Blog

The Chinese word for crisis is made up of two characters. One represents danger. The other represents opportunity. I know — you’ve probably heard this before. Bear with me, because the application of it in crisis communications is something most organizations miss entirely.

The danger is obvious. You’re in trouble. Your phone is ringing. The story is bad. A reporter is in your parking lot. That’s the red part of the picture.

But here’s what the opportunity character is actually pointing at: the audience you’ve just been handed for free.

Think about it. Major advertising campaigns are built around creating attention — manufactured moments designed to make people look up from their phones and pay attention to your brand. A genuine crisis does that automatically. Every customer, every stakeholder, every journalist, every regulator is suddenly paying attention to you and what you do. You didn’t pay for that. You didn’t plan for it. You have it whether you wanted it or not.

What will you do with it?

Most organizations in crisis spend all their energy managing the danger while ignoring the opportunity. They go into defensive mode — minimize, deflect, protect. They don’t realize that the audience they’ve been handed is the same audience they’ve been trying to reach with their marketing budget.

The organizations that come out of crises stronger than they went in are the ones that understood this. They took the moment of maximum attention and used it to demonstrate exactly who they are: accountable, honest, competent, human. That authentic conversation, conducted under real pressure in front of a live audience, is worth more than any campaign they could have run.

The danger is real. So is the opportunity. Handle both.

It was 2pm when the call came in. ‘Ten people dead. CNN is on the line.’

Even after decades in this business, that sentence gets your attention.

An aviation disaster had just unfolded on live television. Cellphone footage was spreading. The client had about thirty seconds from the time they called me to when the first camera would be on them, and they needed to be ready.

We immediately built key messages that balanced honesty with leadership — acknowledging that this was genuinely awful, that we were in the early stages of understanding what happened, that there was a clear path forward. Then the media requests started: 120 requests in 48 hours. Al Jazeera, BBC, print, broadcast, digital, international. Angry stakeholders needing immediate responses. We worked around the clock for a month. Over 100 billable hours of crisis management at the highest stakes.

When it came time to send the invoice, the client braced themselves.

The total was a few hundred dollars.

One month earlier, they had joined my CrisisTether program — essentially crisis communications insurance. A monthly retainer that means no matter what happens, we’re there. They received world-class crisis support within minutes, not hours or days. They navigated a nightmare while protecting their reputation. All included.

If you’re postponing crisis communications planning because it feels expensive or unnecessary, consider the alternative math. What does an unexpected crisis cost your organization tomorrow — in management time, legal fees, lost contracts, lost trust, reputational damage that takes years to repair? Crisis preparation isn’t admitting weakness. It’s acknowledging that the insurance you buy in peacetime is the only kind that works.

In the late 1990s, Eastern Ontario and Quebec were hit by an ice storm of historic scale. Driving through the affected area a week later, I witnessed something I’ve thought about many times since.

The mighty hardwood trees — known for their strength and their solidity — lay broken and shattered across the landscape. Their rigid trunks had snapped under the weight of the ice. They were reduced to firewood.

Beside them, the softwood trees were still standing. Still reaching skyward. Not because they were stronger — they weren’t. Because they were more flexible. They bent with the storm rather than fighting it.

Here’s what that image taught me about business: we obsess over building stronger structures. More robust frameworks. Detailed plans that can withstand any challenge. We equate strength with rigidity and call it success. But rigidity is what the hardwoods had. We saw where that got them.

True resilience isn’t about having the sturdiest possible system. It’s about having one that can bend without breaking — one that can absorb pressure, adapt to unexpected conditions, and return to form when the storm passes. The businesses that survive the equivalent of an ice storm aren’t necessarily the ones with the most impressive infrastructure. They’re the ones that pivot when conditions change, listen and respond quickly, and learn from the failures they inevitably experience rather than treating those failures as evidence that the system was wrong.

The next storm is always coming. Whether it’s economic, reputational, or operational, it will test your organization. The question isn’t how strong you are when everything is normal. It’s how flexible you are when nothing is.

During last year’s Grand Prix, Montreal promised the world a great experience and delivered dirty streets and construction chaos. Global media noticed. International visitors left disappointed.

Here’s why that matters to any business, not just Montreal.

We all talk about excellence. Customer service. Innovation. Quality. We build marketing around these promises. But what happens when everyone actually shows up to experience it? When the spotlight is genuinely on, and the stakes are highest, and the audience is largest — is what you’re delivering actually what you’ve been promising?

Montreal’s problem wasn’t communications. It was delivery. And here’s the compounding danger: when you’ve been proven unreliable on the small things — lineups, cleanliness, basic logistics — your credibility for everything else erodes. When a real crisis hits, your audience remembers. They know you don’t always follow through. They’re already predisposed to disbelieve what you tell them.

That’s the reputational death spiral that poor operational performance creates. You’re not just failing at the event. You’re borrowing against the trust you’ll need the next time something goes genuinely wrong.

Montreal is now spending millions to rebuild trust that should have been maintained all along. The lesson is not to spend more on marketing when the spotlight comes. The lesson is to stress-test your operations before the spotlight arrives. Find the gaps when the stakes are low. Fix the lineups and the garbage collection before the cameras show up, not after.

Reputation isn’t built on what you say. It’s built on what you deliver when everyone’s watching. Are you ready for your spotlight moment?

