CRISIS PREPAREDNESS
In a crisis, an organisation does not rise to the occasion. It falls back on what it has practised.
The situation
The first hours of a serious incident are spent on questions that should have been settled in advance: who is leading, what we are allowed to say, which decisions can wait.
Incident handling is often well organised at the technical level and improvised at the executive level — which is precisely where the consequential decisions sit.
The question
Who decides when the normal rules stop working?
The work
We establish crisis governance that is small enough to move: a defined leadership team, clear thresholds for activation, decision rights that hold when the usual approvers are unavailable.
Communication is prepared as a leadership responsibility — internal first, then customers, authorities and other stakeholders — with the principle of saying what is known, what is not, and when more will follow.
Then we rehearse with the actual decision-makers, using scenarios with incomplete information and no clean answer, and we debrief honestly.
The outcome
An executive team that has already made its first difficult decisions once, and an organisation that knows who to follow.