by Much is made of the importance of proper planning to not just anticipate, but also manage a crisis. Crisis planning is key, as long as it’s coupled with a clear-eyed view of what, in the real world, implementing it will be like — a principle central to strategic issues management and crisis communications. That’s in part an unfair question, of course. No one really knows how well the planning works until the crisis is confronted.
But there is one other preparatory key step to take that might even be more important – and is the hardest to plan for, let alone execute. But this dynamic will often have more to do with determining success in managing a crisis than almost anything else – and it’s essential in learning from the experience.
The team at Montieth & Company interviewed our CEO and Global Managing Partner, Montieth Illingworth, to answer these questions.
1. What could be more important than having a detailed crisis plan in both anticipating and managing a crisis?
What’s even more important than having the plan is to understand how you will make decisions when in the midst of a crisis. Unpack decision-making and a more complex picture arises – and one that the planning can only partially grasp. At the heart of decision-making is evaluating not just what you know but what you don’t know. Decisions made solely on the former often go awry. And yet, most people will ask, what choice do they have? They can only make decisions based on the facts they have in hand, not the ones they don’t.
That’s sensible, but not a real-world view. It’s considering what you don’t know, and need to know, before making a decision that is probably the most important consideration.
2. That’s a bit of an indecipherable Rubik’s Cube. Can you give me an example?
Let’s say you discover an act of fraud or some kind of corruption by a senior executive within the company. You could have a record of what was said and done, and even a corroborating party, a whistleblower. Some of the “known unknowns” are straightforward. For example, who else may have been involved or witnessed it? Who in all was damaged by it? But then there’s the “unknown unknowns”. This always starts with what motivated the person to commit this act, full well knowing the potential consequences of it.
3. Why does motive matter? That may never be known.
It’s only by understanding the reasons for it that you can assess the full scope of the problem and its reputational fallout for the organization. You can’t climb inside someone’s head about their calculus for making decisions based on their grasp of the difference between right and wrong. But their actions say a lot about their motivations. Very often these actions exploit gaps in how the organization makes decisions, and more importantly, how they manage the guardrails to prevent damaging ones. What role did this person, then, have in the decision-making? Who else was involved? You’re not looking to broaden blame, but often getting this wider picture says a lot about fault lines in institutional processes and in behaviors that are just under the surface. That provides important insights into the full scope of the problem that needs to be understood and addressed.
4. Every crisis says something more broadly about an organization, but you can’t fix every problem here. Is it really important to get that bigger picture?
It is because when a crisis happens, you have a unique opportunity: how the organization handles the crisis is a defining moment, both externally and internally. Internally, everyone becomes sensitized to want to understand just who the organization is, whether leadership will manage things properly, if accountability will be taken, and if things get fixed so the crisis is never repeated. Your grasp of the full picture and the actions taken all become enduring impressions.
5. But you still can’t fix all the problems that arise. There have to be priorities.
It’s a multi-layered experience. Yes, get control of the immediate problem and fix it. Understand the wider nature of what happened and address that in a prioritized way – things to fix now, things to fix over time. The key is to realize that a lot of crises become corporate culture defining. They are opportunities to transform the culture to some degree, where and as needed.
6. If there is one cultural shift or transformation an organization should make when dealing with a crisis, what should it be?
Be brutally honest with yourself. Every organization goes through a kind of cultural drift where what made them successful at the start begins to erode in ways that then contribute to causing the crisis or making its management harder. Realize what makes you successful, focus on constant improvement, make the tough decisions about what needs to change, and always envision a better future.