Helge Renå: Krisehåndtering i et organisasjonsperspektiv, Politi-innsatsen 22. juli [Crisis management in an organizational perspective, the police effort 22nd July]

On July 22, 2011, acts of atrocities were committed in Norway. A 32-year-old man (Breivik) first detonated a bomb in the center of the capital Oslo, killing eight people. Later that same day, he killed 69 participants at a political summer camp on the island of Utøya in the worst mass shooting event in Scandinavian history. The Norwegian policeʼs tactical unit Delta approached the perpetrator on the island and arrested him without resistance. On August 24, 2012, the Oslo District Court sentenced Breivik to indefinite detainment. He is currently serving his sentence in Telemark Prison in Skien.

In August 2011, the Norwegian government established an independent commission to investigate and draw lessons from the terrorist attacks. The commission published its report the year after (NOU 2012: 14), and one main takeaway was that the authoritiesʼ response to the incidents were marred with mistakes and lack of coordination and communication. Police forces and emergency management agencies in all the Nordic countries reorganized in the following years according to the lessons learnt from Norway. Now, more than a decade after the terrorist attacks in Norway, researcher Helge Renå provides a fascinating, highly relevant, and most useful analysis of how and why the Norwegian police responded as they did when the emergency calls started coming in on July 22, 2011.

Renå takes an organizational perspective on crisis management, meaning that he is interested in how organizational and institutional structures enable and prevent certain ways of thinking and acting. For example, Nassim Nicholas Talebʼs concept of the Black Swan inspires the author: a category of events that defy pre-conceptualization and therefore will be impossible to predict or prepare for because the organization about to be hit does not know what it is unaware of. Renå shows what happens when formal structures (plans, organizations, procedures, etc.) struggle to cope with an unforeseen shock, also drawing on theoretical work by Arjen Boin, Daniel Kahneman, Karl Weick, Gary Klein, and even one of this reviewerʼs favorites: sociologist Lee Clarke, who coined the term Possibilistic Thinking as a conceptual term for thinking about extreme events.

Not surprisingly, Renå directs strong criticism towards the Norwegian police and the police directorate for organizing badly before as well as during the response to the terrorist attacks. He shows how vital resources never reached each other due to inefficient planning, and his analysis strongly emphasizes the good old saying in emergency management that a “crisis is a bad time to start up a Rolodex”. Plans stipulated that during a large-scale response, the authorities should switch to a staff organization to ensure that the crisis will not overwhelm the ordinary management system. Staff members, however, need to practice procedures and rehearse switching management modes. Because of insufficient training and lack of structured learning from exercises and incidents, precious time was wasted on July 22, 2011, as the different police entities reorganized and struggled to find their feet. As Renå puts it: When the police incident commander at the bomb site in Oslo radioed back to the command center and asked his superiors to “Push the big button!”, managers only hesitantly realized that they did not have such a thing at the HQ.

In his short and concise analysis, Renå also investigates formal as well as informal organizational practices. His verdict on the system installed to distribute flash warnings to all 27 police districts is especially unforgiving: Only six of them registered any of the three dispatches sent out by Oslo Police during the terrorist attacks. Some districts did not receive the e-mails, and one even reported back that they did not have a PC dedicated to the system! Contrary to this formal failure, Renå shows how some informal relations and improvised practices “in the front line” contributed positively to the police response. While the staff was still trying to get properly organized, a liaison officer from the police directorate received a call from his daughter who happened to be on Utøya. “Daddy, theyʼre shooting here! A man wearing a police uniform is shooting at us!” she cried. Her father then handed his phone to the Delta Unit liaison officer, who immediately relayed the information to the special police force, allowing them to initiate their response to Utøya earlier than would have been possible if information had had to travel through the formal channels.

Renå takes a wide variety of different analytical and theoretical approaches to his topic – ranging from classic sense-making over socio-technological interaction to temporal analysis drawing on cognitive psychology. Obviously, the author is unable to go into great detail with every approach in such a short monograph, but that does not in any way devaluate his analysis. This book inspires and encourages the reader to apply some of Renåʼs analytical lenses on oneʼs own empirical data, and his concise utilization of a large number of theoretical frameworks makes the book highly useful for students and teachers. Recommended!