Crisis Preparation: Part One

All organizations will inevitably face a crisis. In this two-part blog we will be discussing the preparation of a crisis management plan (CMP). Part one will discuss how “the preparation phase of crisis management anticipates the occurrence of a crisis” (Coombs, 2015, p. 88) whilst part two will discuss how to create a functional CMP.

“All organizations should prepare to handle a crisis by taking six steps” (Coombs, 2015, p. 66):

1.      Diagnose potential vulnerabilities

2.      Assessthe potential crisis types

3.      Select and train a crisis management team (CMT)

4.      Select and train a spokesperson

5.      Develop the Crisis Management Plan (CMP)

6.      Evaluate the crisis management system

If you have ever been to the doctor’s office for a check-up you understand a little bit of the importance of diagnosing vulnerabilities. Your doctor could inform you that you will get sick and that sickness is preventable by simply modifying your existing method of operation. In the same way, a thorough analysis of the external and internal environments of your organization’s operation can assist you in identifying potential vulnerabilities. Ask yourself ‘where are we vulnerable? Are we next to an organization who could also experience a crisis which would subsequently affect our operations? Are we prone to a natural disaster? Do we have animals in our location that could cause a problem for our operations’? Identifying the likelihood of a crisis and its level of potential impact is the best place to start when developing a CMP.

Just as the human body is susceptible to a plethora of illnesses, an organization is not limited to just one threat. There is a laundry list of potential crises, ranging from environmental disasters to activist actions (Coombs, 2015, p. 67). Timothy Coombs (2015) has compiled all of the potential crises into one master list:

·         Operational disruptions from natural disasters

·         Workplace violence (sexual harassment, assaults, threats)

·         Rumors

·         Unexpected loss of key leadership

·         Malevolence (terrorism, product tampering, activist threats, or computer hacking)

·         Challenges (when your organization is confronted by discontented stakeholders who are not satisfied with the way your company is operating).

·         Technical-error accidents

·         Technical-error product harm

·         Human-error accidents

·         Human-error product harm

·         Organizational Misdeeds (actions an organization takes that has the potential to jeopardize operations, laws, and stakeholder relationships).

By assessing potential crisis types in your organizational operation, you are engaging in preventative actions that could avert potential crises. Utilizing this list, you can identify potential vulnerabilities in organization. First, identify potential crises and select one of each type; select those that have a higher likelihood of occurrence and develop a CMP that addresses those issues before they have a chance to become crises. For a small example, say we selected sexual harassment from the workplace violence section and workplace accidents from the human-error accidents section. By having a sexual harassment meeting within the organization and a seminar regarding proper safety precautions you can marginalize the chances of those becoming an issue.

While identifying and addressing potential vulnerabilities can prevent issues from becoming serious crises, it is still important to select and train a CMT, with a spokesperson, who can formulate and enact your company’s CMP. The CMT is responsible for creating a CMP, enacting it, and dealing with any problems not covered in the original CMP (Coombs, 2015, p. 68). All of the aforementioned are the duties of the CMT. It is up to them to identify potential vulnerabilities, take preventative measures now, and prepare for those that have a likelihood of impact. This means that The CMT will not only develop the CMP, but will also put it to the test in simulated crises. However, “it is impossible for a CMP to anticipate all possible contingencies” (Coombs, 2015, p. 69). It is important then, that crisis managers, and subsequently public relations practitioners remain malleable to circumstance, anticipating what they are able and dealing with what is unexpected.

Selecting those who will participate on the CMT is not as easy as lining up all of your friends, while you and your buddy take turns selecting from the lot who will be on your team. No, “selection is complicated by the need to have specific functional areas within the organization represented on the CMT” (Coombs, 2015, p. 69). The functional approach the selecting a CMT posits that team members must represent specific functional divisions within the organization (Coombs, 2015, p. 69). This means that in order for a CMT to function effectively, the team should consist of individuals with different skills, backgrounds, and titles (such as legal, operations, safety, finances, human resources, and etc.) so that information is easily disseminated between each division during the event of a crisis. 

Before we leave you to search for part two – the development of the CMP – we should briefly mention the importance of selecting and training a spokesperson. “The spokesperson is the voice of the organization during the crisis” (Coombs, 2015, p. 80). The spokesperson is the person responsible for communicating your story to the public, the media, your stakeholders, and the opinion leaders and is crucial to the management of the crisis. They are the ones who inform the world of what happened, how the situation is going to be resolved, inform about the preventative measures that were, and how they had failed. Without a trained spokesperson communicating with the public, everyone involved will question the credibility and competency of the organization while concurrently considering whether the crisis is worse than previously anticipated. Ideally, it is important to have multiple spokespeople on the CMT at any given time. One person cannot be available all of the time.

If we can imagine the organization as a human structure, the CMT is the hand that holds a shield before the body, the shield is the CMP, and the sword is the spokesperson that cuts down any potential doubt that stakeholders would have of the organization in the event of a crisis. Now that we understand the smallest amount of what organizational preparation is required (identifying vulnerabilities, forming a crisis management team, and the importance of the role spokesperson) we shall move on to the meat of the matter: The CMP. 

References

Coombs, W. (. (2015). Ongoing Crisis Communication. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Deloitte. (2016, February 17). Crisis Management Wargaming. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr_1O75185o

Layne, M. (2014, December 23). Marx Layne Crisis Communications: Choosing A Spokesperson. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UykvRtShFU

Weedin, D. (2013, July 19). Responsibilities of the Crisis Management Team Members. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceDU-TSKg_g