After 15 years working in crisis communications, I still don’t understand why organisations get their crisis communication strategy so fundamentally wrong.
They spend weeks perfecting their crisis communication strategy. Assigning roles, mapping scenarios, documenting responses. The plan looks brilliant on paper.
Then something real happens and teams freeze. Not because the plan failed. Because they don’t actually trust each other when everything is moving fast.
I’ve watched crises unfold exactly as predicted in the document. Step by step, scenario covered, everything accounted for.
But if your team doesn’t know how decisions get made under pressure, if people haven’t practised being honest when the information is incomplete, if transparency isn’t already a habit the plan is just a document sitting in a folder.
Your board can have the perfect strategy. But strategy doesn’t execute itself. People do. And people only execute under pressure if they already trust each other and believe their leadership means what they’re saying.
The organisations that come through crises stronger don’t have better plans.
They have teams that already know how to work together when it matters.
Preparation is the person, not the document.
If you want to move beyond paper documents and prepare your leadership team to act with confidence under pressure, learn more about our crisis planning and preparation services.