Approach

How Rico Kerstan thinks about problems: problem-driven work, organizational resilience, and the connection between practice and research.

How I look at problems

Most difficulties organizations face in unclear or critical situations are not knowledge problems. They are structural problems. The issue is not a lack of information: it is a lack of order in thinking and deciding.

That shapes how I work. I do not start from norms, tools, or standard processes. I start from the problem.

What is described on this page is not a product offering. These are thinking models: developed from practice, refined through research.

P-DRIVEN: Problem-Driven Work

Many organizations move into solutions too quickly. They build processes, produce documents, implement systems: before the actual problem has been clearly defined. The result is activity, but not necessarily effectiveness.

P-DRIVEN is not a consulting product. It is a working principle.

The core: first problem clarity, then structure, then measures. Not the other way around.

In practice:

  • What problem actually needs to be solved: not which tool should be applied?
  • What is the underlying cause: not just the visible symptom?
  • What measures are necessary and sufficient: not which ones are available?

This sequence sounds obvious. In practice, it is regularly skipped. Audit cycles, normative requirements, and internal expectations create pressure toward fast activity: at the cost of careful diagnosis.

P-DRIVEN stands for pragmatism in this sense: reduce complexity, address what actually matters, avoid methodology for its own sake.

C]ORE: Organizational Resilience in Companies

C]ORE stands for Corporate Organizational Resilience Excellence. Not as a product label, but as a conceptual model for what organizational resilience in companies actually means.

Resilience is often misunderstood: as defense, redundancy, or crisis planning. That falls short.

The real question is: how does an organization stay functional when conditions change, disruptions occur, and decisions must be made under pressure? And how does it continue to develop: rather than merely survive?

C]ORE treats resilience as a leadership and structural question. Crisis and non-crisis cannot be neatly separated. Organizations that are poorly structured in ordinary times do not suddenly become capable in a crisis.

Concretely:

  • Robustness and adaptability must be thought together: not as opposites
  • Individual measures are not enough: what matters is the interaction of structures, processes, accountability, and culture
  • Resilience is not a project goal to be achieved and ticked off: it is a permanent organizational property

M]ORE: Municipal Resilience

M]ORE stands for Municipal Organizational Resilience Excellence. It transfers the same underlying logic to municipal systems: with the adaptations that context requires.

Municipalities are not companies. They are complex, networked systems with public, private, and civic actors, different accountability structures, and political conditions that shape decisions in specific ways.

Municipal resilience does not emerge from individual plans or isolated preparedness. It emerges from a robust ecosystem: connected actors, clear responsibility structures, and the capacity to act even when things do not go as planned.

What does not work: applying corporate models to municipalities unchanged. What is needed: a model that takes the specific conditions of municipal systems seriously.

The M] reflects that distinctiveness: municipal resilience requires its own conceptual frame.

Research

The gap between practice and research in crisis management is real. There is extensive experiential knowledge, many standards and routines: but little systematic examination of what actually works and why.

I do research because that gap bothers me.

My research sits at the intersection of practice and science. The questions come from practice. The methods come from science. The goal is not theory for its own sake, but a clearer understanding of what works in practice: and what does not.

Core themes:

  • Effectiveness and efficiency of crisis management approaches
  • Decision-making processes in dynamic and unclear situations
  • Crisis management exercises and training: effects and design
  • Measurability and methodological quality in crisis preparedness
  • Organizational resilience as a research subject

Ongoing PhD project (since 2024, TU Ostrava): “Effectiveness and effectivity of crisis management approaches: experimental study on different methodologies in German business context”

Selected publications:

  • Kerstan, R. (2024): Methodenhandbuch für effektives IT-Notfallmanagement. 1st ed.
  • Röhl, A.; Kerstan, R. (2023): Kommunale Selbstverwaltung, 02/2023, pp. 63–66.
  • Röhl, A.; Kerstan, R. (2021): Die Bedeutung organisationaler Ökosysteme für den Erfolg der Unternehmenssicherheit, in: Vogt et al. (eds.), Wirtschaftsschutz in der Praxis (2022).
  • Röhl, A.; Kerstan, R. (2020): Lehren aus der Corona-Pandemie: Resilienz in der Verwaltung steigern, der Gemeinderat.
  • Kerstan, R.; Röhl, A. (2020): Wie resilient sind Organisationen in Deutschland?, Working Paper NBS Hamburg, No. 4/2020.

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