Nov 2001

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE

In September, the world was shown the unthinkable can happen. Evil men hijacking hapless airliners and passengers ; crashing them as weapons into buildings - killing yet more thousands of innocents.

In August, I began the media segment of this newsletter with asking some fundamental questions as whether or not YOUR organisation is crisis-protected in the area of crisis communications. Here are some first practical steps:

1) Form a committee with representation from frontline members in all areas of your organisation

2) identify your industry and list all the most likely and the least likely risks and potential crises associated with it. Owning an oil refinery exposes the owner to malicious acts, terrorists' acts, accidents and so on - pretty obvious. Least likely but also possible ( the unthinkable ) are things like tidal waves, rodent infestations etc

3) decide on a scale of seriousness what constitutes an
-incident
- negative event
-crisis

everyone will have a different view of this. This is to be expected. More importantly, divide areas of responsibility and have EVERYONE trained to make media statements if required bearing in mind that that scaling the response to the event that had prompted the response is critical.

There are circumstances where the CEO is NOT the best person to make a report or give an interview to the media. Asian-based organisations are notoriously bad at making these decisions and as such suffer great reputation-management issues when crises develop. Simply, they were unprepared in crisis communications management.

Next issue: We'll talk more about communicating the corporate position when under fire

Remember:

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling,
but in rising every time we fall."

- Confucius