What do you do if your crisis communications plan is not resilient and adaptable?

In a religious setting, your audience is not just your congregation, but it is also the community. You become public figures when there is a crisis. Often the first response is to assess the situation and navigate what the fallout will be, however, the Catholic Church no longer has that luxury, and needs to get in front of the crisis. The best response is to address it both internally and publicly, and offer complete transparency as you are working on assessing the situation and finding and implementing the solution.

Assess the Current Plan: Conduct a thorough evaluation of your existing crisis communications plan. Identify gaps, weaknesses, and areas where it falls short in terms of flexibility and responsiveness.

Many departments like IT or Health & Safety run drills to see what works, what needs to be updated. Run drills periodically and reassess your processes house for Crisis Comms within the business continuity planning process. Consult and participate with teams who are running the drills and update your plan. If you have an agency, brainstorm with them. Document and socialize the process.

Facilitate cross-functional team exercises to assess the status of the plan and opportunities for improvement. Often, less operational or less involved areas can provide a perspective that contributes to better analysis. If you have reliable external analysts, this can also be an important input to analysis exercises.

- Asses your current plan to identify gaps for responsiveness and flexibility - Obtain input from stakeholders, communications professionals, legal experts, senior management - Create a crisis communication team within the organization - Train the crisis communications team regularly by simulating tabletop scenarios or full-scale drills - Review communication streams such as social media, press releases, internal memos and ensure these streams can be activated swiftly - Develop messaging templates or modules that can be easily adaptable that focus on principles and key phrases - Rinse, cycle, and repeat to refine your plan to the current social and professional climate

When the state oil company in Colombia faced a crisis five years ago, its CEO stepped forward and took responsibility. Although some of the media made memes and ridiculed him, the result was positive and the company was seen to be open and honest. There is an important principle in the crisis: it is a question of ethics. This is the time when you need to stick to your values the most.

Trust is the cornerstone of reputation; once broken, it is challenging to rebuild. Thus, adopting openness and accountability in crisis communications is vital. Having a spokesperson well-prepared through media training is another crucial ingredient in the mix. A well-trained spokesperson knows how to convey the organization’s message effectively, ensuring that the organization's side of the story is heard accurately and empathetically. This training includes how to navigate tough questions without resorting to the dismissive "no comment," which can often be perceived as evasiveness or ignorance.

Es necesario tener una perspectiva o punto de referencia: que buscamos con nuestro plan, que debería tener y como se integra con el Plan de Gestión de Crisis, del cual hace parte

I agree this is the best way to diffuse the situation from many experiences where we had an unforseen issue impact stakeholders. People prefer face to face communication with direct opportunity for questions and answers, any special assistance and a suitable resolution. Adapting your response to the client is key and this has always been effective for me.

Transparency can be tricky, because in a crisis you need to balance transparency with confidentiality, privacy, legal obligations as well as adhering to your own company standards. Sometimes transparency can be at odds with any combination of these considerations. If there are legitimate reasons certain things can't be shared, then be honest about that. However, those reasons need to be fully understood and vetted BEFORE you start communicating so you can cite them with clarity and legitimacy.

Crisis management is nothing more than project management in an environment of extreme uncertainty. The scope of the project, in this case, is to protect the organization from the crisis itself. Therefore, the same rules of agile project management and lean startup apply: build, measure and learn in fast cycles.

The Agile model inspires us in crisis management because it allows for quick but accurate analysis of the environment and flexible adaptation of the response. Understanding the audience and the context allows us to be more assertive.

You have to equal out the employees. Fire the white guys first and then whatever white people you would want to fire next bring in lesser people of merit and IQ, and it will work itself out.

Crisis management governance needs to be improved with each crisis, with the lessons learned along the way. Therefore, it is essential to review processes and evaluate what went right, what went wrong and what improvements are needed to make governance more resilient. Rituals such as process review sessions are a simple way to achieve this goal.

Learning from your own experiences and those of others allows leaders to be open-minded about the actions that need to be taken immediately. Good data analysis is a great tool for this. And yes, at the end of the crisis, even if it has been painful, do a good review of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Crisis situations can teach valuable lessons. They are so fluid, that chances are they will tell you where your processes are lacking, where you haven't thought things through well enough or planned accordingly. A crisis can be an invaluable roadmap to what needs attention.

Identify the weaknesses and gaps, then revise your plan to address them. Incorporate flexibility, clear communication channels, and regular training to ensure readiness for various scenarios. Regularly review and update the plan to reflect changing circumstances and lessons learned from past incidents.

In-depth interviews with stakeholders provide information to feed into lessons learned. Teams busy 'putting out fires' lose sight of relevant information. And in the same model of agility, adaptability and flexibility are key to incorporating lessons learned into crisis plans.

If your crisis communications plan lacks resilience and adaptability, it's crucial to reassess and update it promptly. Start by identifying weaknesses and gaps in your existing plan, then incorporate measures to enhance flexibility and responsiveness. By regularly reviewing and refining your strategy, you can better navigate unexpected challenges and maintain effective communication during times of crisis.

Whether it’s for crisis communications or any other communications project, doing a post-mortem afterward to assess all the actions taken and data showing success or failure is vital. This way you can make necessary changes to make your plan more resilient in the future. You should hold these post-mittens shortly after the conclusion of the initiative while the qualitative aspects are still fresh in your mind, but long enough after that you have a decent amount of data to assess quantitatively, too.

"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." Remember that in a crisis, keeping your calm and keeping perspective is going to serve you well. Nothing good will be accomplished by knee-jerk reactions or emotional responses. You know how to do this. The rules of good communications haven't changed. Slow down. Take a deep breath. And smoothly move forward.

Embrace a balanced approach that combines learning from personal mistakes and shortcomings with a rigorous study of best practices and case studies. This technique equips individuals and organizations with a robust toolkit for managing crisis communications. It fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement, ensuring that one is better prepared to navigate the turbulent waters of crisis communication with confidence and effectiveness.