Published by linker 5
Posted on September 3, 2020
7 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
By Amanda Coleman is the author of Crisis Communication Strategies
If there is one thing that 2020 has shown it is that many organisations and businesses were not as prepared as they could have been to deal with a crisis. Despite having crisis plans and business continuity plans, Covid-19 demonstrated that many were out of date, untested or simply did not exist. Moving forward it is vital that businesses are protected and ready to weather whatever happens in the future.
Creating an effective crisis management and communication process is fundamental to any business. It is not just something to use when a critical incident has occurred. It should be part of the operating procedures helping to drive the business and protect its assets. Risk management and crisis readiness go hand-in-hand. For many, communication is the end of the process when the reality is it should be at the start helping to define the plans and approaches.
The starting point is understanding what systems, processes and plans are in place. More than that it is knowing whether they have been used and did they work? Unfortunately, many crisis plans and procedures are used and never assessed. It means there is little to no information about whether it was effective, and whether anything needed to be changed. Debriefing every critical incident or crisis response is essential to creating a strong and resilient process. If you don’t know that it worked then why would you continue to do the same things the next time?
Every plan can be improved and developed. Doing this takes time, and requires review, analysis, and consideration. If you have a plan, then take another look at it. If you don’t have a plan, then how do you expect to strategically and tactically respond to a crisis?
Amanda Coleman
Managing risk is what will help a business to survive when others may feel. This means the business needs to have a culture of risk management that comes from the top and features right through to the frontline staff. It must be regularly talked about and reviewed. There needs to be a risk management plan and risk matrix that is in place. You cannot be ready to respond if you have no understanding of what problems may happen and what issues may occur. Identifying risks and developing mitigation is not just something for one department, it is something for everyone in the business. Critically it should be something that PR and communication teams get involved with as they are in a privileged position of being able to see across the business as well as outside of the business to spot things on the horizon.
Strategic risk management is the starting point. It needs to be supported by a framework for operational response to a crisis or critical incident. It is important to note that the same approach and response and be used for a serious or critical incident as well as for a significant crisis. The response must also be able to deal with an operational and a reputational crisis. There are many ways to structure to manage a crisis including military, emergency services or legal response. In my book Crisis Communication Strategies, I have drilled this down to seven key elements that are required to be in place for there to be a strong framework for crisis management.
The structure, processes and systems are all important to the crisis response. They need to be created, developed, redesigned, improved and tested so they are ready to go whenever and wherever required. Above all an effective crisis management and communication process needs to have put people at the centre of it, from those who will be asked to respond on behalf of the business through to those who have been adversely affected.
A final piece of the jigsaw of building resilience when a crisis happens comes from training, exercising and really understanding the plan. When there are both financial and time pressures this is often work that is overlooked or put off until there is both time and money. This means businesses are putting employees under unnecessary pressure when they are called in to face a crisis. Building resilience comes from not just knowing the plan, but knowing it in detail, and understanding the role you must play. People know it because they have done more than read about it, they have found some way of living it.
If they have lived it then they will be able to recall those experiences when the crisis response is put into action. From readiness there is resilience. Actions can be taken, and decisions made because people are comfortable in the crisis framework and working environment. It means having a plan is just half the battle in being crisis ready.
Crisis management and communication has been thrust into the spotlight during the Covid-19 pandemic. The conversations that are taking place now must continue if businesses are to have a strong and decisive crisis response ready for whatever lies ahead.
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