Five things that will knock your crisis communications plan off course
Every organisation will have to manage a crisis at some point. Whether it is a cyber incident, an act of God, new regulation, legislation or simple human error. The difference between a crisis successfully navigated and one that overwhelms the company can mean the difference between survival and failure.
Which is why preparing for a crisis is critical. Most large organisations will have a highly detailed disaster recovery plan; they will have invested in protection and recovery centres; and they will hold regular simulation exercises, often with the assistance of highly paid external consultants. Corporate communications teams will have spent hours populating playbooks, drafting reactive and holding statements and compiling contact databases.
But these plans often omit the first rule of any crisis: it will not go according to plan. Two quotations – one from the battlefield, one from the boxing ring – sum this up most effectively:
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”
General Helmuth von Moltke 1880
“Everyone got a plan until they get punched in the face”
Mike Tyson 1996
Preparing for the unexpected, therefore, is critical to the success of any crisis plan; but over preparation is likely to be wasted: if events do not follow the playbook, the playbook itself is of limited value.
Here are five things that can knock the best-laid crisis communications plans off course:
1. Delay:
In many IT outages, failures and cyber incidents, the full impact of the problem is not known immediately. Technicians and specialists have to examine systems and infrastructure, which are often third party provided. This will lead to a delay in communication and explanation which is unavoidable, but which looks like a failure of management. And companies hate saying “I don’t know”. At the outset it is better to say that you are working hard to establish an accurate impact of the situation rather than providing figures which may need to dramatically change in the near future. Inevitably this leads to accusations of false optimism or a lack of corporate oversight.
2. Legal Opinion:
Many incidents are made worse by the failure of an organisation to apologise, to empathise or to sound sincere. Often, this stance is taken following legal advice, with counsel insisting that any apology is an admission of liability. (Clue – it isn’t.)
3. Time and Place:
Most crisis simulations take place during office hours, with all participants sitting in the same room or connected on a video call. In real life, crises happen at weekends, in the middle of the night, and during holiday season. This simple (and easily predictable) circumstance has been the cause of many incidents turning into crises. In our digital world, negative coverage in a different time zone that goes unchallenged for several hours can dramatically affect the direction of overall media coverage in a prolonged and negative way.
4. Spokesperson (or the lack thereof):
In any crisis, stakeholders want a human response on a human level. They will not trust automated responses, pre-prepared statements or – worst of all – silence. Having a credible, well-trained spokesperson with humanity can take the sting out of many situations.
5. Action, not Words:
The worst crises are those that linger beyond the initial impact. When organisations suffer a crisis, there is a well of sympathy and understanding among stakeholders. But that well is shallow. If the company does not take material and visible steps to remedy the situation, and to guard against its recurrence, sympathy will quickly turn into condemnation.
Understanding that any crisis communications plan has an inbuilt element of failure is central to the plan succeeding. Only through understanding the plan’s limitations can its potential be reached.
