Crisis Leadership Blog

We all love to use the word strategy and this is the natural level at which a communicator should be thinking.  Our efforts are a major part of what makes strategy - the way in which the organization will realize its objectives - work. But much as we like to talk about it, it’s also easy to forget what real strategy looks like.  I recently had a valuable...

  I'm often asked, "What are the keys to crisis response success?".  After 25 years in the field, I have a ready stock of answers (a whole book’s worth in fact).  However, many of these articles have been from the standpoint of what the company should do, how fast they should respond or who should be in the room. However, I’m a communicator at heart...

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 was to freeze out of fear. Quickly, most of the gazelles...

  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 saying ‘it’s blowing up on Twitter’: that’s to say, not very...

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 is a set schedule, agenda and attendee list, crises can...

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 hiring a consultant. Most of you reading this I unfortunately...

“It’s blowing up on Twitter….” One of the phrases that I cringe at is ‘this is blowing up on Twitter’. I've been in a number of crisis situations where the person responsible for social media will run into the room, look at their iPhone, utter those fateful words and then disappear. However, as a crisis strategist this is of very little use to me - I don't...

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!” -- usually there are a set of rapid response tools that are deployed,...