The journalist has a deadline. You have an approval process. Guess which one moves faster? It's a frustration I hear regularly from media and communications teams. And journalists.
The team knows if they don't respond to a media enquiry quickly, the story will go ahead without them. If they don’t talk to stakeholders in time, the narrative gets set by someone else. But they can't just fire off a response. There are facts to check, executives to consult and approvals to get. Lots of approvals to get. And they can be slow.
It turns out this isn't just an Australian problem.
I recently spent several days in Southeast Asia delivering crisis media training for one of the region's major energy businesses. With international stakeholders, major customers across Asia and relationships spanning government, royalty and local communities, it's a complex operation. Plenty of people have a legitimate interest in what the company says publicly.
You’d expect an energy company in Southeast Asia to face very different challenges from a business in WA. But put both communications teams around a table and I suspect they'd have plenty to talk about. The same tension between speed, accuracy and approvals.
Big organisations have big approval processes. And for good reason. Like a set of traffic lights, they're there for safety. But when there's an emergency, you don't want the ambulance sitting at every red light waiting patiently for permission to move.
Your communications team can't run a red unless leadership has already agreed on which lights they can run, under what circumstances, and how far they can go.
Hello crisis comms plan.
I love a good plan, provided it's still relevant when somebody needs it. Sometimes plans are developed by a consultant, signed off by the relevant board members, and then tucked into a lever arch folder in a lockable cabinet, supporting a pot plant.
Five years later, there's a serious incident on site and someone goes looking for it. The flowchart explains who needs to approve the first stakeholder response. It goes to the Head of Communications. Then Legal. Then Bob.
Except Bob left in 2021. The plan hadn’t caught up.
If your crisis plan doesn't contemplate a cyberattack, data breach, AI-generated deepfake or a social media storm, but still has a detailed procedure for handling an angry letter to the editor, it might be time for an update.
It shouldn’t be treated like a document to be completed, it’s a process to be maintained.
Your plan should have holding statements, that are pre-approved. So, if a crisis hits, you're inserting verified facts into a prepared structure instead of staring at a blank page while the phone rings.
A good holding statement acknowledges what's happened, explains what you know, recognises who's affected, outlines what you're doing and tells people what happens next. That last part is particularly important. Even if you don't have all the answers, you can tell people when they'll hear from you again.
Put a recurring appointment in the diary for annual review. Melbourne Cup morning. April Fool's Day. Bob's birthday, if you must. The date doesn't matter. The discipline does. And the boss needs to be part of it.
But it's called a holding statement for a reason. It holds the fort until someone is ready to speak. A senior leader may need to face the cameras and answer difficult questions, even if they don’t have all the information yet.
Think about what happens when you're sitting on a plane that hasn't moved for 40 minutes. You've watched the safety demonstration, read the in-flight magazine and exchanged an awkward hello with the stranger whose elbow you'll be sharing for the next six hours. Yes, I fly economy.
The pilot doesn't always know exactly when you'll be taking off, but they’ll get on the microphone anyway. They tell you what they know, acknowledge the inconvenience, explain what's being done and promise an update when there's something more to share. You might be annoyed you're stuck on the tarmac, but at least you know somebody's in charge.
The pilot doesn't need every answer to make a useful announcement.
Neither does your CEO.
When that moment comes, you want a leader who's practised thinking on their feet, not one learning how to do it in front of a television camera.
It's no small undertaking to fly a media trainer from Australia to Southeast Asia. But we did this face-to-face because the written messages need testing. We could have exchanged documents, held a few Teams meetings and called it crisis preparation. Instead, we put people in front of cameras and pressure-tested responses. We practised difficult, hypothetical, scenarios. I travelled a long way to discover that an uncomfortable question sounds remarkably familiar in any language.
And it's every bit as relevant to an executive in WA. With any luck, you'll never face a crisis that puts all that preparation to the test.
But if you do, you'll be glad somebody updated it after Bob left.
Get in touch with ThinkBox Media for Crisis Media Training.
