Expecting the Unexpected: How to Begin Planning for Crisis

When a crisis hits, you want your response to be calm, transparent, empathetic and credible. Unfortunately, in times of actual crises we are prone to produce the exact opposite of this response — it’s hard to keep a clear head when the whole building is on fire! A crisis plan developed well ahead of time will go a long way towards helping your organization achieve a proportional and timely response, prevent any additional damage, and maintain a positive image during and after a crisis.

While preparing for an unplanned scenario might seem rather daunting, it becomes a lot less complex when broken down into four simple steps:

1. Identify potential crises: consider prior experiences faced by your organization and others within your industry. Also consider events in your geographic area; both natural and man-made disasters (for instance, an oil spill caused by a neighboring chemical plant may have major implications for you).
2. Assess potential crises: categorize each crisis under ‘victim crisis’, ‘accident crisis’, or ‘preventable crisis’. Victim crises could include product tampering/malevolence; workplace violence; rumors and disinformation; and natural disasters. Accident crises include industrial accidents and defective products that are not the result of reasonably preventable actions. In contrast, preventable crises are accidents that result due to negligence and organizational misdeeds.
3. Analyze the risk of each crisis: sort each potential crisis by likelihood of occurrence and potential damage to the organization. You’ll find that some crises have a low likelihood of occurrence but would cause a great deal of damage, and vice-versa.
4. Begin planning: post-analysis, prioritize which crises to start with. The actual process of creating a plan for each crisis is extensive and you never know when a crisis will hit so prioritizing is important. Consider that it would be wiser to prioritize crises of low impact but high likelihood over those of high impact but low likelihood.

Once you begin planning you will discover your potential points of weakness and start to think of solutions to prevent and mitigate those problems. Remember: the process of planning is never finished. When a crisis occurs, you will need to go back to your plan and evaluate your defined tactics for addressing other scenarios, improving on existing plans based on new knowledge.