Don’t be a gazelle – how to manage fear in crisis I was recently watching Animal Planet with my daughter. The show was about predators hunting their prey, in this case a lion and a herd of gazelle. Gazelles have keen hearing and a good sense of smell but sensing the lion, their immediate response...

  In my experience, at some point in the discussions during a crisis someone will utter a phrase that will kill the conversation. “We need to think about litigation.” This sounds like a pertinent and important thing to think about but this statement is as useful as the head of communications...

Who needs to be in the room when developing crisis response? ‘Is everyone here?’ It’s a pretty standard and innocuous question at the beginning of most meetings or conference calls but working out what we mean by ‘everyone’ during a crisis can be difficult.  Unlike a standard meeting, where there...

We are in the crisis business, which means we're also in the business of risk evaluation and risk mitigation. Wouldn't you love it if you could de-risk the hiring of a professional service provider -- like a crisis and reputation management consultant? There's a tremendous amount of unknowns in...

What I want you to do is look at the trajectory of a crisis shown below and look specifically for the dotted line. The dotted line is where most crisis response tends to stop. After something breaks -- my least-favorite expression to hear in these moments is “It’s blowing up on Twitter!” --...

  It should not be so hard for companies to “Sorry.” Recently, I was mulling over the different responses I normally see during a crisis meeting if the CEO asks, "What happens if we just apologize?" General Counsel: panic.   "No. We can't do that. We can't accept blame because of the...

  The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) gave his update to the group. ‘Someone accessed our user database with a set of compromised access credentials they obtained through phishing attacks. We think we've lost some PII and unhashed user login info. Unfortunately, it looks as though...

I was recently put in an awkward situation where the question of the crisis communications team’s independence at a major organization became an issue. As background, the communications team had asked me to work with them to prepare some materials related to a specific product launch.  There was...

Having the ability to find a link between your passion and your profession will make you better at both. That said, I often try to uncover the similarities between what we do in crisis communications and crisis planning with my passion for sailboat racing and long distance sailing. I was recently...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness" is the well-known opening to Charles Dickens' novel "A Tale of Two Cities." However, the second part, regarding wisdom and foolishness, isn't quoted as often as the first. When we walk...

What is a crisis? It’s a big question, but in its most basic terms, it’s something that interrupts you from a pre-planned activity -- it moves you off-course, in other words -- and it triggers a negative reaction from some important subset, be that employees, stakeholders, investors, the media...