The Crisis Has Already Started

One of the most persistent misconceptions about crisis communications is the belief that a crisis begins when it becomes public.

The logic is understandable. Organisations tend to experience crises through moments of visibility: the journalist’s phone call, the social media storm, the formal complaint, the regulator enquiry. These are the moments that command attention. They create urgency, and trigger hastily arranged emergency meetings. They feel like the beginning because they are the moment at which an issue becomes impossible to ignore.

Yet I have increasingly come to believe that this understanding of crisis is fundamentally flawed.

A crisis rarely begins when it becomes visible. More often, visibility is simply the moment at which an existing problem can no longer be contained. The actual origins of most crisis moments tend to be quieter and considerably less dramatic. They emerge through fragments of information that, viewed in isolation, seem relatively insignificant. A concern is raised. A relationship deteriorates. A decision is made that appears manageable at the time.

Contrary to popular imagination, crises rarely announce themselves. There is no dramatic shattering of normality while you stand, already ten minutes late for work, in a coffee queue on a rainy Tuesday morning. More often they arrive quietly, disguised as routine problems that appear manageable at the time.

The difficulty is that organisations are conditioned to distinguish between “business as usual” and “crisis”. We treat these as separate states. As one ends, the other begins. The reality is often much messier. Most crises are not events but are the result of long processes. They develop gradually before accelerating suddenly. By the time they become visible to the outside world, they have usually accumulated a history of decisions, assumptions and missed opportunities that stretch back weeks, months or even years.

This distinction matters because it dramatically changes the role of communications. Communications are often seen are the people who scramble in a doomsday bunker, tapping away at version four of the company statement. They are seen as those who have a red phone that rings, indicating it is time to lock the doors and deactivate social media comments.

If we accept that a crisis begins when the headlines appear, communications becomes largely reactive. We are the department whose hot word is proactive and there is no greater time to practice what we preach than when the tectonic plates begin to shift.

It starts with recognising signals. Not certainty. Not guesswork. Signals.

Like seismologists monitoring shifts beneath the earth’s surface, communications professionals should pay attention to indicators long before an issue becomes visible. Experts do not wait for buildings to collapse before deciding an earthquake is real. They monitor patterns, identify risk and prepare for a range of possible outcomes. The fact that a disaster may never occur does not make the preparation unnecessary. In fact, the possibility that it might never happen is precisely what makes preparation difficult. Acting without certainty requires judgement.

The same is true of communications. By the time the ground starts shaking, most of the valuable thinking should already have begun.

The thinking here is important, because communications professionals are often expected to operate in environments where certainty is unavailable. Waiting for complete information is an attractive idea in theory, but in practice organisations rarely have that luxury. The earliest stages of an emerging issue are characterised by ambiguity. Facts remain disputed. Motivations are unclear. Outcomes are impossible to predict. Leaders are understandably reluctant to act too quickly.

Yet uncertainty itself contains information.

Just as the waves retract before an earthquake induced tsunami lands on the shores, an unusual enquiry from a journalist tells us something. A complaint that refuses to disappear tells us something. A stakeholder concern that continues to resurface tells us something. None of these signals necessarily indicate that a crisis is inevitable. Most do not. However, they may indicate that a situation has the potential to evolve into something more significant.

It is at this point that I believe communications teams should begin preparing.

This is sometimes misunderstood as pessimism. It is not. Nor is it an assumption that the worst outcome will occur. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that preparation is most valuable before it becomes urgent. Like evacuating the building before the Richter Scale can be read.

When I speak to communications professionals, I am often struck by how much emphasis is placed on drafting statements during a crisis. We discuss holding lines, media responses and public messaging as though the principal challenge is finding the right words quickly enough. This is a theme I often discuss when speaking about leadership communications.

In reality, writing is rarely what consumes the most time. Thinking does. A competent communications professional can draft a statement remarkably quickly. The challenge is deciding what the organisation believes, what it knows, what it can responsibly say and what it is prepared to defend. The words are often the final stage of the process. The difficult work happens long before anybody opens a blank document.

The difficult questions in a crisis are seldom linguistic. They are strategic. What does the organisation actually believe? What facts can be verified? Which stakeholders are most affected? What obligations exist? Which risks are acceptable? Are trade-offs are unavoidable?

Answering those questions requires judgement. It requires discussion. Sometimes it requires disagreement. Most importantly, it requires time.

Time is precisely the resource that becomes scarce once a crisis crashes through the front door.

This is why I have become increasingly sceptical of the notion that crisis preparation begins when a crisis is formally declared. By that stage, the organisation is already operating under pressure. Decisions that could have been considered carefully now need to be made quickly. Conversations that should have taken place days earlier suddenly become urgent. The cost of delay increases with every passing hour.

The most effective organisations I have observed are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated crisis plans or the largest communications teams. They are the organisations that recognise emerging issues early enough to begin thinking before they are forced to act. This is particularly important for smaller communications teams, where time and capacity are often constrained. As I argued previously in my Influence article, “Why Small Comms Teams Are Shaping the Future of Crisis Response”, smaller teams frequently succeed not because they have more resources, but because they are forced to prioritise agility, judgement and preparation from the outset.

Sometimes that preparation proves unnecessary. Draft statements remain unpublished. Scenario plans gather dust. Meetings conclude with the reassuring realisation that the issue was never as serious as first feared.

That is a sign of success, not failure.

Preparation that turns out to be unnecessary is usually far less costly than preparation that never happened at all.

Perhaps this is the paradox at the heart of crisis communications. The work that most improves an organisation’s response is often invisible. Nobody applauds the statement that was never needed. There is no celebration for the handling of the scenario that never materialised. Nobody writes case studies about crises that failed to emerge.

Yet these unseen moments frequently determine whether an organisation responds with confidence or confusion when pressure eventually arrives.

By the time a crisis becomes visible, the organisation is often living with the consequences of decisions made long before the headlines appeared. The question is not whether preparation guarantees success. It does not.

The question is whether organisations can afford to wait until certainty arrives before they begin thinking seriously about uncertainty.

Increasingly, I believe they cannot.