CRISIS MANAGEMENT

In the two weeks of the political scandal, the crisis management actions of the PGMA team are less than impressive. There are a lot of uncoordinated moves from the president's team and allies.

A crisis in an organization is an event or a series of events that threatens the viability or the survival of the organization. In my 35-year career, I was a major player in four crisis situations in the companies I worked for, and I have learned my lessons well. The companies and my career survived, but with pain and some scars to the institutions and the individuals. Three of the events were caused by outside factors such as the Aquino assassination, the Dewey Dee scandal, and the Asian economic crisis, while one was precipitated by an internal struggle for control. But they were all crisis situations that had to be resolved by management.

Major physical disasters, like floods, earthquakes, fires and other calamities, other than economic or political, may also cause a crisis. It may be that since physical disasters are less predictable, the crisis management needed would be more difficult.

The management of College Assurance Plan (CAP) and Pacific Educational Plan (PEP) are in a crisis mode now and the outcome of their efforts should be visible in the next six months; but the embattled Presidency of PGMA is the best example of crisis management in action.

Ideally, if an effective Risk Management System is in place in an organization, crisis management would be more effective as the risk management process would have identified or predicted this potential crisis. Monitoring, mitigating, and remedial measures would have been in place to deal with this risk. But the best Risk Management System cannot predict all strategic and tactical risks that will lead to a crisis situation, so when a risk develops into a crisis, it is showtime for management. This is the state of the PGMA presidency in the current jueteng and tape revelations.

In the two weeks of the political scandal, the crisis management actions of the PGMA team are less than impressive. There are a lot of uncoordinated moves from the president's team and allies. Containment and damage control are inadequate and the public is confused and unenlightened. It seems to be lacking in integrated advice, scenario setting, and outside perspective; a defect in almost all power centers as the inner circle hunkers to a siege mentality and losses the feel of the outside.

The good thing going for the administration, is the lack of credibility of the opposition making it impossible for the critical majority to trust them to run the government. It is a case of jumping from the frying pan to the fire, so it is dampening the emotional outrage. Unlike the two previous EDSA's, the opposition does not have the moral high ground. These make them unable to come up with a strategy to unravel the PGMA presidency.

I would still insist that there is an 80% probability that PGMA will stay in power, a 4 to 1 odds. And she can even improve these odds in her favor, if she calls for the election of the delegates to the constitutional convention within the next six months, and for the elected delegates to convene by the middle of next year for a parliamentary election in 2007.