You wish you’d gotten to it last week, last month, last quarter.  Because, you sure could use a plan right now!

A crisis has just erupted and you really wish you’d attended that seminar at the NTA convention in Salt Lake City , or scheduled that meeting to discuss crisis management or prepared the crisis plan that might have guided your decisions right now.

Whether you’ve got a crisis plan or not, the situation’s hit the fan and here you are.  Now, it’s up to you and your team to pull your company, your employees, your clients out of the fire and to lead them safely through the crisis.  If you fail, people and your company may suffer or die.  If you succeed, your company may be stronger than its ever been.

How will you manage through this crisis?

What do you do when something bad happens to your company, your employees, your customers, your community?  What do you do if a bus/plane/train/boat load of your customers crashes?  What do you do if their hotel burns down in the middle of the night?  What do you do if your major corporate client goes out of business?  What do you do if your CEO is accused of racism?  What do you do if the your head office burns down?  What do you do if your community is evacuated due to a major natural disaster?

In an ideal world, you’d have a wonderful plan to guide you each step of the way.  Then again, in an ideal world, a crisis wouldn’t happen.  So…

Plan or no plan, you should lead your organization through this crisis in five, easy-to-remember stages.  But, first…

Understand what a crisis is

There are many different definitions of crisis, but perhaps the most useful one is this:  a situation that severely imperils your organization’s ability to succeed in its mission.

The examples listed at the beginning of this article – major crashes, fires, scandals, supply chain interruptions, etc. –  begin to illustrate the various ways that crisis can impact your organization.  While there are an infinite number of ways crisis can strike, there are generally four major dimensions along which crisis will impact your organization:

• Operational impact – An operational crisis interferes with your ability to continue normal operations.
• Life safety & security impact – injures or kills employees, clients, passengers, guests, others.
• Financial impact – reduces your revenue, increases your costs and damages your company’s ability to raise capital.
• Reputational impact – damages your corporate reputation and reduces your support among stakeholders.

One of the defining characteristics of a crisis is that its outcome is uncertain.  In every crisis, there is an opportunity to influence the outcome – to emerge from the crisis stronger, weaker or not at all.  Therefore, it’s essential you set clear goals for your crisis management efforts.

Understand the goals of crisis management

Organizations are rarely impacted along just one crisis dimension.  Quite often, a crisis that begins along one dimension will grow to include other impacts.  The bus crash, for example, imposes an immediate security and life safety impact on passengers and quickly creates an operational impact for the company which has to reallocate fleet resources.  If the crisis is not well managed, the company will experience a negative reputational impact that could well evolve into a major financial impact if angry customers begin canceling bookings.

One of the goals of effective crisis management is to prevent the “mutation” of one type of crisis into another – to keep an operational crisis from becoming a life safety & security, reputational or financial crisis, for instance.

The other goal of effective crisis management is the most important one:  to enable your organization to manage through the crisis and emerge from it in a position to continue achieving its business strategy.  This requires that you be able to make timely and effective management decisions during the crisis.

Understand what happens in a crisis

In the early stages of almost every crisis, an Information Gap occurs:  there is never enough information available.  To make matters worse, much of the information that first comes in will be wrong.  Most people instinctively respond to this phenomenon in one of two ways:

• by avoiding critical decisions until they have “enough information.”  Unfortunately, they may never have enough information because the situation will keep changing, getting worse.  Meanwhile, they’re stuck in “analysis paralysis.”
• by seizing on the first news they hear and leaping into action – basing their response on incomplete, often inaccurate, information.  While early action is important, it is just as important that it be focused on the right problem.

Later on in a crisis, you may experience an Information Glut – finding yourself overwhelmed by information, almost all of which is irrelevant or inaccurate.  You must be able to rapidly sort through the information, identifying and interpreting data that is both relevant and accurate.

