Crisis Management

Crises require a prompt response within a short timeframe often determined by customers, key stakeholders, regulators, or media. News travels as fast as electrons around the world challenging crisis communicators to get ahead of the story and dispel misinformation, disinformation, speculation, and the agendas of those who may use the crisis to further their own position. Management must quickly assess what has happened, what are the potential impacts, and how the crisis should be mitigated.

We create crisis management plans conforming to international standards that are based on an organization’s risk profile. We facilitate the process of identifying stakeholders and the issues that could arise during a crisis. Our plans include substantial content (see below) including forms for capturing incident information, identifying and forecasting issues, developing mitigation strategies, and managing the flow of information during the crisis. We write concise “playbooks” with flowcharts and step-by-step instructions for executing the plan.

We also develop crisis communications plans to align with and complement the crisis management plan.

Daily communications are handled by many internal professionals–corporate communications, human resources, sales and marketing, and others. Communications during an emergency or crisis are very different and may include reputation, regulatory, and customer relationship implications.

Crisis communications should be a part of every response plan—incident management, business continuity, and crisis management. Communications protocols and procedures should be defined for all potential stakeholders who may be affected by or may need to be informed about the incident. Communications during incidents involving public safety and other government agencies may include regulatory implications and managing communications within a joint information center environment.

Preparedness, LLC develops crisis communications plans based on the unique requirements of incident management, business continuity, and crisis management plans. We know how these plans are connected. We helped write the standards defining crisis management and crisis communications, and we are mindful of regulations that define crisis communications requirements.

A crisis communications plan must assign responsibilities for communications with numerous stakeholders depending on the incident.

We train executive crisis management and support team members on roles, responsibilities, lines of authority, coordination with internal and external teams and resources, situation analysis, issues identification and forecasting, strategy development, and crisis communications.

We design, facilitate, and evaluate exercises to familiarize participants with the crisis management plan and playbook, roles and responsibilities, coordination with the crisis management support team and subordinate teams, and incident management. We design and facilitate exercises involving the crisis management team, crisis communication team, and business unit and or facility response and continuity teams. These exercises provide an opportunity to practice protocols for notification, situation analysis, strategic decision making, communications, and coordination of messaging.

We provide customized exercise “situation” manuals with multi-part scenarios, events list, injects, discussion questions, and self and group-assessment questionnaires. Following the exercise, we facilitate a group “hot wash” discussion to capture action items. We write after-action reports with recommendations for continuous improvement.

Every organization can benefit from conducting a standards-based assessment of its preparedness programs. With many teams operating at multiple levels within the organization, numerous plans, and varying levels of capabilities, optimal performance is challenging. We can assess the adequacy and implementation of corporate policies, standards, and procedures for incident management, communications, continuity, and recovery. We use national standards and industry practices as criteria, follow accepted auditing practices (that we teach for professional certification), and utilize our years of auditing experience to deliver in-depth assessments and detailed guidance for improvement.