Here’s a crisis prevention tip that costs almost nothing and saves an enormous amount of pain: designate someone to be your crisis spokesperson, give them the responsibility and the freedom to act, make sure they’ve trained a backup, and then actually verify the backup knows what they’re doing.
Sounds obvious. Most organizations have never done it.
I had a client discover this gap last July. Three team members were on well-deserved vacation when a client situation emerged online. The backup person assumed someone else was watching. Nobody was. What could have been resolved in twenty minutes became a weekend-long scramble. Passengers were sitting in a foreign country, left stranded through no real fault of the travel company — but that detail didn’t matter once the story got out.
The situation was entirely preventable. A fifteen-minute planning conversation before vacation season would have mapped who was responsible on which days, identified the gaps, and ensured someone specific knew they were ‘on call’ and what that actually meant.
The answer isn’t to never take vacations. It’s to map your coverage the same way a hospital maps shifts. Someone is always responsible. When they’re unavailable, someone specific — not ‘anyone’ — is their backup. That person knows they’re the backup. They’ve been briefed. They have the contacts and the authority to act.
The ‘someone else has it’ assumption is one of the most dangerous phrases in any organization during a crisis. It’s how situations escalate from manageable problems to genuine disasters. It’s also among the easiest things in the world to fix with a bit of deliberate planning.