The failure of foresight in crisis management: A secondary analysis of the Mari disaster

Article history: Received 4 February 2012 Received in revised form 29 September 2012 Accepted 2 October 2012 Available online xxxx Foresight the ability to plan and think systematically about future scenarios in order to inform decision-making in the present has been applied extensively by corporations and governments alike in crisis management. Foresight can be complicated because dispersed groups have diverse, non-overlapping pieces of information that affects an organization's ability to detect, mitigate, and recover from failures. This paper explores the failure of foresight in crisis management by drawing on data on events that preceded and followed theMari disaster in a naval base in Cyprus in July 2011, where a large explosion killed 13 people and injured 62 others, while completely destroying the major power plant of the island. The paper examines how foresight into crisis management decisions was compromised because of a conscious effort by high ranking decisionmakers to minimize emergent danger and avoid responsibility for the crisis, in joint with red tape, bureaucracy, and poor coordination and information flows. The paper explores the notion of operational and political responsibility of individual decision-makers and discusses an alternative approach to foresight in crisismanagement, one that is built onmultiple layers of decision-making. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.