Crisis Management & Organizational Learning: How Organizations Learn from Natural Disasters

Managing a large scale crisis often presents a substantial challenge for an organization that may even threaten its survival. However, we argue that organizations can embrace such challenges to learn from crises. Through examining how organizations learn from the process of crisis management, we offer new implications for organization theory and management practice. We do so through conducting a longitudinal case analysis of how organizations learned from a series of similar natural disasters. We examine how organizations learn from the management of crises and develop a three-stage approach to organizational learning in crisis management. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for theory and practice.