A major incident—fire, explosion, or act of violence—brings emergency vehicles and an army of journalists to your doorstep. Swirling reports of a serious product defect make customers skittish. A natural disaster half-way around the world cuts off the sole source supply for a profitable product line. An allegation of impropriety casts a dark cloud over the organization and sparks regulator interest.

A crisis can be an issue, event, or series of events that severely impacts or has the potential to severely impact an organization. The organization’s reputation and its relationships with stakeholders—critical to long-term success and viability—can be severely strained. Lost sales, lost market share, and increased expenses can challenge any organization.

A crisis can emerge suddenly or emerge from an incident or series of incidents that have not been properly managed. Latent problems in management, business practices, product design, quality control, and customer service are often exposed by the scrutiny of customers, media, and regulators. Real or perceived problems that are improperly managed can severely impact brand, image, and reputation.

No crisis follows a script. No holding statement, emergency procedure, or recovery strategy will be enough to navigate through the uncertainty, potential magnitude, and duration of a crisis. A crisis management team that thinks strategically, is creative, flexible, and able to sustain a response that is supported by the core values of the company is needed to manage a crisis to the best possible resolution.

A crisis management program protects brand, image, reputation and important relationships. It focuses senior management attention and supports employees, families, facilities, and operations that have been or could be impacted by the crisis-causing incident. Preparedness, LLC can develop your program by following an international standards-based approach that includes:

• Risk assessment to identify potential issues and incidents that could escalate into a crisis
• Crisis management and crisis communications organization, roles, and responsibilities
• Concept of operations to guide actions
• Forms, agendas, and tools for incident reporting, team meetings, identification and prioritization of issues, and strategy development
• Stakeholder analysis and audience-specific holding statements
• Training for crisis management team members
• Exercises to enhance competency to execute and to identify gaps in capabilities
• Program reviews using international standards to identify program gaps and opportunities for improvement