Planning & Preparedness
Most crisis plans fail for the same reason: they were written for a filing cabinet, not for the person who gets the call at six in the morning. A good plan answers four questions before anyone starts writing.
Start here
Not a document about decisions. If your plan opens with background and context, it will not be read when it matters. It should open with names, roles and the order things happen in—and it should fit in someone's pocket.
One named person, with one named backup, who can authorize a statement without a meeting. Not a committee.
The face for each audience, and who is never on the record. If the answer is “whoever is available,” there is no plan.
Who writes the first version in ten minutes, who has legal sight of it, and how long that loop takes. Speed lives or dies here.
The line where you call outside counsel. Write it down now, because it is impossible to judge objectively on the day.
The checklist
Nothing here is decoration. If an item is missing, the gap shows up during the event—usually as a delay.
Once a year as a floor, and immediately after any real event, leadership change, acquisition, or anything that changes who is in the building or how you are regulated. A plan older than the people named in it is worse than no plan, because it creates a false sense of readiness.
Pick one fact and change it: the spokesperson resigns, the incident moves to a second state, a regulator calls before you call them. If your plan cannot absorb one change without a meeting, it will not hold. Run this test in twenty minutes with whoever is in the room.
A tabletop, ninety minutes, no slides and no audience. Give the decision-makers a scenario with missing facts and a clock. We run it, stay quiet when the room goes quiet—because that silence is the finding—and score what happened against the written plan.
A short report: what held, what broke, what to change and who owns each fix by a date. Ten pages beats fifty. If nobody can recite the three things that changed, the exercise did not land.
What we deliver
At Furman University, a tailored crisis communications training and tabletop exercise put university leaders and campus police in the same room with a scenario that had incomplete facts—and a clock on it.
Where this fits
The plan is generic. The pressure is not. These sessions apply it to the specific audiences, rules and reputations you are answerable to.
Crisis communications for schools and campus leaders, where parents, students, staff and the local news all need the same truth at the same time.
See the sessionMedia readiness for public-sector teams operating under records rules, elected oversight and a press that never stops asking.
See the sessionCrisis communication training: Red Team pressure-testing, on-camera control under hostile questioning and scored tabletop rehearsals.
See the trainingStrategic communications, crisis and risk counsel, and earned-media strategy for organizations with lean or no communications team.
See advisoryNext step
