What is a crisis? Merriam-Webster's definition would be "an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending."
If you think a crisis is unlikely to hit your business, you may need to have a rethink.
Today, a crisis is not just an oil spill or a worksite fatal accident. Crises today come in diverse forms and magnitudes, from staff layoffs, atrocious customer service, financial scandals, technology "cheat" scandals, pandemics, malpractices, product recalls, negative "viral" social media mentions, third-party stakeholder failures, whistleblowing, natural disasters, national and geopolitical conflicts, and of course, data and cybersecurity lapses.
Emerging businesses often view crisis management and communication programs as "optional," rather than critical. Huge and multinational corporations, because of their corporate tenure and having faced crises large and small through the decades, would have crisis management and communication programs in place.
However, not all such programs are progressive and keep with the times, and not all such programs work under duress or actual crises—unless we put such programs and relevant stakeholders through regular exercises for readiness and resilience.
Going ISO
The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) would elaborate on a crisis as an "abnormal or extraordinary event or situation that threatens an organisation or community and requires a strategic, adaptive, and timely response to preserve its viability and integrity.""
For a start, businesses can look at the ISO 22361 recommendations of seven key principles of governance, strategy, risk management, decision-making, communication, ethics, and learning.
The ISO 22361 framework clearly shows that having a crisis management and communication program in place is necessary, as well as having the internal (and external) stakeholders adopt the right mindset of "kaizen" for continuous improvement and continuous learning.
From crew to boardroom
Famous aviator and author of the 1961 aviation classic "Fate is the Hunter," Ernest K. Gann, once said, "Anyone can do the job when things are going right. In this business we play for keeps."
Aviation is one of the arenas where mistakes are not just expensive but fatal. Therefore, aviation has some of the most stringent and onerous standards for crisis management and communication.
Because these standards and frameworks are so clear and useful, some have been adopted by other industries, including emergency medicine. Despite the variety of approaches to crisis management and communication, the aviation industry offers valuable insights.
One of the methods in aviation for managing safety and risk, communication, and decision-making is crew resource management (CRM), where the ideas were based on the 1969 work "The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents" by aviator David Beaty.
The CRM became consolidated after the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, where two Boeing 747s collided on the runway and 583 people died. CRM, as the name suggests, is offered as training for not just pilots in the flight deck but also cabin crew and is for the management of resources during flights.
A CRM training program would typically include communication, situational awareness, problem-solving, decision-making, and collaboration or teamwork. Modern flight decks involve a more collaborative pilot team where the pilot-in-command (PIC or "captain") and the pilot-monitoring (co-pilot or "first officer") are often working closely together, rather than a classical hierarchical command structure. Often, in a flight, it is not uncommon for PIC and pilot monitoring to exchange tasks of monitoring the instrumentation or flying.
The CRM concept has already been adapted for other industries, including maritime, maintenance and engineering, medicine (especially emergency medicine or surgery), logistics, and emergency response teams such as firefighters.
The same concept can also be implemented in businesses, which we have taught to clients in various industries, including cybersecurity, enterprise technology, healthcare, and more.
A simple way to look at CRM is to know your environment, have a checklist-style plan before crises happen, define clear roles and workloads for every internal and external stakeholder, define clear and closed-loop communication, and have a process to call for help, including calling for external partners for help.
In aviation, we talk about threat and error management (TEM) as an umbrella safety concept, which evolved from a joint collaboration between Delta Airlines and the University of Texas' human factors research project in 1994. In a flight deck, threats can be faulty instrumentation, while errors could be missing checklist items during flight phases.
In a typical business, threats can be latent, such as cultural (national, organisational, or professional) or vague policies; overt, such as environmental (global, trade wars, or pandemics); or staffing related.
To mitigate threats and errors, businesses can go through the TEM lifecycle of meeting the crisis, detecting threats and errors, responding to threats and errors, evaluating results, and then formulating improvements and learning.
Keep it simple
Part of the sophistication and yet certainty of aviation is communication, where there is theoretically little or no confusion or ambiguity. This advantage is due to having Aviation English, the international language for commercial aviation from the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), which became a universally accepted recommendation in 1951.
Aviation English is a condensed working "language" of just a few hundred terms of jargon, a phonetic alphabet, standardized abbreviations, and numbers in simple English. The net result is that pilots of any commercial flight can communicate with any other pilot in the same flight deck, as well as ATCs (air traffic controllers), with no ambiguity.
Similarly, let's reassess our approach to business communication. Do we speak in jargon that only PhDs and insiders understand? Do we keep facts, figures, and narratives simple and truthful?
Whether in a crisis or not, we can certainly steer clear of ambiguity and errors to facilitate clear internal and external communication. Do we actually listen to each other, respond appropriately, and have empathy and respect for each other, whether in a crisis or not?
After all, especially in a crisis, you need teamwork and collaboration to allay anxieties and smoothen outcomes.
Getting started is the first step
Remember, crises will happen—it is an eventuality, not a probability. So, the earlier you put together a crisis management and communication program that is kept updated, fielded, and managed properly within and with external partners, then when a crisis strikes, you are ready to manage and resolve it well.
