A client sent me their crisis communications plan last week and asked if it was any good. Thirty one pages. Escalation tiers, a holding statement template, a phone tree with two people on it who left in 2023. It was, by the standards of the genre, a competent document. It was also written entirely for events the company would be the first to know about.
That is the flaw, and almost every plan I have read has it.
Three weeks ago a data infrastructure company no consumer had heard of became globally recognizable inside forty eight hours because of a few seconds of stadium video at a Coldplay show. No product failed. No customer data leaked. No executive said anything on a hot mic. A camera that belonged to nobody in particular pointed somewhere, a crowd reacted, and the internet did the rest before any communications team could have finished a first draft.
Nothing in a thirty one page binder covers that.
Your crisis plan assumes the camera is pointed at the brand, and the modern crisis begins with a camera pointed at something else entirely.
Three things follow from that, and they are all uncomfortable.
One, you will learn about it from outside. Product recalls and financial restatements arrive through internal channels with hours of lead time. Ambient capture arrives through a junior employee's group chat at 9:40 on a weeknight. If your escalation path starts with a department head, your first four hours are already spent. Somebody junior needs a number that reaches somebody senior, without permission, without a meeting.
Two, the story is not about your category, so your category expertise is worthless. The company in question sells data orchestration. Not one person sharing the clip cared what data orchestration is. Speaking as an expert into a moment that has nothing to do with your expertise reads as tone deaf, every time.
Three, and this is the one nobody wants to hear, most of these do not require a statement. The reflex to respond comes from plans built for recalls, where silence is negligence. Here, a statement is often the thing that gives the story a second day and a quotable line. The hardest crisis skill is distinguishing an event that requires action from an event that merely requires enduring.
The hardest crisis skill is distinguishing an event that requires action from an event that merely requires enduring.
What I would actually add to that binder is one page. Who can escalate, at any hour, without approval. Who decides whether we speak. What we do when the subject is a person and not the company, because the duty of care changes completely. And a plain statement that saying nothing is a permitted outcome.
Truffles knocked a full glass of water onto my desk during that call. I did not issue a statement. The water dried.