Crisis Communications
Crisis Communications
How bad it gets is decided before anything happens.
Preparation that starts from how an organisation actually works. And hands-on help when the situation is already live.
If something has already gone wrong: skip this page and get in touch now →
The pattern
Most crisis plans describe an organisation that doesn’t exist.
There is usually a plan. It sits in a folder, written for a generic organisation, rehearsed once, aging quietly. Meanwhile the real vulnerabilities live somewhere else: in departments, in country offices, in the gap between what headquarters assumes and what the front line has quietly learned to work around.
And the weather has changed. Narratives travel faster than statements, attacks arrive coordinated, and the first hours decide more than they used to. Preparation that ignores how the organisation actually works is rehearsal for the wrong play.
Before something goes wrong.
Crisis readiness
A project with depth: interviews across departments, levels and countries, collecting what people have actually experienced, how they solved it, and where the organisation is exposed now and next. Out of that, a map of weak points, and guidance built to hold.
Guidelines, not a policy. Guidance that gives people footing in a difficult moment, instead of a rulebook that silences them. Then implementation across the organisation, with crisis drills where they earn their place.
What the programme leaves behind
- A vulnerability map: where the organisation is actually exposed, across departments and countries
- Crisis guidelines: what can be said today, what is still open, and how to say so honestly
- An escalation and decision structure: who decides what, from when, and what happens if they cannot be reached
Two to three readiness programmes a year. Depth is the point, and depth does not scale.
Crisis support retainer
Guaranteed availability from someone who has already worked through the organisation from the inside: immediate reachability, smaller situations handled within the retainer.
Larger situations fall cleanly out of the retainer into their own engagement, and that line is drawn in advance.
A retainer from an advisor who already knows the map is a different thing from one who starts the worst day by asking questions.
When it already has.
Crisis response
Acute help, hands-on, now. Assessment of the situation, the first statements, the sequencing of who says what to whom, and a senior advisor next to the people who have to stand in front of it.
No prior relationship needed. Organisations in a live situation can come in cold; the work starts with the situation, not with paperwork.
Get in touch nowResponse engagements often become readiness work afterwards, once the fire is out and the appetite for prevention is real. That order is fine.
What it is not
A binder on a shelf.
A template plan.
A media training with actors.
An organisation that knows
its weak points, and holds.
The diagnosis is the difference. Dozens of interviews across an organisation are the most valuable and most expensive part of readiness work, which is why the market usually skips them or hands them to junior teams. Here they are run in full and processed with an AI-supported pipeline, from recording to analysis, which makes the reading faster and deeper. The interviews themselves stay what they must be: one senior advisor, listening.
The work behind it
Proven where it is hardest: across borders, with small teams.
Two years of continuous crisis work
Developed and proven in continuous crisis-communications work for an international organisation, including the far-flung parts of a large operation run by small teams.
Decades of live situations
Before that: crisis situations handled across nearly two decades of agency leadership, reactive then, systematic now. The method is new. The scar tissue is not.
Adjacent, when it fits: organisations that want standing awareness of what is coming look at the Political Landscape Monitor. Readiness and the monitor make each other better.