Responding to information asymmetry in crisis situations: innovation in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Crises test the resilience of public service organizations. Healthcare providers must respond and innovate within tight constraints to address challenges. Presenting COVID-19 as a knowable unknown (black swan event), we adopt information processing theory to investigate how healthcare providers and their suppliers address information asymmetry to support decision-making. Building on primary and secondary datasets, we demonstrate managers were innovating internal structural responses. For black swan events, in-house 'intelligent clients' are intrinsic not only in managing information uncertainty associated with early stages of the crisis, but also in addressing information equivocality and joint decision-making with other organizations associated with implementing solutions.

The impact of Digitalized Communication on the effectiveness of Local Administrative Authorities – Findings from Central European Countries in the COVID-19 Crisis

“…We thus contribute to the emerging literature on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for administrative procedures conducted by public institutions. While previous literature has focused on consequences for either leadership, work organization or cultural aspects (Phillips et al 2021;Ansell et al 2021;Parker 2020;Gabryelczyk 2020), our study provides insights on the success of using digitalized communication tools in local administrative authorities. It confirms previous observations of a COVID-19 driven acceleration of digitalized procedures in public administrations.…”

“…This has induced the establishment of new procedures for providing services to external parties as well as different coordinating tasks inside administrations. In this context, the challenges of knowing how to handle and to distribute relevant information between public administrations and their 'customers', including citizens, firms and other parties, have become highly relevant (Phillips et al 2021).…”

“…The digitalization of public sector communication with citizens, firms and other parties has been identified as "one of the cornerstones of the digitalization of the public sector" (Andersen et al 2011, p. 439). In the current public management literature, the question of how information is processed and communicated by public administrations is important for responding adequately to the COVID-19 crisis (e.g., Phillips et al 2021). Because little knowledge exists regarding how communication to citizens has been rearranged by local administrations, which are primary providers of services to citizens in the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate the following research question: How does the use of digitalized communication tools affect the effectiveness of public service provision by local administrative authorities in the COVID 19 pandemic?…”

Unknowns, Black Swans, and Bounded Rationality in Public Organizations

“…The many unforeseen, unprecedented, and often highly consequential ways in which COVID‐19 has affected our lives remind us once again how the fortunes of citizens can turn on events that were simply not on the radar of public organizations prior to their occurrence (Hall et al 2020). Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon and members of the Carnegie School recognized long ago that boundedly rational individuals and organizations routinely face such events (Simon 1997[1947], 1955), sometimes called “Black Swans” when they are significant, and which emanate from the broader category of what are often called “unknowns” (Phillips, Roehrich, and Kapletia 2021). These two terms have become familiar in the public administration literature (Kettl 2020; Termeer and van den Brink 2013; Van der Wal 2020), perhaps not least because of the link to government agencies' responsibility to maintain citizen safety and security and prevent crises from occurring (Boin and Lodge 2016; Christensen, Lægreid, and Rykkja 2016; Comfort 2002).…”

“…While Van der Wal (2020) and Maher, Hoang, and Hindery (2020) depict COVID‐19 as a Black Swan (in this journal), Taleb himself does not (Avishai 2020) as he already foresaw the risks of a “strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet” (Taleb 2010, 317) in The Black Swan . In other places, the pandemic has been described as a “knowable unknown” (Phillips, Roehrich, and Kapletia 2021) and a “known unknown” and “unknown unknown” (Kettl 2020).…”