Crisis communications

Before something goes wrong. And when it already has.

Two situations, one discipline. 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.

The core programme

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.

Interviews across departments and countries
A map of vulnerabilities, current and coming
Guidelines with footing, not a gag order
Implementation and drills, as needed

The firm takes on two to three readiness programmes a year. Depth is the point, and depth does not scale.

After the diagnosis

Crisis support retainer

Bought availability from someone who has already been through the organisation: immediate reachability, smaller situations handled within the retainer.

Larger situations fall cleanly out of the retainer into their own engagement. That cap is stated up front, because it is what makes a retainer calculable for both sides.

A retainer from an advisor who knows the map is a different product from one who starts the worst day with questions.

When it already has.

Immediate

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.

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Response engagements often become readiness work afterwards, once the fire is out and the appetite for prevention is real. That order is fine. It is how most organisations honestly arrive at prevention.

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. The firm runs them with its own AI-supported pipeline, from recording to analysis, which makes the processing faster and the reading deeper, while the interviews themselves stay what they must be: one senior advisor, listening.

The work behind it

Proven where it is hardest: across countries, with thin teams.

Two years of standing crisis work

Developed and proven in two years of continuous crisis-communications work for an international organisation active in eleven countries, including the long branches of a large organisation 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, and each stands on its own.