Crisis Communication

Crisis communication is planning work that is occasionally used under pressure. Almost all of its value is created in advance, when there is time to decide who speaks, what can be said before the facts are settled, and how information will move inside the organisation while an incident is running.

The plan is a set of decisions, not a document

A plan that has not decided anything is of no use at three in the morning. The decisions worth making in advance are narrow and practical: who is told first, who is authorised to approve a public statement, which channels are used in which order, and what threshold turns an operational problem into a communications one. Contact chains are kept current inside the organisation and are the single most common part of a plan to go stale.

Writing the first statement

The first statement is short, and its job is to establish that the organisation knows an incident is happening and is dealing with it. It says what is known, what is not yet known, what is being done, and when the next update will come. It does not speculate about cause, does not assign blame, and does not promise an outcome. Setting a time for the next update is what buys the room to establish facts, and that time is then kept even when the only news is that there is no news.

Keeping one account of the facts

During an incident the most damaging communications failure is usually internal: two parts of an organisation describing the same event differently. A single running record of established facts, held in one place and updated by one team, keeps public statements, staff messages and answers to enquiries consistent. Staff generally learn about an incident affecting their employer from the news unless someone has deliberately decided otherwise.

The review afterwards

A review conducted a fortnight later, when the pressure has gone, is worth more than one conducted while the incident is still live. It looks at when the organisation first knew, how long the first statement took, where the account of facts diverged, and which parts of the plan were never opened. The output is a small number of changes to the plan, not a report.