Many of us will have rolled our eyes when we've received an invitation to join our colleagues in a meeting room to discuss our values. Writing the same tired old tropes on a whiteboard or flip charts can seem like a waste of time. The values are written up at the end of the session, immortalized...
Speed is at a premium at the outset of a crisis, and being able to trust your gut and having good pattern recognition helps you move fast when facts are scarce. However, once you get farther into the response, the challenges are more complex, and patterns become less clear: your gut can start to...
The sun is shining in Austin, Texas, and many of us are thinking about plans for the beach this summer. I've written before about the notion that a healthy body is a combination of diet and exercise, and the equivalency that I see with healthy organizations, which will have a mix of ability -...
Loyal readers of this blog will have seen that we've spent a lot of time talking about speed, clarity, and trust recently. For us, these represent a new approach to helping organizations: less of a focus on crisis response and more on risk awareness and crisis readiness. Overall, we're focused on...
I'm fond of the old military saying: "two is one, and one is none." It reminds me to have a backup or a spare for critical equipment when I'm on the boat. I can't run to the corner store if something goes wrong when I'm at sea, so I need to be able to replace or repair critical parts of the boat....
Mobilization simply means getting the right people in the right place with the right information to allow them to start managing the event taking place. The term 'mobilization' can sound very operational and, therefore, a little out of place in a communications environment, but that's the point....
Procedures have a terrible reputation amongst communicators for stifling creativity and limiting the freedom needed to respond to a crisis. We'll often say that we can't plan something as complex and instinctual as a crisis in advance. In many ways, I agree. My dislike of shelves of binders is...
Procedures have a terrible reputation amongst communicators for stifling creativity and limiting the freedom needed to respond to a crisis. We'll often say that we can't plan something as complex and instinctual as a crisis in advance. In many ways, I agree. My dislike of shelves of binders is...
You've probably seen the Abbott and Costello sketch 'Who's on First?' (and if not, you're missing out) where the team's names - Who is on First base, What is on Second, Why is in the Outfield - make for a lot of confusion and a great skit. But take a moment and think back to the last time you were...
The final component of our speed, clarity, and trust architecture that will transform you into a Crisis Confident organization is trust. The simple quote from Santosh Kalwar, "Trust starts and ends with the truth," helps us think about the truth and the trust that's necessary for superior crisis...
Two quotes help me think about the concept of clarity and its importance in crisis response. The first is from Henry Kissinger. "If you don't know where you're going, every road will get you nowhere." And the second one is from the always quotable Yogi Berra. "If you don't know where you're going,...
In my last blog post, I introduced the concept of Crisis Confidence, and that confidence is born out of speed, clarity, and trust. Over the next three weeks, I want to dig in on each of those elements and give them context and specific recommendations on what you can do to improve all three. Being...
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