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Crisis management increasingly requires coordination and collaboration between multiple organizations. This means that inter-organizational boundaries have to be spanned by dedicated organizational members (i.e. boundary spanners). This paper aims to describe which features facilitate the work of boundary spanners in crisis management.

A case study, consisting of 26 interviews, has been conducted in the Netherlands to explore how civilian and military representatives effectively spanned inter-organizational boundaries.

Five features are identified that enable boundary spanners to improve crisis management coordination and collaboration. Boundary spanners are likely to be successful when they (1) serve long terms, (2) are sensitive to partners' concerns, (3) have considerable discretion, (4) are politically skilled and (5) prove influential in their own organization.

Crisis organizations can extend boundary spanners' term length, broaden their discretionary space and give them more influence to facilitate their work. Additionally, in the selection process, it would be well to choose organizational members who display a sensitivity to the interests of crisis partners and possess political skill.

Multiple studies have reiterated the key role of boundary spanners in enabling crisis management coordination and collaboration. Yet, this study is the first to provide a systematic analysis of key features that help boundary spanners to reach this goal.

When a crisis strikes, responders need to make sense of it to gain an understanding of its origins, nature and implications. In this way, crisis sensemaking guides the implementation of the response. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the sensemaking questions that responders need to address for achieving effective and efficient crisis management.

Data are drawn from six exercises, in which teams of professionals from different crisis organizations were confronted with two terrorist attacks. Just like in real incidents, these professionals convened in tactical response teams and formulated their response collectively.

The exercises demonstrate that crisis responders do not just have to make sense of the crisis, but also of their own roles and actions. They raise and address three sensemaking questions: What is happening in this crisis? (i.e. situational sensemaking), Who am I in this crisis? (i.e. identity-oriented sensemaking) and How does it matter what I do? (i.e. action-oriented sensemaking).

Crisis preparation tends to focus on plans and systems that accelerate or improve the construction of a situational understanding, while this study suggests the need of more preparatory attention for crisis responders’ roles and actions.

The research extends crisis sensemaking literature beyond the restricted focus on the incident itself by showing that responders are also trying to grasp their own role and how their actions matter when they are engaged in crisis response.

Emergency organizations allocate specific tasks to responders in an attempt to resolve increasingly complex incidents. Many studies take a pragmatic perspective by studying how emergency organizations can more effectively compartmentalize response tasks. Yet, the effects of compartmentalization on responders' sensemaking of moral issues (i.e. moral sensemaking) has received almost no attention.

Based on existing research, the authors bring together different insights on the relation between compartmentalization and emergency responders’ sensemaking of moral issues.

The authors demonstrate that emergency organizations may undermine the moral sensemaking of responders through introducing moral blind spots and moral dissociation or, instead, enable moral sensemaking through enhancing moral agency and awareness. The authors argue that emergency organizations need to induce moral sense-discrediting among responders to enhance their moral sensemaking. Finally, the authors conclude with discussing two types of compartmentalizing tasks, functional concentration and the holographic metaphor, to show that the latter is most likely to enhance moral sensemaking among emergency responders.

This study introduces moral sensemaking to the emergency management literature and investigates how organizational design influences it.

The present article analyses extreme context studies published in leading project management journals with the aim of developing a time-based typology that could be of value for the project community at large.

In this study, the authors reviewed 62 articles on extreme contexts published in three main project management journals (IJMPB, PMJ and IJPM) and two specialized outlets Disaster Prevention and Management (DPM) and International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment (IJDRBE).

The authors present a typology, in which emergency, risky and disrupted (RED) contexts are related to the manageability of time. It shows that when pressure rises, due to high levels of urgency, uncertainty and ambiguity, control over time decreases, causing the organizational response to shift from formalized into improvised.

Based on this review, the authors theorize the influence of extreme contexts on project management in general.

The study responds to the scholarly call to advance the academic debate on the relatedness of project and temporary organizations by perceiving temporality as a continuum.