Organizational routines in incident command centres: Improving society’s ability to handle extreme events
The project investigates organizational routines in incident command through a comparative analysis of organizations critical to society’s response to extreme events. The purpose of the project is to develop a novel framework for understanding routines and their function as organizations switch to incident command. Further, the project aims to test this framework in the studied organizations. The project’s importance is partly identified by the organizations themselves and partly motivated by the increasing challenges of extreme events generally. Lastly, there is a clearly identified knowledge gap concerning routines in extreme contexts. In extension, the project’s aim is therefore to contribute to society’s resilience in tackling challenges such as climate change, increased migration and terrorism. Incident command work within the provincial- police, armed forces, Security services, and County administrative board (Västerbotten) is investigated through ethnographic methods covering both extreme events and preparation for these events. Each organization is studied by one member of the research team through interviews, observations and document studies. Through a unique cooperative effort in “Knowledge Forum Region North”, the organizations discuss the challenges of incident command with the research team. The knowledge forum also constitutes a test arena for practical application of the theoretical models provided by the researchers.
Final report
Purpose and Research Questions
The overarching purpose of the project was to increase society’s ability to prepare for and manage extreme events in order to avoid as many negative consequences as possible (i.e., material damage, injuries, and deaths). Extreme contexts here refer to situations in which people risk being injured or killed. A clear example is the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences for, among other things, sick leave and the Police Authority’s ability to maintain law and order. A central function in managing such events is incident command organizations, where operations are characterized by a strong dependence on organizational routines. Despite the fact that incident command organizations are crucial for successfully managing extreme events, the state of knowledge is limited: previous research has often been conducted retrospectively, has suffered from restricted access, focused on individual organizations, and received limited theoretical attention.
This raises a number of questions in which organizational routines (patterns of interdependent actions carried out by several people) are central. The main question of the project is therefore how the dynamics of routines contribute to society’s ability to prepare for and manage extreme events. To answer this, the project aimed to develop a context-sensitive framework for routines in extreme contexts, which would then be validated through a series of workshops (“Knowledge Forum Region North”).
In accordance with the project plan, we studied incident command organizations (the organizational form commonly used to manage extreme events) of the County Administrative Board, the Armed Forces, and the Police Authority ethnographically and through interviews. Specifically, this meant that, in addition to interviews, we observed incident command organizations as they trained for extraordinary events: one occasion at the County Administrative Board in Västerbotten, two occasions within the Armed Forces, and two occasions within the Police Authority. In addition, we ethnographically followed the Police Authority in Region North’s handling of COVID-19 and related events for two and a half years.
Implementation and Development
Professor Markus Hällgren (project owner), Associate Professor Ola Lindberg, and Professor Oscar Rantatalo participated throughout the entire project as planned.
Early in the project, the Swedish Security Service (Säkerhetspolisen) chose not to participate because they needed to focus on an internal organizational transformation. Their role in developing future scenarios for extreme events was therefore replaced with collaboration with the Police Authority. The greatest change during the project was, as with many other projects during this time, the limitations imposed by COVID-19. Negative consequences mainly included delays in the initial data collection, as the organizations were uncertain about what access they could grant. In the end, empirical data collection could be carried out without major deviations. Other negative consequences included reduced opportunities to meet the advisory group in person and to attend conferences in person. Both activities were replaced with digital alternatives of fully adequate quality.
For the project, the pandemic was primarily beneficial as it provided the opportunity to follow the Police Authority’s incident command organization in detail and over an extended period. This, in turn, enabled comparisons between episodic events and continuous events, as well as the challenges and opportunities associated with each temporal perspective. Given these developments, the project came to focus partly on exercises of incident command organizing within each organization, and partly on how the work in incident command organizations were expressed in practice within the Police Authority.
Results and Conclusions
Dissemination and feedback of research results have consistently been an important component of the project. This has resulted in continuous workshops, training sessions, presentations, and publications. Individually and collectively, these activities have validated tentative results and generated new research ideas. In total, we conducted 16 workshops, primarily for the Police Authority, County Administrative Boards, and the Armed Forces, but also for companies and organizations such as major industrial firms, public agencies, universities and municipalities. These workshops have been invaluable for triangulating and validating both tentative and final results. In addition, the results have been presented and discussed at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) and a local initiative for the business community in Västerbotten. The results have also been discussed in media such as Gokväll, VD-tidningen, Irish National Radio, Financial Times, Tidningen Chef, and Projektforum. Targeted training efforts have been requested and carried out for the Police Authority and the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and their training programs for extreme events.
The project’s results have also been presented and discussed during courses at both basic and advanced levels in business administration (Hällgren & Buchanan, 2025) and pedagogy (Lindberg et al., 2025).
