Category: Blog

It feels like a misunderstanding.

Trust me, I’ve been there… Someone calls. They sound puzzled, not panicked. “Have you seen this?” They send a link, or a screenshot, or a tweet. Your stomach moves before your brain catches up.

This is what I call Danger Hour. Not because the story is loud yet. Because nobody is sure it EVEN IS a story.

Decisions made now lock in faster than people realize. Whoever speaks first to whoever asks first becomes the record. Whoever gets pulled into a meeting now misses the call that actually matters.

What to do in this hour: Stop. Get the right four people on a phone, not a Slack thread. Confirm what you actually know versus what you’ve only heard. Identify the next person on your team who will get a call from a reporter, and make sure they don’t pick up before you’ve talked.

Speed kills careers. Don’t let lack of speed kill yours. You don’t have to decide what to say… yet. That will come. Right now, you can decide who’s allowed to say anything at all.

If there’s a reasonable chance this is going to get talked about, don’t wait. You can issue a statement with who, what, when and where. Careers get broken on “How and Why.”

“Two fans have attacked each other at tonights Chris Stapleton concert. We’re aware of the issue and police have responded. We’ll have more information tonight at 10:30pm Eastern.”

There. You just bought yourself time.

Which is good… because you’re going to need to explain why the metal detectors weren’t working, how fans managed to get a gun into your venue, or why security didn’t respond right away. Those are the NEXT hours problems. You’ll get there soon enough.

Don’t try to fix it in the first hour. Just don’t make it worse before you understand it.

Joe Fontana had a 30-year political career — three decades as an MP, federal cabinet minister, and eventually Mayor of London, Ontario. Then came a $1,700 accounting discrepancy, and the RCMP came knocking.

His lawyer gave him textbook advice: say nothing, admit nothing, give prosecutors nothing to work with. In a courtroom, that’s defensible. As a strategy for a sitting mayor of 300,000 people, it was catastrophic.

Fontana said nothing. City councillors demanded his resignation publicly. Media showed up at his door. He hid. For two years, the court of public opinion held its session while he waited for the legal one. By the time the verdict came down, it barely registered. People had convicted him over breakfast months earlier.

Here’s what his lawyers didn’t account for: there is more than one courtroom. The legal system operates on evidence, procedure, and the presumption of innocence. The public operates on what they see, what they hear, and what they’re left to imagine when nobody speaks.

Silence isn’t neutral. It’s an invitation for other people to write your story, and they are not feeling generous.

Could better communications have saved him? Maybe not. He fudged receipts. He did the thing. But silence guaranteed the outcome. The public never heard accountability. They never saw leadership. They saw a guy hiding behind a lawyer over seventeen hundred dollars.

Your lawyer’s job is to keep you out of jail. A crisis communicator’s job is to make sure you still have a career, a reputation, and a life on the other side. Those two jobs are sometimes in direct conflict. Smart leaders plan for both courtrooms.

Most crisis plans have one fatal flaw: they assume you’ll have time to open the binder.

I’ve watched executives dig through 200-page documents while reporters were already in the parking lot. It never ends well. Nobody reads the plan during the crisis. Nobody. The binder looks great on a shelf. It makes the board feel better. It checks the compliance box. But when your phone rings at midnight and someone says ‘we have a situation,’ you’re not reaching for a binder. You’re reaching for a person.

What actually saves organizations in a crisis has almost nothing to do with documentation. It’s three things: one phone number that gets answered at 2am, smart key messages that are already drafted so you have something credible to say while the details are still unclear, and at least one rehearsal of the hard conversation before you’re in it for real.

The binder isn’t useless — it can serve as a reference document once the immediate fire is out. But it cannot replace the muscle memory that comes from having practiced, the trust that comes from knowing who to call, and the clarity that comes from messages built before your brain is flooded with adrenaline.

Ask yourself this: does your crisis plan have a pulse? Not a table of contents, not a list of stakeholders, not a flowchart with seventeen escalation steps. A pulse. Someone who answers. Something to say. A plan that breathes.

If the answer is no, you’re not prepared. You’re insured on paper.

Tom Peters once asked what would happen if we called it ‘Customer Helping’ instead of ‘Customer Service.’ He was onto something.

Service, as a word, implies something done to you. An oil change. A shoe shine. Noble enough, but transactional. The language shapes the behavior. When the goal is to service a customer, the metrics that follow are efficiency metrics — call handling time, cases closed per hour, cost per interaction. Nobody measures whether the person on the other end felt helped.

