in the "hot phase" of the social-economic crisis, when holding onto domain-specific silos in a transboundary crisis management is known to be a recipe for disaster. Not only does Thompson describe the challenges of centralization and coordination in (transboundary) crisis response organizations, he also hints at a process of organizational synthesis that emerges as the organization swings into action. Our current interpretation of the organizational synthesis process is the following. Crisis response actors in transboundary crises shape, and reshape, organizational context while simultaneously enacting multiple uncertain, emerging and evolving crisis contexts. In doing so, they develop their organizational context in such a way that centralization and coordination are, ultimately, achieved.

The more recent notions of sensemaking and organizing concepts (Kuipers & Boin, 2015; Weick, 1979 Weick, , 1995 help to understand how organizational synthesis among many different crisis response actors is achieved when it comes to transboundary crises specifically. On the one side, crisis response actors have to make sense of their own specific and continuously evolving crisis context. Sensemaking hence refers to dealing with the "outside," the way in which actors together attempt to create a "workable level of certainty" (cf. Weick, 1979) in inherently uncertain, equivocal, reactive and specific crisis contexts. On the other side, crisis response actors engage in organizing processes by "assembling ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes" (Weick, 1979, p. 3). Organizing, thus, places emphasis on the "inside," the creation of a sensible social structure. Sensemaking and organizing together constitute, in our view, a general process of organizational synthesis.

The process of organizational synthesis is at the heart of our understanding how crisis response actors in a transboundary crisis successfully deal with the challenges of centralization and coordination in their crisis management. Three examples of transboundary cases make this very clear.

Our reanalysis of the transboundary cases from the perspective of organizational synthesis revealed three principles for successful transboundary crisis management, namely: reformulating key strategic priorities, flexible adaptation of crisis management protocols and the emergence of multifunctional units.

When it comes to the first, we witnessed the quick reformulation of key priorities at the central level-ranging from the ministerial level in the MH17 case to the task-force command level in Uruzgan and the company command level in the Sint-Maarten case. In the MH17 case, the Dutch crisis cabinet, headed by the Dutch prime minister, immediately attended to the initial impact of the MH17 crash in Dutch society by formulating three priorities: "repatriation of victim's remains," "investigation of the crash" and "bringing those responsible to justice". Commanders of the marine unit who were present on the island of Sint-Maarten during the passing of hurricane Irma quickly formulated three priorities: "saving life and limbs," "controlling luting" and "evacuation." During the Uruzgan mission, "reconstruction" goals were reformulated to "peace enforcing" goals, after patrols in the mission area discovered a subsequently more dangerous mission area than expected. The reformulated priorities placed more emphasis on combat activities and were more in tune with the nature of the experienced mission area at the time.

The formulation of key priorities certainly was a product of central level actors making sense of environmental cues, trying to simplify environmental turmoil. These priorities were not set in granite.

Simultaneously, the formulation of priorities provided key cues for shaping coordination between dispersed crisis response actors at the contextualized. This resulted in the creation of a so-called "steering group MH17 Recovery" in which different actors from different ministries coordinated their activities to govern the task-force on site in

Ukraine. The steering group refrained from a "top-down" command and control approach, but instead promoted the effective, autonomous operation of this task force and its commanders.

The marine crew that was deployed on the island of Sint-Maarten abandoned their standard "HUREX" protocols in favour of combat heuristics developed in a recent peace-keeping mission in Mali. The heuristics facilitated the creation of a centralized "pocket of force" Engineers and infantry integrated their activities within multifunctional platoons for the passing of a second hurricane (Maria). Within TFU, the so-called Smallest Unit of Action-principle was developed in which soldiers from different functional specialisms (such as: engineers, infantry, cavalry) regrouped themselves into multifunctional patrols, better able to deal with the Uruzgan mission environment.

The three principles visualized in Figure 1 are 

We thank Marie-Anne van Stam for her design of Figure 1 .

1 In Dutch: Landelijk Coördinatiecentrum Patiënten Spreiding.

The Transboundary Crisis: Why we are unprepared and the road ahead

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Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period

Task Force Uruzgan and experimentation with organization design

Exploring the EU's role as Transboundary crisis manager: The facilitation of sense-making during the ash crisis

Operating under high-risk conditions in temporary organizations: A sociotechnical systems perspective (series: Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies)

Crisis response at the Island of Sint-Maarten in the wake of hurricane Irma: Introducing the process of bricolage at the organizational level

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Evaluatie nationale crisisbeheersingsorganisatie vlucht MH17

De impact van de coronacrisis op gemeenten: Eerste tussenrapportage een maand na de uitbraak

The Netherlands response to the coronavirus pandemic

The social psychology of organizing

Organizational synthesis in transboundary crises: Three principles for managing centralization and coordination in the corona virus crisis response