Within academia, results and knowledge about extreme contexts have been disseminated in several ways: through three locally organized two-day mini-conferences (In Extremis) with guests from, for example, Cambridge University, Oxford University, York University, Hamburg University, among others; three special issues (Journal of Management Studies, International Journal of Project Management, and Project Management Journal); visiting scholars (from e.g., Queensland University, Southampton University, IESEG Business School, Cranfield University, Aalto University); the Organizing Extreme Contexts network (www.organizingextremecontexts.org; https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14245317/) with 700 researchers; ten virtual seminars averaging 70 participants; conference participation (EGOS, PROS, Euram, Academy of Management); and presentations at Warwick Business School, Henley Business School, University of Sydney, and ESSEC Business School.
In addition, the project has resulted in three articles in peer-reviewed journals, with two additional under review; one book chapter; five conference presentations; and two popular science articles. Added to this are four articles discussing the organization of extreme contexts, which are clearly relevant to the project but only indirectly linked to it.
The three main results of the project are:
• There is an inherent difficulty in developing relevant crisis scenarios that organizations can learn from. In our studies, we focused on insufficiency and the development of habits. Concerning the social construction of insufficiency (when there is not enough knowledge or information on how to resolve a situation) we found that it creates interruptions in an organization’s routines while simultaneously generating opportunities to develop new solutions (Lindberg et al., 2025a). From this, new habits can emerge that prove successful in addressing the scenarios organizations face. This shows how organizations learn from scenarios even when existing knowledge and information may appear insufficient (Hällgren et al, 2026; Lindberg et al., 2025b).
• Some scenarios, as above, aim to prepare for known extreme events. Other scenarios aim to prepare for previously unknown events. Building on a fiction-based workshop we initially developed and tested with the Police Authority, we show how extreme fiction can be used to challenge prevailing assumptions about leadership and group dynamics, enabling critical reflection on both the future and current routines (Hällgren & Buchanan, 2025).
• Incident command methodology is mainly developed for short, episodic extreme events with a clear endpoint—such as an accident or natural disaster. In long-term overlapping extreme events, we found that incident command methodology suffers from a gradual erosion of its legitimacy when the regular organization loses interest in running it over time. To counteract this, the incident command personnel engaged in four overarching strategies aimed at restoring legitimacy (Hällgren et al., 2025b).
In summary, the project has contributed to a richer understanding of incident command work as a way of organizing. The ambition of the project was to develop, if possible, a more unified framework for how organizations manage extreme events. However, we conclude that a unified framework cannot be developed and is not equally relevant given the continuous challenges society faces. Instead of a shared framework, the project demonstrates the growing need to organize in ways that can meet continuous extreme events, something temporary incident command organizations struggle to do. The proposal for a unified framework is therefore rather an organizational form that is more adaptive and more resilient than what the incident command organization can handle.
The project’s development and results have generated several new questions relevant to both organizations and academia. These include, but are not limited to, the finding that the traditional temporary staff-organization model has its limitations. This creates a need to understand how organizations should be structured to manage continuous extreme events without a clear endpoint. The results also raise questions about how organizations critical to society’s ability to manage extreme events can collaborate and coordinate optimally when their conceptual tools and methods appear similar on the surface but differ considerably in practice. Finally, the results highlight the need for further study of how organizations can learn from extreme events, particularly through scenarios based on actual or fiction-based situations.
The overarching purpose of the project was to increase society’s ability to prepare for and manage extreme events in order to avoid as many negative consequences as possible (i.e., material damage, injuries, and deaths). Extreme contexts here refer to situations in which people risk being injured or killed. A clear example is the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences for, among other things, sick leave and the Police Authority’s ability to maintain law and order. A central function in managing such events is incident command organizations, where operations are characterized by a strong dependence on organizational routines. Despite the fact that incident command organizations are crucial for successfully managing extreme events, the state of knowledge is limited: previous research has often been conducted retrospectively, has suffered from restricted access, focused on individual organizations, and received limited theoretical attention.
This raises a number of questions in which organizational routines (patterns of interdependent actions carried out by several people) are central. The main question of the project is therefore how the dynamics of routines contribute to society’s ability to prepare for and manage extreme events. To answer this, the project aimed to develop a context-sensitive framework for routines in extreme contexts, which would then be validated through a series of workshops (“Knowledge Forum Region North”).
In accordance with the project plan, we studied incident command organizations (the organizational form commonly used to manage extreme events) of the County Administrative Board, the Armed Forces, and the Police Authority ethnographically and through interviews. Specifically, this meant that, in addition to interviews, we observed incident command organizations as they trained for extraordinary events: one occasion at the County Administrative Board in Västerbotten, two occasions within the Armed Forces, and two occasions within the Police Authority. In addition, we ethnographically followed the Police Authority in Region North’s handling of COVID-19 and related events for two and a half years.
Implementation and Development
Professor Markus Hällgren (project owner), Associate Professor Ola Lindberg, and Professor Oscar Rantatalo participated throughout the entire project as planned.
Early in the project, the Swedish Security Service (Säkerhetspolisen) chose not to participate because they needed to focus on an internal organizational transformation. Their role in developing future scenarios for extreme events was therefore replaced with collaboration with the Police Authority. The greatest change during the project was, as with many other projects during this time, the limitations imposed by COVID-19. Negative consequences mainly included delays in the initial data collection, as the organizations were uncertain about what access they could grant. In the end, empirical data collection could be carried out without major deviations. Other negative consequences included reduced opportunities to meet the advisory group in person and to attend conferences in person. Both activities were replaced with digital alternatives of fully adequate quality.
