When crises break, the urge to “kill the story” or minimise any hint of wrongdoing, can still end up doing organisations harm in the longer term. Better crisis and issues planning in times of calm can help, as 1440’s Guy Corbet explains.
In a crisis, people do not think straight. Leaders who are usually calm and collegiate can, under pressure, become defensive and indignant. They may feel besieged, unfairly scrutinised and that they have lost their private life.
So it is easy to see why their long-term focus may blur, to obsess instead with short-term considerations.
The headlines differ (trust and safety, harm, cyber attacks, outages, misjudged campaigns) but the human pattern is the same. Fears of failure, and self doubt.
What a crisis does to thinking
When a story breaks, emotion crowds out judgment. Instead of thinking through long-term implications, teams ask “how do we make this stop today?”. They may cling to what they hope is still private and underplay what is already obvious.
That is when cautious, legalistic statements appear, written more for the courtroom rather than for customers. And the story shifts from the incident to how it’s been handled.
Over the past year, broadcasters, retailers, platforms and transport operators have all faced scrutiny over cyber incidents, operational failures and misjudged communications.
Too often commentators end up focusing less on the trigger and more on slow acknowledgement and poor tone. This can give the impression that organisations are more worried about managing optics than addressing the real issue and rebuilding trust.
Typical unhelpful reactions
In a crisis a few unhelpful instincts can dominate the thinking. People feel unjustly attacked and under siege, become defensive or combative, and fixate on the short term instead of the relationship with stakeholders.
They cling to what is “known” internally and ignore what is not yet clear (or put another way, what will soon be known). This can waste time while different factions vie behind the scenes.
Time and again, you see the same errors repeated. Silence in the crucial early hours. Unclear language that plays down harm. Squirmy apologies that do not clearly explain what happened, why or what will change.
In every case, it’s easy to imagine the people in the room thinking like shocked or frightened insiders, not like leaders, or the customers, viewers or passengers reading the story.
Planning for when you won’t think straight
The purpose of crisis planning is not to script every line. It is to make the hardest choices before anyone is under siege. That means agreeing in advance how open to be, what tone to take, and how you want to be seen when things go wrong.
It is better to do that than to be caught improvising and trying to reconcile different approaches, all under the glare of rolling news and social feeds.
It also means doing the groundwork. Risk audits across financial, legal, operational, market and reputational risks. Scenario‑testing where today’s unknowns could rapidly become tomorrow’s headlines.
Clarity on roles helps too. Who will sign off statements, when to involve legal, when to escalate, and where red lines sit on key issues or risks. That structure protects people from panicked, ad‑hoc decisions in the heat of the moment.
Building reputational credit in the bank
Reputational credit is what gives you the benefit of the doubt when something does go wrong. It is built over time by being open about potential issues, building trust and understanding with stakeholders and being fair and reliable with customers. All before a crisis hits.
When brands have already demonstrated those behaviours, coverage will tend to be more balanced and stakeholders more ready to believe explanations.
The lesson from many comms disasters is that reputations fall apart often not in the incident itself, but in the hours and days afterwards, when tired leaders try to wing it.
A realistic assumption is that, in a crisis, you will not think straight. So do the work now to decide how you want your organisation to behave when that happens. Start quietly putting reputational credit in the bank. Fix the roof while the sun is still shining.