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CRISIS STRATEGY
These are the questions to ask when assessing the crisis and formulating your strategic approach:
· What is the crisis? What precisely has happened? Do we all have the same understanding of the situation?
· Is there a more fundamental problem? Could this be the tip of an iceberg? Could this incident call into question the reputation of the whole company; the group; the industry? Does it call our safety standards into question? Could this become a broader issue? And so on.
· Is there more to come? Are there likely to be more of these explosions; product tamperings (especially copycat) ; bent sales executives etc?
· What is the worst case? Think how bad it could get at worst. And be ready for it just in case.
· What are the audiences likely to make of it? Step outside the crisis and imagine what it’s like looking in from the outside - for the worried local community; the staff who are only just learning what’s happened; the opportunist politician; the official; the other audiences - especially the media? What would you make of it if you were they? Can you ask them? Have you thought, for example, of sounding out one or two tame journalists to see if they regard it as a minor story or the editor is holding the front page?
· What are the likely time scales?
First: How long before the various media - daily, weekly, trade, TV, radio - start going to bed with the story? Is our holding statement all they will have to publish or do we have a little time to develop a more detailed brief for them? And by when do we need to have established communication with the employees; the regulatory bodies; group headquarters; the insurers?
Second: how long is the crisis likely to run - the initial burst and then all the follow-ups; litigation; clean-up campaign; dealing with pressure groups etc?
· What is actually at stake? If the worst comes to the worst, what will we actually lose? How loyal are our suppliers, our customers, our shareholders - and will they stay with us in bad times? How long are people’s memories? Are we panicking unnecessarily? But don’t let a positive answer to this question be an excuse for inaction. Some of your top people and advisors will clutch at any straw right now if it lets them off appearing in public or taking a risk with press statements and interviews. There could be something really big at stake here that you hadn’t thought of.
· Can we involve any allies? Would our messages come better and more credibly, for example, from our trade association? An independent research department? If the MP praised us last month for being a good member of the community is he or she prepared to say it again now? The HSE gave us a clean bill of health recently and they owe us one...can we persuade them to put their heads above the parapet on our behalf?
· Who else is (culpably) involved? Another….
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