The first hour of a crisis

How do we know that what is happening is no longer an ordinary operational problem but a crisis? And that, besides the problem itself, we now also need to deal with communication? Sometimes it is quite simple — when the media get in touch, you are already in a crisis.

When someone else is telling your story and it is spreading beyond your control, you are already in a crisis. Notice that there is a second condition here too — it is spreading. If someone raises a problem but you judge that it is not spreading any further, sometimes the best decision is to leave it alone and not draw attention to it unnecessarily. To solve the problem quietly. The decision is yours — you need basic sound judgement and monitoring.

Once we know it is a crisis and we resolve it, or at least have planned the steps to resolve it, we communicate. That does not mean we have to announce to the world that we have a problem, but we prepare a statement and inform the owners and employees.

In the first hour of a crisis you can lay an excellent foundation for successful communication — you convene the crisis team, agree on the basic starting points and divide up the tasks.

The first hour is also when you can create a problem even bigger than the original crisis.

That is exactly what happened to United Airlines in 2017. When airport security officers dragged a passenger off a plane by force and videos of the incident began spreading on social media, the company already had a crisis.

Instead of first understanding what had happened and how the public saw the situation, it responded procedurally. That is a great danger for unprepared companies shut away in their own corporate bubble.

CEO Oscar Munoz apologised for having to “re-accommodate” passengers, and in an internal e-mail that became public he described the passenger as disruptive and belligerent.

Meanwhile the public was watching footage of a bleeding man being dragged down the aisle of the plane. So United was no longer dealing only with the original incident, but also with its own disastrous and inappropriate communication.

Only later did the CEO take full responsibility and call the event “truly horrific”. But by then someone else had long been telling the story.

The opposite example came from Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol crisis of 1982. Seven people died after taking capsules that someone had laced with cyanide after they were manufactured.

The company was not responsible for the contamination, yet it did not wait for the question of blame to be settled. It withdrew 31 million bottles of Tylenol from the market and put customer safety ahead of an immediate commercial loss.

It did not start by working out who was to blame. It worked out what had to be done. Its decision-making was made easier by its own corporate values, which put responsibility towards customers first.

A crisis that could have destroyed the brand later became a textbook example of good crisis management.

So in the first hour you do not need to communicate fast at any cost. You need to take control quickly of what we know, what we do not know, who decides and what we can say. That is precisely why the first hour of a crisis is much easier if you made the most important decisions before it began.