When a crisis hits, will you be ready – or scrambling to respond?

When issues strike, they don’t come with a warning. They move fast – with social media, the news cycle, and growing audience expectations for ‘real-time’ communication requiring organisations to act quickly.

At Kaizen, we’ve helped a range of organisations and leaders navigate sensitive issues and crises, from international manufacturers managing concerns over product safety and major developers facing misinformation campaigns, to communications support during legal cases, and supporting public and private leaders handle the glare of the media spotlight. There’s no perfect playbook, but from our experience there are ten key principles to keep in mind to ensure timely, clear and effective issues and crisis communication.

1. Be prepared

The best way to ensure you are ready to navigate an issue or crisis is to have the fundamentals in place. A clear plan outlining protocols, approaches and channels, roles and responsibilities (for example, media spokespeople and decision-makers), and potential scenarios can help organisations react calmly when a crisis strikes. Keep these plans practical, action focused and updated regularly. For example, if you have identified the most likely risks, draft a holding statement that can be tailored and deployed quickly.

2. Practice

Do your spokespeople undergo regular media training? Have you run a ‘crisis scenario simulation’ to pressure test your protocols and processes? It can be a good idea to conduct these annually – with media training and practice interview sessions more often for media spokespeople.

3. Stay calm, listen and ask the right questions

What happened? What are the facts? Who is impacted? Is it escalating? What are the risks and implications – legal and reputational? The right questions help you cut through panic and focus on what matters. It’s also critical to monitor owned, media and social channels for developments.

4. Prioritise your audiences

Once you’ve identified the audiences most impacted or likely to be impacted – you can prioritise your communication. Importantly, you don’t want employees, customers or internal stakeholders learning about an issue or crisis in the media first – when you can, prioritise internal and direct communication with your most importance audiences.

5. Tailor your communication

Staff, partners, customers, investors, regulators – your critical audiences may need tailored communication, delivered via the most appropriate channel(s). Keep communication clear, simple and to the point, and don’t overlook the power of verbal and face to face communication – especially with staff.

6. Move quickly, but with purpose.

If it’s appropriate, acknowledge the issue, outline what you know and what is being done to address it. Use a holding line if needed, but commit to providing future updates via the channels your audiences consume.

7. Act with honesty and integrity

Keep it factual and empathetic. Show you care and be honest about what you know and what action is being taken. Show progress. Keep showing it.

8. Communicate clearly and often – shut down mis and disinformation immediately

Don’t allow an information vacuum to be created – you need to provide regular, clear and factual updates to your audiences. Where misinformation or disinformation becomes public – shut it down immediately with the facts

9. Everything is ‘on the record’ in a crisis

Remember, anything shared in writing with your stakeholders and/or on social media could be published and/or be provided to the media. So, as above – act and communicate with honesty and integrity, provide regular updates and shut down mis and disinformation quickly.

10. Learn from the issue

Once the issue has been resolved, conduct a post-issue review. What worked? What didn’t? Are there long term impacts? Do you need a communications strategy to rebuild trust? Use the insights to strengthen your protocols, update your plan and build capability for next time.

At Kaizen, we’ve developed and refined our issues management approach through years of hands-on experience. We help organisations plan for and stay ahead of emerging risks, respond decisively and protect their reputation. For a confidential discussion please contact our team at any time – chris@kaizenco.au.