The best crises are the ones that never happen - because they were identified early and dealt with effectively. Research shows that most managers believe their companies may, at some stage, be vulnerable to a crisis, yet most admit their crisis management planning is minimal.
Cumbersome, unwieldy, impractical crisis management planning, in which unskilled planners attempt to impose unworkable solutions on a company, will not succeed.
They require unrealistic levels of continual management and updating, may run counter to the company’s culture and operating procedures, are seen as an irrelevant and annoying distraction by busy employees and senior managers, and are quickly rendered out of date.
Some systems attempt to predict every possible crisis to which the company is supposedly vulnerable, which is to fundamentally misunderstand sound crisis management principles.
- To sharpen ‘early warning’ mechanisms.
- To shorten the crisis cycles.
- To get to the facts, quickly.
- To reduce costs.
- To give ‘control of the company’ back to the management. To facilitate swift and decisive action.
- To ‘stiffen the backbone’ of suppliers, employees, shareholders, distributors / agents and those in the route-to-market.
- To give customers confidence that the company is in control of its own destiny, and to minimise the impact on revenues.
- To manage the long term reputational and revenue recovery issues which most crises leave in their wake.
- To minimise the ‘corporate shock’ sometimes caused by TV cameras at the gates, and hourly bulletins updating every arcane detail of the crisis as it develops.
Our crisis management planning enables clients to handle any type of crisis more effectively - from criminal activity to major industrial accidents; from transport disasters to life-threatening product failure; and from the predictable to the unpredictable.