The Chinese characters for crisis mean two other words: Danger and Opportunities. The wise of Chinese culture is reflected in its semantics, anyone willing to take the risks of great dangers is also risking being highly successful.
Or in the words of The question though is: what is the difference between the ones who come out of a crisis cultivating seeds of success and the ones who come out the crisis with the roots of failure?
The first step to be successful in a crisis is to be prepared. Executives often fail to recognize that we have emerged from an old world with an industrial economy to a new world based in knowledge economy. Therefore in this new world reputation value shouldn’t be underestimated.
In my analyses this is the first challenge to communicators. Assure high management understands the need of a well placed crisis management plan and understand what kind of crisis can rise. According to Institute for Crisis Management (in their 1995 research) there has been a lot of focus in the wrong kind of crisis. “The real problems had revolved around white collar crime, labor disputes and company mismanagement.” The (mis)management can be tricky to tackle as the embarrassment to admit executives can make mistakes often prevent them to plan for this possibility.
Issues not well managed can become crisis in a quick and abrupt manner. So here it is the next challenge. A well planned crisis management plan will foresee and avoid crisis.
The list goes on: Perception versus reality; media support, putting together strategic, incident and communication team, managing all parties involved… are some of the key aspects to plant the roots of success out of a crisis.
There will be more on crisis in the upcoming postings along with some great case studies.
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And here it is a great book on the subject which is also source for some of my comments:
Book: Risk Issues and Crisis Management in Public Relations
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