Crisis Leadership Blog
Insights and perspectives on being the lighthouse during a crisis.
Holding Statements: What Are They and Why Are They Critical to Effective Crisis Response
Speech is silver, silence is golden. According to this proverb, saying nothing is more valuable than saying something, even if the something itself has value. As a crisis management expert, I believe those are backward, and I’d add one more phrase to the proverb:...
Scaling Your CEO for Better Crisis Response
At Kith, we have seen CEOs rise during a crisis and we have seen others stumble. The difference often comes down to what they focus on during the crisis at hand. As your most senior leader, a CEO can be one of the most important assets your organization can deploy...
How to Dig Out of a Mess of Your Own Creation
The headlines were unsettling, not shocking at first. But when UnitedHealth, the healthcare behemoth responsible for processing 50 percent of all US patient medical claims annually, revealed it was the victim of a ransomware attack described as “the most serious...
When a Publicity Stunt Backfires
There are times (April Fool’s Day, I’m looking at you) when a company decides to pull a publicity stunt to see how big a splash they can make. They engage in intentional misrepresentation – of their business’ product, service, or brand – pushed out as a cheeky,...
Are You Warm Blooded or Cold Blooded?
At Kith, we often say that a crisis does not develop your leadership skills – it reveals them. It also reveals what type of creature you are: warm blooded or cold blooded. Now, obviously, humans are warm blooded as a matter of biology, so what we’re really asking you...
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.