The difference shows up most clearly under pressure. A customer who has been genuinely helped by a company is sticky. They’re willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong because they have a track record to draw on. A customer who has been ‘serviced’ — processed, moved along, checked off a list — is ready to shop for alternatives. The crisis is just the excuse they needed.

I saw this in an airport in Aliso Viejo, California, navigating a cascade of delayed flights and security disruptions. The companies that were already building real relationships with their customers — airlines, hotels, travel brands — weren’t scrambling to manage reputation damage. They were collecting goodwill from customers who were rooting for them.

The companies that had merely serviced their customers were watching those same people post their frustrations online.

You’ve heard the expression ‘your customers know the difference.’ That’s true. What’s also true is that your org chart usually doesn’t. The companies winning customer loyalty right now aren’t the ones with the most efficient call centers. They’re the ones where real humans pick up, listen, and stay until the problem is solved.

Are you servicing your customers, or are you helping them?

Toronto proposed four non-profit grocery stores. New York was already building them. Two cities, two countries, sending the same message to the grocery industry: you’re not solving this, so we will.

When a government or community publicly challenges your business model, most corporate instincts are terrible. Option one: ignore it, hope it goes away, bet on public attention spans. Option two: defend your pricing with spreadsheets. Option three: get indignant and point out that government has no business being in the grocery business. All three are wrong.

The move — the one that actually works — is to lean in. Welcome it publicly. Three sentences: we think anyone working to improve food access in underserved communities is doing important work. We’ve operated in these areas for decades. We know the challenges. If the city wants to pilot this, we’d be glad to share what we’ve learned.

That’s it. That’s the whole playbook.

Here’s what it accomplishes. You signal confidence without arrogance. You position alongside the community instead of across from it. You let the world quietly notice how brutally complex the grocery business actually is without ever having to say ‘good luck with that.’ The city will discover the staffing problems, the supply chain problems, the land use problems. You don’t have to point them out. Your calm, collaborative posture says everything.

The instinct to get defensive when someone publicly challenges your business model is natural. It’s almost always the wrong move. Defensiveness signals threat. Collaboration signals confidence. In any industry where the public already has questions about you, the difference between those two signals is the difference between a news cycle and a narrative.

European bookings to the United States are down 14 percent year over year. The World Travel and Tourism Council projects $12.5 billion in lost international visitor spending for 2026. That number is real, it’s arriving now, and waiting for it to self-correct is not a strategy.

Think about who pays the price when international travelers quietly choose somewhere else. Not the big brands — they can absorb this. It’s the locally-owned restaurant where the Frankfurt family would have had dinner. The independent tour operator. The family inn where they would have stayed. That’s where the damage lands.

So what’s within your control? Quite a bit, actually.

Redirect your marketing dollars to domestic travelers now — not in Q4. Domestic leisure demand is holding. Disney already made this pivot. If you haven’t, you’re behind.

Know your international mix. Latin American bookings aren’t seeing the same drop as European ones. Do you actually know where your remaining pockets of international growth are? If not, find out this week.

Call your overseas trade partners. Tour operators and booking agents know before you do when demand is softening. Those relationships need active maintenance right now, not reactive outreach when your numbers crater.

Lead with experience, not discounts. The temptation in a soft market is to cut price. It’s the wrong instinct. The operators who come through 2026 strongest will be the ones who sharpened their story — what makes their corner of the world irreplaceable. Winning doesn’t mean eroding margins to fill rooms.

You can’t control Washington. You can control your welcome. Start there.

At 11:40 pm last night, a plane hit a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia. At 2:45 am, Air Canada posted on X. Three hours and five minutes. In a crisis, that’s a lifetime.

I want to be fair. It was the middle of the night. People were scrambling. Nobody wants to say the wrong thing. I understand all of that. What I also understand is what was happening while Air Canada was quiet: every mainstream media outlet had the story. Social media had video. Families watching the news had no idea if their person was on that plane.

Silence in a crisis is not neutral. Someone else fills it.

When Jazz Aviation’s President finally spoke that morning, the words were right: ‘Today is an incredibly difficult day for our airline, our employees, and most importantly, the families and loved ones of those affected.’ That’s the right human instinct. Delivered too late. There was also the matter of Air Canada describing the two pilots killed as ‘two Jazz employees.’ I understand the corporate structure. Their passengers don’t care.