Finally, how to make timely decisions without all the facts

Crisis is overwhelming.  To successfully lead through a crisis, you must make it not so.  Like any overwhelming challenge, break your crisis into bite-sized bits.  Focus your first decisions on containment – taking immediate action to prevent the situation from getting worse.  You don’t have to solve the entire crisis right away.  First, you have to keep it from getting worse and buy yourself some time to assess the situation in more detail and then make situation-specific plans to resolve it.

The best way to accomplish this in the heat of moment is to follow a crisis management framework that will guide you through the various stages of the crisis.  There are five stages to every crisis management effort and we recommend an approach called the CAPER Crisis Management Framework.  CAPER is an acronym designed to help you remember a simple five stage process to manage through any crisis.

 1.  Containment –  Take immediate action to prevent the situation from growing worse.  This buys you time to develop accurate information about the crisis and assess it properly.  In a crisis, people respond by instinct.  Unless you can afford to practice immediate actions to the point they become instinctive (as military and emergency services professionals do) you should design these procedures to be as close as possible to routine daily operating procedures.  This stage typically includes measures such as:

• focusing on people first, property second.
• moving people at risk to a place of safety.
• calling for help from emergency services, if required.
• treating injuries to prevent them growing worse.
• establishing a perimeter around the affected area so people don’t wander into danger.
• acting to prevent the crisis from crossing out through the perimeter – fire fighting, isolating unaffected activities so they are not damaged by those involved in the crisis, etc.
• creating a central information point where external stakeholders, media, etc. can come for information from your organization about what’s going on – ensuring there is one informed voice speaking for your organization.

2.  Assessment – each crisis is unique and, therefore, requires a unique solution.  It is important to build into your crisis management process a capability to make accurate on-the-fly assessments of evolving situations.  This means assigning responsibilities for gathering information, creating reliable procedures to pass information to decision-makers and training people to interpret it accurately.  This may involve:

• creating a crisis operations center where all information from employees, stakeholders, media, etc. can be gathered and assessed.
• teaching employees to send critical information to the operations center.
• gathering a crisis management team with broad representation from across your organization to help assess and interpret information as it comes in – perhaps including managers normally responsible for operations, customer service, facilities, human resources, finance, marketing, public relations, etc.
• creating a “log book” to record critical information as it comes in and a simple filing system to safely store reports and information.
• creating a way to differentiate between accurate and inaccurate, relevant and irrelevant information.

 3.  Planning –  because each crisis requires a unique solution, it is important to develop your team’s ability to make quick, effective plans based on evolving information.  This means identifying people with this competency, training them to work in a dynamic environment and practicing plan development and approval procedures that will work in a crisis.  During a crisis, this may include:

• involving a crisis management team, as identified under Assessment, in the development of plans.
• establishing a quiet, secure room or area to develop plans – close to the operations center where information is being developed, but separate so it’s possible to concentrate without distraction.

4.  Execution – in any crisis, you must be able to execute your plans effectively.  This task is much easier if you have a strong, high-performance team in place before the crisis.  Great teams bend with the wind and are amazingly resilient in a crisis.  Effective training and development to build a leadership culture, depth of talent and a sense of teamwork in your organization is invaluable.  During a crisis, remember:

• it may be easier to use day-to-day leadership structure as much as possible to execute tasks
• establish clear safety guidelines such as: “protect yourself first, your team second, and property last” so no one believes it’s necessary to risk their own life to accomplish their task.

5.  Reorganization and Recovery – as the crisis winds down, it is important to return your organization to normal operations as efficiently as possible, and to refresh any consumables used in the crisis.  The next crisis could occur at any time.  Great organizations also learn from their experience, so your crisis management process should include procedures for an “after action review” to discuss what worked, what didn’t and to improve your ability to manage the next crisis.

• Schedule a “Post Crisis Review” meeting of key managers to discuss what happened, what worked well and what could be done better next time.
• Begin developing or improving your crisis management plan for next time.
• Schedule training and practice sessions to improve your crisis management capabilities.
• Restock all the consumables you used.

 

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