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Crisis Management In The Media

CRiSIS Planning And Media COMMUNICATION EXPERTS

The Drill’s crisis management consultants make news headlines: Part of our crisis planning ethos is to try to help businesses shape the developing narrative via judicious media and stakeholder engagement, to take crisis-hit companies from unsafe ground to safer terrain.

Also, when crises break, media journalists/producers often ask Drill experts - all crisis management specialists - to offer insights and observations to boost understanding of the crisis communication issues at play. Our experts have vital international and hands-on crisis management consultancy expertise, which is transferred into our crisis management planning tools and crisis software.

Drawing on years of frontline crisis management consultancy, Drill staff enact crisis fixes and crisis solutions to help businesses overcome their PR and operational problems. Your crisis response plans can be improved just by reading some of the articles below, featuring our proprietary approaches and methodologies for crisis management puzzles. The articles do not constitute specific advice or counsel, but we believe their principles to be, without guarantee, thought-provoking! So when you’re ready for better crisis management planning or preparation, call us.

We hope you enjoy the read.

Your Risk Management Process is a poor Crisis Response Plan

A fair bit of confusion exists in business silos about risk management versus crisis management.

I say this because one of our prospective clients encountered [and freely shared] a pretty interesting hurdle while initiating their crisis management strategy and companion Comms plans. The hurdle seems to be an Executive Perception that you don't really need a Crisis Response Plan, if you already have a beefy Risk Management Manual or Risk Management process in place.

In our experience, while your risk management plan and your business continuity plan and your crisis response strategy must all be related - and mutually referencing - they ain't the same thing, and don't have the same tasks or purpose.

Let's start with a couple of key differences between risk management manuals and crisis response strategies or plans:

Generally, risk management plans attend emerging or potential risks, their likelihoods and imagined severities. While they cite causes, consequences and effects, they tend to be somewhat thematic and broader-brush by nature.

Crisis management strategies, however, are mainly devised to deal with actionables and specifics pertaining to curbing actual crisis incident devastations. Often, crisis plans are incident-tailored and activity driven in their mission to negate damage and discomfort, and restore BOSAU 'business-or-service-as-usual'.

To give a crude and imprecise analogy from the funfair: Risk Management is like a session in the fortune teller tent envisaging the future, while Crisis Management is closer to 'rescuing' valuable trinkets from a goodie-filled pond, using nets at the end of long sticks. Applied theory vs actionable practice, I'm musing...

I'd further add that Risk Management is often seen as a proactive and long-term science while crisis management tends to be perceived as a more immediate brief. [But in truth, while the Crisis Management deliverables become most visible when the ships hit the flan, Crisis Strategies can be just as long-term as Risk counterparts, although rarely treated with the same gravitas, you could argue].

Now, I'm in no way denigrating Risk Management; I mean, look at all it has got going for it as a discipline...

  • They take the long view and relate very closely to your routine operations

  • They are proactive in how they assess, accept, avoid, stem and transfer risk

  • They're obstacle spotters and dismantlers - which is a bloody valuable endeavour

  • They are squarely aimed at ensuring you can keep on-track in pursuing your goals

Yet let’s remember that a good crisis management plan is not short of rightful admirers either…

  • It's ever vigilant, scenario scanning and intel-tracking live for the first sniff of danger

  • It can react with clearly defined roles, responsibilities and resources at a moment's notice

  • It's instantly on-the-ground to alleviate pain with remedies and support

  • It's collaborating with third parties to protect people, property and potential contagions arising from any further incident blow-up.

Recognising that the disciplines are complementary seems entirely reasonable. And there's certainly no need to bias one subject over the other. Yet it's surely to the organisation's best benefit that they are also accepted, designed and enacted as quite discreet specialties, which have shared interests but different skillsets ?

However, if your risk management strategy does include a forensic and weighty chapter on crisis response planning and crisis mitigation strategies detailing who-does-what-and-why-when-what-went-wonky, why that's a different matter. Of course, if the risk management instructions are too unwieldy, thematic or hard to apply when the crisis erupts then you have another set of problems to tackle.

And that why your Risk Team should form a Brains Trust with an expert Crisis Crew; in order to design the most applicable and usable plans that spot issues, react appropriately and fix problems nimbly before, when and after they emerge.

A risk management template is simply not the same thing as a crisis response plan.

Do you know The Drill ?

Gerard McCusker