Here’s the script I give every executive who asks what to say when they don’t yet have all the facts: ‘We know there’s been an incident. We’re on site. We’re gathering information. We’ll update you the moment we know more. If you have a loved one on this flight, call this number.’

That’s it. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Air Canada did eventually set up a hotline and issue a full statement. Both were the right moves. Both were late.

The first hour of a crisis is the most consequential hour a leader will ever have. Don’t spend it being careful. Spend it being present.

The first 60 minutes of a crisis will define everything that comes after. And most leaders spend them doing exactly the wrong things.

I’ve taken that call hundreds of times. A leader on the other end — scared, nervous, trying to figure out what to do next. Different industries, different countries, different crises. And the mistakes are almost always the same four.

The first mistake: they call the lawyer before anyone else. Legal’s first instinct is to protect you in court. Say nothing. Admit nothing. That is solid advice for a deposition. You’re not in a deposition. You’re in the court of public opinion, and that court is already in session. Every minute you spend on a conference call with legal is a minute someone else is writing your story.

The second mistake: they wait for all the facts. This one sounds responsible. It feels like the smart move. The problem? The world doesn’t wait for your fact-finding mission. While you’re gathering information, your customers and the media are filling the vacuum with speculation. You don’t need all the facts to say something. You need three sentences: here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, and here’s what we’re doing right now.

The third mistake: they talk about what happened instead of what they’re doing about it. The public doesn’t need a play-by-play of how you got here. They need to know you’re in control. Shift forward.

The fourth mistake: they underestimate how fast the story is moving. Leaders think in hours. The internet thinks in minutes. By the time you’ve scheduled a meeting to ‘align on messaging,’ the screenshots are already circulating.

The first 60 minutes are about one thing: showing up. With honesty. With urgency. With a plan that proves someone is in charge.

Mike Tyson said it best: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. He was talking about boxing. He could have been talking about crisis planning.

Most organizations have some version of a crisis plan. A binder. A shared drive folder. Maybe a flowchart someone made three years ago. And almost all of them make the same mistake: they plan for what they think will happen. They write down the likely scenarios, map out the responses, and call it done. That’s bare minimum. That’s planning for the punch you can see coming.

There are three levels of crisis preparedness, and most organizations stop at level one.

Level one is the binder. You’ve identified the scenarios, written down who does what, maybe drafted a few holding statements. This is table stakes. It makes auditors happy. It does not prepare you for anything you didn’t already predict.

Level two is getting punched in the face. Real simulation. Spokespeople on camera. Curveballs mid-exercise. A journalist who doesn’t play nice. You find out where your team breaks before a real crisis does it for you. This is where organizations learn something.

Level three is getting punched a second time and measuring the difference. Did you adapt? Did you freeze? Where did communication break down? Where did it hold? You take what you learned and build it back into the plan. The plan evolves based on what you actually experienced, not what you assumed.

Most organizations are still at level one. They have a plan they’ve never tested, for a crisis they probably won’t face, managed by spokespeople who’ve never been under real pressure.

Find out where you break before the cameras do.

The Gulf aviation network is essentially grounded. Emirates, Qatar, Etihad — all severely disrupted. Dubai hotels have been hit by drone strikes. Airports in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Kuwait are closed. Twenty thousand flights have been cancelled and a million travelers are rethinking their plans.

If you’re watching this from somewhere else in the world thinking ‘glad that’s not us’ — that’s the wrong reaction. This is a global tourism problem. Those three airlines connect Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia to everywhere. When they go down, the entire travel network feels it.

Right now, a million travelers are looking for certainty. They’re nervous. They want reassurance. They want to know where it’s safe to go, what happens if they book and conditions change, and whether someone is actually thinking about them. The destinations that speak up first — with clarity, with empathy, with a real message — will capture that demand.

Acknowledge what’s happening. Your customers are watching the same news you are. If your marketing is still pushing ‘escape to paradise’ while people are sleeping in airport terminals, you look tone-deaf.

Answer the question they’re afraid to ask. Every potential guest right now is thinking: is it safe? Will my flight get there? What happens if things get worse? Answer those questions before they ask them.

Make it easy to say yes. Flexible cancellation. Rebooking guarantees. Remove the risk from the decision. Qatar is paying for stranded tourists’ hotel rooms and meals right now. You don’t have to go that far. But you need to show people that booking a trip in this environment isn’t a gamble.

Destinations that win in a crisis are the ones with the best communication. Most of them are saying nothing right now. Don’t be most of them.