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.

Only 7 percent of your communication impact comes from the actual words you choose.

Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s research on this is widely cited and often misapplied, but the core insight holds: the words in your message are only a small fraction of what your audience is actually absorbing. Vocal tone — the pitch, pace, and rhythm of your voice — accounts for roughly 38 percent. Facial expressions and body language account for the remaining 55 percent.

What that means in practice: you can write the perfect crisis statement and completely undermine it with how you look when you deliver it. I watched a CEO deliver genuinely positive news about quarterly results to his team while crossing his arms, avoiding eye contact, and speaking in a flat monotone. Nobody believed him. The words said ‘good news.’ Everything else said ‘something is wrong and I’m uncomfortable.’

The audience in any high-stakes communication moment isn’t just listening to your strategy. They’re scanning your facial micro-expressions for signs of confidence or fear. They’re analyzing your posture for conviction. They’re listening to your voice for real enthusiasm versus performed enthusiasm. They read the full package, not your carefully crafted script.

This is why crisis communications training that’s limited to message development misses the point. You can have the right words and still fail the communication. And under real pressure — in front of a hostile room, on camera, in a press scrum — your body is going to signal your actual emotional state regardless of what your mouth is saying.

Executive presence under pressure is a trainable skill. But it requires practice under conditions that feel real, not just reading the approved talking points one more time.

A CEO responded to my outreach with: ‘Why do you assume I need a crisis communications consultant?’

The question reveals a common misconception. The best crisis advisors aren’t firefighters. We’re architects.

A firefighter shows up when the building is burning. An architect helps you design the building so it doesn’t burn, and if it does, so the fire doesn’t spread. Those are different engagements at very different price points, and the second one actually works.

Less than ten percent of my client work involves dropping everything to assist in an active crisis. The other ninety percent is preparation: building messaging frameworks before they’re needed, mapping vulnerabilities before they become exposures, training executives on how to handle hostile rooms before they’re in one, stress-testing scenarios before the scenario is real.

The strongest client relationships I have started during peacetime. We built trust. We mapped the organization’s risk landscape together. We developed messaging. We practiced scenarios. When crisis eventually arrived — and it always does — we weren’t strangers scrambling to understand each other under pressure. We were partners. I knew their business, their key stakeholders, their media environment. I could tell them exactly what to say and what traps to avoid before they stepped in them.

This is why the savviest leaders build relationships with crisis advisors when things are going well, when the brand is strong, when there’s time to think clearly. Not because they’re expecting the worst. Because they’re smart enough to know that preparation is the only form of crisis insurance that actually functions when you need it.

The CEO who blocked me after my response is out there making a different calculation. I hope it works out for him.

I’ve spent years studying how businesses handle disasters — product recalls, CEO scandals, workplace tragedies, data breaches. What I’ve found is that the most dangerous misconception in business isn’t about any one type of crisis. It’s the belief that crisis happens to other kinds of companies.

Here are seven types of crises that are completely agnostic to your industry, your size, and your risk profile.

A data breach. Your customer information exists somewhere digitally. That makes you a target regardless of what your business actually does. A senior executive gets arrested. Your organization is only as protected as the humans who run it. A harassment allegation goes public. More than half of workplaces experience this. The ‘dirty companies’ don’t have a monopoly on bad behavior.

A disgruntled client or employee posts a viral takedown. The internet provides them a platform, and the algorithm rewards engagement. Your CEO’s old social media posts resurface. Everyone has a past. Regulators launch a surprise investigation. Compliance is not the same as being investigation-proof. A key partner gets caught in a scandal with your name attached. You are responsible for who you associate with in the public’s eyes.

None of these require you to be an oil company, a hospital, or a financial institution. They require you to be a business — with employees who are human, customers who have expectations, partners who may disappoint you, and a reputation built over years that can be damaged in hours.

The companies that survive these moments aren’t the lucky ones. They’re the prepared ones. They knew it was coming eventually, and they decided to be ready.

A brilliant CEO crumbled at a town hall when an employee asked a simple question: ‘Can you guarantee this acquisition won’t lead to layoffs?’

He froze. He stammered. He eventually said: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that.’ The room temperature dropped ten degrees.

Here’s what most leaders miss about that moment: when people ask for guarantees, they’re almost never seeking ironclad promises. They’re seeking certainty in uncertain times. They want to feel like there is solid ground somewhere. The CEO’s honest answer was the right answer — he genuinely couldn’t guarantee no layoffs. But the delivery left his audience with nothing to hold onto.

The trap is the framing of the original question. ‘Can you guarantee X?’ traps you into a yes/no about an outcome you don’t control. The move is to shift from the outcome to the process — to what you absolutely can guarantee with conviction.

‘What I can guarantee is that every decision will be made with complete transparency. You’ll hear it from me first.’ That’s a real commitment. ‘I can guarantee that supporting our people remains our highest priority through any changes.’ That’s something you can actually own. ‘I can guarantee we’re exploring every possible alternative before considering staff reductions.’ That’s a promise about your values and your process.

Same facts as ‘no, I can’t guarantee that.’ Completely different experience for the room.

Leadership communication isn’t about promising perfect outcomes — nobody believes you can control everything, and claiming otherwise damages credibility. It’s about providing perfect clarity on your values and your process. That’s the certainty people are actually asking for. Give them that.