Crisis management plans and processes to protect your reputation
Why is crisis management planning so important? In the words of Warren Buffett: “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
The way you manage a crisis will affect the future of your organisation for years to come. Indeed, research by Oxford Metrica shows that organisations which endure a crisis will be re-evaluated in the light of the crisis and fall neatly into two well defined groups: the winners and the losers.
To be a winner, you need to protect the value in your business. This means being able to respond swiftly and effectively under pressure to an escalating situation. Get it wrong and a reputation created over decades can be destroyed in seconds. Get it right and your reputation will be preserved, maybe even enhanced.
All too often, we see organisations that are slow to respond to a crisis, taking hours (or longer) to do or say anything of substance. Equally, when they eventually decide on a course of action, they take a reactive approach – responding to unfolding events in a knee-jerk fashion, without ever getting ahead of the situation or influencing the crisis.
This type of behaviour is usually down to a lack of planning. Under enormous pressure and in the absence of a well-conceived crisis management plan, businesses are required to muddle through based on instinct and the collective experience of their senior management teams. Not surprisingly, this is rarely a recipe for success.
Planning for a crisis enables you to take the right steps and protect your organisation from harm. From considering likely risks and potential mitigation strategies to evaluating existing procedures and creating new, enhanced crisis management plans, our tried and tested approach to crisis planning gives you the foundations you need to build an effective response.