Guidelines, not a policy

Rulebooks silence people at exactly the moment they need footing.

Most organisations that have been through a difficult week come out of it wanting a document. Something binding, agreed in advance, so that next time nobody has to improvise.

The instinct is right. The document is usually wrong.

What a policy does under pressure

A policy is written by people who are worried about what could go wrong, which means it is mostly a list of things nobody may do. Do not comment on ongoing proceedings. Do not speak to media without clearance. Do not post in a personal capacity about organisational matters.

Read on a calm afternoon, that is prudent. Read at seven in the morning by a country director whose phone is already ringing, it says one thing: say nothing until someone senior tells you otherwise.

So they say nothing. And the silence is not neutral. It is itself an answer, delivered to journalists who have a deadline and will fill the space with whatever else they have.

The delay is the damage

The serious harm in most communications crises is not a badly chosen sentence. It is the six hours in which the organisation was the only party not speaking.

Those hours are almost never caused by disagreement about what to say. They are caused by nobody being sure whether they are allowed to say it, and by the person who could confirm being on a plane.

What guidance does instead

Guidance starts from the opposite question. Not what is forbidden, but what is available.

Here is what is already established and can be said today without checking. Here is what is not yet clear and the sentence that acknowledges it honestly. Here is who decides the rest, and here is what happens if that person cannot be reached within the hour.

The difference is not tone. It is that one document removes room for manoeuvre and the other creates it.

Written for the person who has to use it

Most crisis documents are written for the organisation to have. Few are written for someone to read while a situation is live.

The test is simple and unforgiving. Can somebody with no crisis training, alone, early, with no one available to call, open this and know what to do in the next ten minutes? If it takes longer than that to find the relevant part, the document will not be opened at all.

Why this is easier to implement

There is a practical argument as well, and it is not a small one. Rulebooks generate resistance, because everyone who reads one recognises a restriction on their own judgement, and much of the internal energy goes into arguing about scope.

Guidance is accepted more readily because it visibly helps the person holding it. That acceptance is what makes it survive the second year, which is the only kind of preparation that is worth anything.