Know Your Crisis: Why One Communications Playbook Isn’t Enough

Something has gone wrong, and your company’s trust and reputation are suddenly at risk. What do you do?

For many leaders, this is the most acute communications stress point they will ever face. The stakes are high, the scrutiny is immediate, and one misstep can make the situation significantly worse.

What makes this harder today is that crises no longer arrive in isolation. Many organizations are operating in a state of “permacrisis” with continuous disruption, heightened visibility, and overlapping pressures. In that context, it’s tempting to look for a perfect “crisis communications playbook” that can be pulled off the shelf when something goes wrong.

But crisis isn’t a monolithic problem. There are three distinct types of crises leaders face: those driven by the company’s own decisions, unexpected events that happen to the company, and broader industry or societal events that pull the organization into the spotlight. Each type creates different risks and calls for tailored communications strategies.

A Company-driven “Crisis”: When Decisions Become High-Risk Moments 

While it isn’t a surprise event, a company-led initiative can qualify as a “crisis” if the potential for negative reaction is high. Examples include a corporate layoff, site closure, product discontinuation, major pricing increase, or controversial advertising/marketing move.

The most common mistake leaders make in this scenario is taking a “stealth approach” to communication: burying the policy change as the fifth item in an internal email, filing a government-required layoff notice after hours on a Friday, or quietly slipping a pricing change into new language on the website. If a change is significant enough, it will be noticed by always-on, AI-amplified audiences. The company will be viewed as hiding the news or being insensitive to its impact.

Less often, leaders fail to recognize that a decision will create a crisis at all. The choice may have been made at a lower level of the organization, or leaders may have skipped audience pulsing before the rollout. New logos and ad campaigns being retracted after customer backlash illustrate this dynamic. The negative result is similar to the “stealth” approach described above but intensified because leaders are caught off-guard without a crisis plan.

To avoid negative fallout from a company-driven “crisis,” leaders and communications teams should pause to check each event against potential risk:

• Will this impact the company’s business/financial outlook (real or perceived)?

• Will this have a financial impact on a key stakeholder group (employees, customers, channel partners, etc.)?

• Could this potentially be polarizing (religion, politics, cultural norms, etc.)?

• Could this harm the credibility of the company’s leaders or products?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then prepare it as crisis communication with robust materials, including thorough messaging and FAQs along with reactive scenario planning.

(Note: While the word “crisis” is dramatic, the decisions triggering them may feel very small to senior leaders. Ask any internal communicators who have had to manage the elimination of free snacks or a shift in the payroll schedule with thousands of angry employees!)

An Unexpected Company Crisis: When There’s No Time to Prepare

In contrast, the second crisis category is events specific to the company that come without warning. There is a long list of potential scenarios here, including governance issues (executive death or scandal, government investigation, lawsuit) and product and customer issues (safety recall, security breach, service downtime, customer incident).

There’s an old saying, “Measure twice, cut once.” It’s a reminder to prepare carefully, because once you act, it’s hard to undo the consequences. But during a crisis, leaders can be tempted to improvise as they’re pinged by employees, media, customers, and others who want them to say something right now. The risk is that they say something inaccurate that needs to be corrected later, and audiences remember the confusion more than the correction.

Some questions to ask when a company-specific crisis occurs:

• Are all the key facts about this situation known?

• Is there a significant negative impact for one or more stakeholder audiences?

• Is there a shareholder or governance obligation involved?

If the answer to all three of these questions is “no,” then you can take some extra time to gather more information and perfect a communication. However, in most crises, at least one of these will be a “yes.”

When there’s urgency, it’s useful to develop a “holding statement” which is a brief acknowledgement of the situation. Internally, a holding statement could be shared on the intranet or an instant messaging platform like Slack; externally, it could be posted to the customer website/newsroom or sent in response to journalist inquiries. If it has material financial impact in a publicly traded company, it will have to be available to all audiences (including investors) simultaneously.

Depending on the crisis, a thorough and thoughtful follow-on to the initial holding statement could range from a live meeting with a select group of stakeholders all the way up to multiple large-scale communications spanning days, weeks, or months.

Throughout this type of crisis, it’s essential that a company show up as fully focused on resolution and concerned for the impacted parties. Coming across as confused or uncaring will deepen the long-term brand impact of the crisis.

An Industry or Societal Crisis: When External Events Create Pressure to Respond

Sometimes, a crisis is not specific to one company, but it’s a situation where stakeholders—shareholders, employees, customers—expect the company to respond. This past year has offered numerous examples, from trade tariffs and work visa policy swings to regional conflicts and acts of violence.

In these situations, many leaders’ reaction is to wait and see how other companies are responding. That can have strategic value, as it can provide time to hold private conversations with government officials or align efforts with other industry players. (The recent open letter from Minnesota-based company CEOs is a good example of companies joining forces for a unified impact.)

Timeliness is important. But the biggest error leaders make in these situations is inconsistency in their communications responses across a range of issues and events. Audiences watch these signals closely and will interpret significance even where it isn’t intended. I’ve seen this happen many times, when someone says, “The company did X for Y situation but hasn’t done the same for this. That’s a sign that . . .” They fill in the blank with a negative leadership judgement. And once trust has eroded, it can be hard to rebuild.

Some questions to ask in external crisis situations:

• How does this event connect to the company’s business operations and values?

• Has the company responded to a similar situation in the past?

• What financial or political assumptions might be made if/when the company communicates about this?

• If a similar situation were to arise, would the company communicate again?

These are nuanced questions, and they can be hard to answer objectively in the emotion of the moment. My next article will focus on how to build guiding principles in advance of any crisis, which is the best way to achieve both speed and consistency.

Get Ready

Whether you’re leading a startup or a Fortune 500 company, there is a crisis in your future. Prepare for it, recognize what type of crisis it is, and respond to it with confidence and care.

I’ve helped companies develop guiding principles and decision frameworks for all flavors of crisis. Reach out if you’re looking for a partner to prepare for and navigate crisis moments.