Having a great crisis plan is only the start of the story.
Whatever smart thinking is captured in that plan is irrelevant if the activation of your crisis team and plan goes awry.
We just marked the 30th anniversary of one of the most infamous examples of appalling response, by the European ferry company Townsend Thoresen.
You may not of heard of them. As a result of the damage to its reputation, the company had to be re-named P&O Ferries.
Townsend Thoresen was the operator of the Herald of Free Enterprise, a car ferry which sank in Zeebrugge, Belgium, in March 1987, killing 193 passengers and crew.
The TV crews got to the company’s offices before anyone in authority and thus the chaotic response was on live TV.
The shambolic activation of its crisis response continued.
Among many other sins, the company’s chairman speculated that the disaster occurred because the ship hit the harbor wall. In fact, it had never hit the wall. The ferry sank because the doors that allowed cars on board were left open as it set sail – a habit the company encouraged to allow a quick turnaround in port.
The Townsend Thoresen example is from the days before online and social media.
Now, stories appear and are updated within minutes of news breaking.
Social media shares, tweets and chatter amplify the facts and add instant analysis to keep the news in a fast-moving spin.
Your crisis team has to be activated quickly and effectively to get ahead of a story.
But it’s not enough to be quick. The activation also must be effective.
A recent example of a company that appeared to fumble the activation of its crisis plan with disastrous consequences is Samsung.
The problem with exploding batteries in the Samsung Note 7 phones ended up costing billions of dollars of profit and damaging the company’s reputation.
The company did move fast when the problem first emerged after the phone’s launch in August 2016, but so fast it made mistakes.
It angered regulators in the US by not following guidelines laid down by the CPSC. It told users in Hong Kong they were not affected but then it turned out they were.
But more crucially, it got the analysis of the problem wrong.
Samsung announced a worldwide recall and offered replacement phones that it said were safe.
But then the fires kept on happening and Samsung was forced to kill the product permanently.
Months later, in January 2017 after a long investigation, the company announced that it was poorly designed and manufactured batteries that were to blame.
The lesson here is that once you finally have that updated and comprehensive crisis plan, pay attention to how the team and the crisis response will be effectively activated:
- Have the team equipped with a mobile smartphone crisis app to ensure that those first few hours of a threat are well managed and coordinated.
- Have the team trained and prepared by holding regular crisis scenario workshops.
- Get the team together on a regular basis to look at other crises in the news, what went well and not so well - and lessons to be learned.
- Regularly review the balance of expertise on your crisis team and add more resources as necessary.
Find out more about the author by visiting www.thehatcliffegroup.com
