You Don’t Have a Crisis Plan. You Have a Document.
Most leadership teams will say yes when asked: “Are you prepared for a crisis?” They shouldn’t answer so quickly. Because what they usually mean is the following:
We have a document.
We know who the spokesperson is.
We’ve talked about this once.
That is not preparedness. That is administrative reassurance.
Here’s the truth most organisations avoid:
Crises don’t test your plan. They expose your habits. What people do under pressure is not what’s written in a PDF.
It’s what they’ve practised—or avoided—until that moment.
Let’s talk about what typically passes for crisis readiness.
A slide deck.
A phone tree.
A comms approval flow that assumes the following:
calm thinking,
full availability,
perfect information.
None of which exist in an actual crisis.
A real crisis is when your crisis management team looks like this:
incomplete facts,
emotional stakeholders,
legal pressure,
media speed,
internal disagreement,
and leadership being pulled in five directions at once.
If your plan assumes rational behaviour, you don’t have a plan. You have wishful thinking.
Now the uncomfortable question:
Who in your organisation has actually been trained to manage a crisis?
Not informed. Not copied on an email. But trained. Who has:
Practised decision-making under time pressure?
Rehearsed hostile questions?
Learnt how to speak when they don’t yet have all the answers?
Understood when silence is strategic—and when it’s fatal?
For most companies, the answer is 'no one'.
Another inconvenient truth:
Most crises are not communication failures. They are leadership failures—made visible.
The message collapses because the organisation collapses first.
Unclear authority
Fear of accountability
Conflicting priorities
Delayed decisions disguised as “alignment”.
PR doesn’t create these problems. It just becomes the place where they surface. And yet, many companies still treat crisis preparation as an insurance policy:
nice to have,
rarely tested,
quietly outdated.
Until the moment it’s needed. And then it’s already too late.
Let’s be explicit. A crisis will arrive. Not if. But when.
And scarily, it may not be the one you imagined. It rarely is. It might be any one of dozens of possible crises
a regulatory issue,
a data breach, ransomware
an internal scandal, bribery, corruption,
serious injury or death caused by non-adherence to safety
an operational failure, customer service abuse
a leadership misstep, espionage
or something that starts small and accelerates fast.
The organisations that survive are not the ones with the longest documents.
They are the ones with the following:
clear roles,
trained leaders,
rehearsed responses,
and the courage to act early.
Here’s the real test of preparedness:
If tomorrow morning you were faced with a real crisis.
30 minutes to respond,
partial information,
and public pressure—
Who decides? Who speaks? Who decides the narrative? Who manages the media? Who challenges the decision?
Who owns the outcome?
If that’s not immediately clear, you are not prepared.
Crisis training is uncomfortable by design.
It forces leaders to:
confront their own reactions,
test their authority structures,
and see how the organisation behaves under stress.
That discomfort is the point.
Because the real crisis will be far less forgiving.
Final thought:
The question is not whether you have a crisis plan.
It’s whether your people know how to use it – when it actually matters.
Most don’t. And that gap is where reputations are lost.
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. 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.