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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 out of peril and threat harms way.

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.

At A Quarter-Century Old: The Tabletop Exercise Is Not Fit For A Digital Era

This year marks the Silver Jubilee of the PowerPoint-driven tabletop crisis exercise. Tabletop training sessions once were corporate staples, akin to Blackberry devices, CyberShot cameras and Sony Ericsson mobiles.

Its defining era was around early 2000s, and it perfectly captured the communications environment it was designed for: that is, long before social media became central to corporate reputation, before smartphones accelerated the news cycle, and before AI got key to how information is created, curated and consumed.

Yet a quarter of a century later, the ole crisis tabletop exercise has barely changed.

Most tabletop exercises remain facilitator-led discussions. Participants debate hypothetical scenarios, facilitators hand-out of pass around new information on A4 sheets, and the exercise concludes with attendance records, facilitator notes and an after-action precis: From a governance perspective, the exercise is complete. From a capability perspective, often precious little has been retained.

That reflects a broader issue. Tabletop exercises are often designed to demonstrate existing preparedness rather than test for evolving skillsets and then build them out as a result.

Today's crises rarely unfold in linear fashion. They emerge simultaneously across internal and external platforms, news and social media, AI-generated search results, messaging apps and geographically dispersed operational environments. Today, reputation, operations and stakeholder expectations evolve in real time across interconnected digital and physical domains.

A felt-pen and butcher-paper discussion around a boardroom table seems too quaint for today’s environment.

Interactive digital simulation platforms offer a different model. Rather than producing a one-off event, they generate a persistent record of organisational decision-making; by capturing decision pathways, rationale, consequences and performance data that can be replayed, analysed and reused. The output is not simply an after-action report, but an enduring, organisational learning asset.

Tabletop exercises can continue to have a role in executive engagement and strategic discussion.

But after 25 years they need to become more attuned and, like media around them, more interactive. Perhaps it's time to acknowledge that the benchmark for crisis preparedness is no longer whether an organisation has held a ‘simulation’: It's whether the exercise can demonstrate, capture and continuously improve decision-making in the same dynamic communication and context environments where modern crises occur.

We can all accept that the crisis environment has fundamentally changed, but the dominant simulation methodology (tabletops) has not. If that applies to your brand, it’s time for a rethink if not a retirement!

Gerard McCusker