Crisis Leadership Blog
Insights and perspectives on being the lighthouse during a crisis.Kyte Baby: How It Could Have Been Avoided
There have been some really great dissections of the #KyteBaby crisis response. Jeremy Tunis and Eleanor Hawkins to name my favorites. But for all this great analysis, I want to dive a little deeper into how this could have been prevented. I see there are three...
Kith Launches Litigation Communications Practice
KITH LAUNCHES LITIGATION COMMUNICATIONS PRACTICE Crisis Management Advisory Formalizes Legal Conflict Expertise Austin, TX– Kith, among the fastest-growing crisis management advisory firms in the country, has launched a new legal conflict communications practice to...
The Cost of Inaction
I have danced ballet most of my life. It’s the one thing I keep coming back to but I now live somewhere where there are not many options for ballet. Barre is o.k. Pilates is great. I was once kicked out of a yoga class for tapping my fingers. Nothing is ballet. So...
Think Twice, Speak Once
My grandfather built his own house on a farm in Saskatchewan. The house is now 75 years old and is home to a new family. I am tremendously fortunate to have had him share this skill with me. I built a bookshelf, can hang doors, and build decks. As with most...
Control What You Can Control, Including Your Anger
Justin Wilcox is used to winning and losing. For the head football coach of the University of California Golden Bears, wins and losses usually come on the football field, but his latest loss was handed to him by a bunch of college presidents and network executives...
By definition, Kith means a cadre of peers who shape opinions and attitudes while instilling sophisticated habits for action. As a way to live this value, we like to share resources that are building blocks to good crisis management and can help you start the path of protecting your reputation.
More Recent Insights
The Kith Method: Why – And How – We’re Changing Direction
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 building what we're calling Crisis Confidence. Crisis...
Redundancy: Add Spare Capacity to Make You Faster in a Crisis
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. Otherwise, we could be in for a long, hard, and potentially...
Time to create good habits
I’m on my way back from Austin where I gathered with a group of female founders. We all belong to a group called Fyli (pronounced Fee-Lee). Our purpose is to support female founders as they launch their next big thing. The idea is that support must be 360 degrees. Need access to an investor? Done. Need to find a CMO? Done. Need help ensuring you are...
Crisis Plans Can’t Be Time Capsules
A friend of mine just returned to his office for the first time in more than two years. It was exactly how he left it – albeit cleaner – when he abruptly left work on a Thursday afternoon in March 2020 to retrieve his sick kid from school. He stayed home with the kiddo Friday. The world shut down on Monday. “It’s amazing what I thought was important on...
Mobilization: How to be fast off the blocks in a crisis
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. It's meant to convey a sense of purpose and deliberateness...
How procedures generate speed
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 long-held and well-documented. Trying to map each step of a...
How procedures generate speed
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 long-held and well-documented. Trying to map each step of a...
How Your Chain of Command Generates Speed
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 called into a room as a crisis was breaking.Now ask...
Trust: The Foundation of Becoming Crisis Confident
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 response. Of the three elements, you may be saying to...
Clarity: The Foundation of Becoming Crisis Confident
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, you might wind up someplace else." Clarity equals direction...
The Kith Method
Good crisis management comes from a plan. Great crisis management comes from capability – and starts before you even smell smoke. That’s why we developed the Kith Method. We can help build and maintain a flexible capability that works for you.
Your reputation is an investment; time-consuming and costly to build and expensive to repair. Protect it.