Why Crisis Management Training Cannot Be Learned in a Classroom
Years ago, a colleague of mine decided to become the first-aid representative for our entire floor, a hundred people. She attended every class and earned her certification. A month later, a man at the next desk had a heart attack. She did not calmly step in. She ran around the office for a good ten minutes, telling everyone not to panic and repeating that she was the trained first aider for the floor, while doing nothing actually to help him.
The certificate was real. The competence and mental resolve that it was supposed to represent were not there when it mattered.
The CEO’s Nerve That Ran Out
It is tempting for any CEO reading this to assume the lesson belongs to someone else, a different sector, a different time. It does not. When Marks & Spencer suffered a ransomware attack in 2025, chief executive Stuart Machin handled the opening well, fronting clear updates as trading was halted.
But the composure did not last. Online orders stayed frozen for six weeks, and the cyberattack alone wiped over £1 billion off the company's stock market value, cost roughly £300 million in operating profit, and helped nearly halve half-year profits. Rival Next quietly picked up the customers M&S lost along the way. The freeze did not happen on day one. It happened over the weeks that followed, while a household-name retailer haemorrhaged money it will not get back.
The Indecisive Cruise Ship Captain
Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia, is the extreme version of the same failure. When his ship struck a rock off Giglio, the recorded radio exchanges with the coast guard show a man who was unable to act, repeatedly ordered back on board, and indecisive in managing the situation. He was later sentenced to sixteen years for manslaughter, causing the disaster, and abandoning ship. Whatever skill he had on a calm bridge was gone once the real crisis began.
Why Lighthouse PR Builds Simulations, Not Certificates
This is the pattern we see again and again at Lighthouse PR: a capability that exists on paper often disappears once real pressure runs past the first news cycle. A classroom, a certificate, or a slide deck cannot tell you how a leader holds up on day thirty, not just day one.
Only a realistic simulation, run long enough to test endurance, can do that. This is why Lighthouse PR builds full simulation exercises for clients rather than issuing a plan to file away.
The first aider, the retail chief executive, and the ship's captain had one thing in common. They had been trained or credentialed, but for a moment, they had never lived through or experienced. The only way to know how anyone, or any organisation, holds up under a genuine, sustained crisis is to put them through the experience before it is real.
That is the premise behind Lighthouse PR's approach to crisis preparedness and why we keep making the case for simulation over certification.
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About the Author
Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of business growth and business continuity services — always led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.
Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.