It’s always tough to answer the question, ‘How much damage does a reputational crisis cause?‘ Unlike a business interruption or accident, the cost of reputational crises is much harder to determine. Unfortunately, whether you’re in the early stages of a crisis or trying to get a leadership team to find a preparedness program, ‘How much could this cost?’ is the kind of thing crisis managers get asked all the time. ...
*Is what people tell me, but here’s why they’re wrong “This will never work.” “People won’t trust something so important to an automated process.” “You can’t develop high-quality, professional materials like this without extensive consultation.” “It can’t be done.” These are the things you hear when you make something that’s only been available via expensive professional consultation into an on-demand service. Except these comments aren’t just about CrisisDojo. This is also what the founders of a small start-up heard back in 2001 when they launched their online legal services firm. ...
I want to share a simple framework for crisis response. But, if you’re a crisis management professional or corporate communicator, you need to take a deep breath before you read this. You’ll want to tell me that you can’t simplify crisis response. You’ll want to tell me, ‘It’s not exactly like the standard’. You’ll want to tell me that this won’t work for your big clients. I understand these concerns, so there’s no need to email me and tell me why I’m wrong. ...
A great exercise presents participants with a near-real environment that will apply stress to them, their plans, and their processes. Like a good gym session, they’ll finish tired, and a few things might be sore, but they’ll be better, stronger, and faster not long afterward. However, it’s just as easy to put together a training session that leaves everyone hurt, confused, anxious, and feeling less prepared. So how can we deliver a great exercise? One that will make a team much more crisis ready by the end? ...
Exercises are an essential part of skills development and, for things like emergencies and crises, the only way to build these skills outside of an actual event, events that are thankfully few and far between. But creating a successful exercise takes a lot of work and planning – you can’t just throw some problems at a group of people and hope they’ll learn from the experience. So how do you plan a great crisis exercise? ...
Recently, there was a great discussion on the frequency of crisis management exercises in a forum I’m part of. What was most surprising to me was the degree of consensus on the ideal tempo. The vast majority of folks recommended a quarterly & annual frequency. – Quarterly low-intensity tabletops focused on skills development and team cohesion. – Annual high-intensity simulations to reinforce learning and test teams and systems in a realistic environment. ...
To be successful, the process would have to: Be faster than if I did it ‘by hand’ Produce realistic inputs Be easily repeatable Allow for customization to meet client needs The outputs had to include: Ideas for scenarios A short video news report Social media clips Text for a news story This left me with five challenges to solve: Get ChatGPT into my workspace. Generate scenario ideas. Generate supporting text material. Generate a video news clip input. Generate social media inputs. Here’s how the AI Crisis Management Exercise Build Hackathon* went down. (*Attendee one) ...
Two major events are going to happen in US within the five years. One is a replay of the US subprime mortgage collapse which spawned the 2008 financial crisis. The other will occur when the bubble of college debt bursts. Both events – one of which may well trigger the other – will cause massive strain on US banks with potential global repercussions. This isn’t a bold claim. There are lots of people, all of whom much more familiar with this kind of risk than I am, sounding similar alarm bells. For example, the day after I started writing this, the Financial Times’ editorial was on a similar topic. And there may be other significant events that occur in addition to these but making forecasts about what’s going to happen isn’t the point of this article. ...
“The first rule of snakes [problems] is, if you see a snake, you kill it….Just take care of it” Jim Barksdale, former CEO Netscape It’s rare for an event to be truly unexpected. We know that our personal habits affect our health. We know that incorrect use of tools and machinery can cause injury. We know that small-scale corner-cutting leads to more serious infringements. We know that running complex systems – like drilling rigs or nuclear power stations – beyond established safe parameters can be catastrophic. ...
I have been thinking about effective crisis management a lot recently and am working on a more in-depth piece on managing a crisis which I hope to publish soon. However, crises don’t wait until we are properly prepared before they strike so I put together this quick set of suggestions as a stop-gap. Normally, I wouldn’t make a top-10 list but sometimes it’s the easiest way to share ideas. So here goes and I hope you find these suggestions useful. ...