P-DRIVEN: Observations from an Exploratory Comparison

The exploratory comparison

To develop working methods for crisis teams, it is first necessary to identify which tasks an approach structures and which changes an exercise can reveal. P-DRIVEN is a problem-driven, facilitator-supported working approach that places the relevant problems at the center of the team’s work. The following comparison examines it alongside two other process inputs.

At NBS Northern Business School Hamburg, three teams took part in a comparative crisis management exercise with two rounds. Within each round, the scenario progression, the messages and events introduced by exercise control, the time frame and the organizational role were the same for all three teams. The second round used a different scenario while retaining that comparative structure.

The teams started from different conditions. Participants with relevant prior security or emergency experience and advanced security management study were deliberately assigned to Team 1; the remaining participants were assigned by lot. Between rounds, Team 1 received an ad hoc reflection input, Team 2 a structured staff-work input and Team 3 a facilitator-based P-DRIVEN process input.

What changed in the observations

In Team 3, external ratings rose strongly in the second round while participant self-ratings remained nearly stable. In Team 2, both self-ratings and external work-mode ratings improved. Team 1’s self-ratings declined while external ratings improved. These patterns show why participant perceptions and external observations need to remain distinct.

My conference manuscript “The Decision Corridor: An Exploratory Rubric for Reviewing Temporal Actionability in Crisis Management Team Decisions” (Rico Kerstan, exploratory conference manuscript dated 29 May 2026), examines the exercise material at decision-episode level. It distinguishes three prompts: anticipating a developing condition, fitting the scenario problem and directing action to the appropriate role or responsibility.

Across 83 documented episodes, 10 clearly meet all three criteria. In round 2, Teams 1 and 2 each have three episodes clearly within the corridor out of twelve, or 25%. Team 3 has three out of eight, or 37.5%, after none of its twelve first-round episodes met the strict rule. Its three positive second-round episodes form two connected decision complexes. Across the full corpus, the ten positive episodes form six substantive complexes, not ten independent successes. Proactivity is the restrictive prompt: it is clearly secured in 13 episodes, compared with 48 for scenario fit and 82 for targetedness. Other episodes may still contain useful crisis handling; the corridor rule asks the narrower question of whether a usable action path was secured in time.

Why the evidence needs more than one view

These results add detail rather than a single winning score. Team 1’s positive cases are distributed across more distinct complexes over the two rounds. Communication-event volume and participant ratings show different patterns from the episode classification. A decline in communication volume, for example, does not tell us whether the remaining assignments fit the scenario.

The discrepancy between self-assessment and external observation is therefore a substantive finding of this comparison. For practice, I recommend using both perspectives and returning to concrete decisions where they diverge. The question is which action the evidence supports, not which account feels more convincing.

What the comparison establishes

The study is exploratory. The teams had unequal starting conditions, the inputs were not independently controlled interventions and the episode recoding lacks an independent intercoder trail. It does not establish that P-DRIVEN caused the observed changes or that one hour of training produces a general improvement in crisis management performance.

It does show a noteworthy second-round pattern in the facilitator-supported team and a useful separation between perceived work quality, external ratings and scenario-aligned decision episodes. Those findings provide specific questions for further comparison and reliability work.

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