For the project, the pandemic was primarily beneficial as it provided the opportunity to follow the Police Authority’s incident command organization in detail and over an extended period. This, in turn, enabled comparisons between episodic events and continuous events, as well as the challenges and opportunities associated with each temporal perspective. Given these developments, the project came to focus partly on exercises of incident command organizing within each organization, and partly on how the work in incident command organizations were expressed in practice within the Police Authority.
Results and Conclusions
Dissemination and feedback of research results have consistently been an important component of the project. This has resulted in continuous workshops, training sessions, presentations, and publications. Individually and collectively, these activities have validated tentative results and generated new research ideas. In total, we conducted 16 workshops, primarily for the Police Authority, County Administrative Boards, and the Armed Forces, but also for companies and organizations such as major industrial firms, public agencies, universities and municipalities. These workshops have been invaluable for triangulating and validating both tentative and final results. In addition, the results have been presented and discussed at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) and a local initiative for the business community in Västerbotten. The results have also been discussed in media such as Gokväll, VD-tidningen, Irish National Radio, Financial Times, Tidningen Chef, and Projektforum. Targeted training efforts have been requested and carried out for the Police Authority and the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and their training programs for extreme events.
The project’s results have also been presented and discussed during courses at both basic and advanced levels in business administration (Hällgren & Buchanan, 2025) and pedagogy (Lindberg et al., 2025).
Within academia, results and knowledge about extreme contexts have been disseminated in several ways: through three locally organized two-day mini-conferences (In Extremis) with guests from, for example, Cambridge University, Oxford University, York University, Hamburg University, among others; three special issues (Journal of Management Studies, International Journal of Project Management, and Project Management Journal); visiting scholars (from e.g., Queensland University, Southampton University, IESEG Business School, Cranfield University, Aalto University); the Organizing Extreme Contexts network (www.organizingextremecontexts.org; https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14245317/) with 700 researchers; ten virtual seminars averaging 70 participants; conference participation (EGOS, PROS, Euram, Academy of Management); and presentations at Warwick Business School, Henley Business School, University of Sydney, and ESSEC Business School.
In addition, the project has resulted in three articles in peer-reviewed journals, with two additional under review; one book chapter; five conference presentations; and two popular science articles. Added to this are four articles discussing the organization of extreme contexts, which are clearly relevant to the project but only indirectly linked to it.
The three main results of the project are:
• There is an inherent difficulty in developing relevant crisis scenarios that organizations can learn from. In our studies, we focused on insufficiency and the development of habits. Concerning the social construction of insufficiency (when there is not enough knowledge or information on how to resolve a situation) we found that it creates interruptions in an organization’s routines while simultaneously generating opportunities to develop new solutions (Lindberg et al., 2025a). From this, new habits can emerge that prove successful in addressing the scenarios organizations face. This shows how organizations learn from scenarios even when existing knowledge and information may appear insufficient (Hällgren et al, 2026; Lindberg et al., 2025b).
• Some scenarios, as above, aim to prepare for known extreme events. Other scenarios aim to prepare for previously unknown events. Building on a fiction-based workshop we initially developed and tested with the Police Authority, we show how extreme fiction can be used to challenge prevailing assumptions about leadership and group dynamics, enabling critical reflection on both the future and current routines (Hällgren & Buchanan, 2025).
• Incident command methodology is mainly developed for short, episodic extreme events with a clear endpoint—such as an accident or natural disaster. In long-term overlapping extreme events, we found that incident command methodology suffers from a gradual erosion of its legitimacy when the regular organization loses interest in running it over time. To counteract this, the incident command personnel engaged in four overarching strategies aimed at restoring legitimacy (Hällgren et al., 2025b).
In summary, the project has contributed to a richer understanding of incident command work as a way of organizing. The ambition of the project was to develop, if possible, a more unified framework for how organizations manage extreme events. However, we conclude that a unified framework cannot be developed and is not equally relevant given the continuous challenges society faces. Instead of a shared framework, the project demonstrates the growing need to organize in ways that can meet continuous extreme events, something temporary incident command organizations struggle to do. The proposal for a unified framework is therefore rather an organizational form that is more adaptive and more resilient than what the incident command organization can handle.
The project’s development and results have generated several new questions relevant to both organizations and academia. These include, but are not limited to, the finding that the traditional temporary staff-organization model has its limitations. This creates a need to understand how organizations should be structured to manage continuous extreme events without a clear endpoint. The results also raise questions about how organizations critical to society’s ability to manage extreme events can collaborate and coordinate optimally when their conceptual tools and methods appear similar on the surface but differ considerably in practice. Finally, the results highlight the need for further study of how organizations can learn from extreme events, particularly through scenarios based on actual or fiction-based situations.