Chapter 9 Crisis Management

Chapter 9
Crisis Management


The institute of Crisis Management defines crisis as “a significant business disruption that stimulates extensive news media coverage. The resulting public scrutiny will affect the organizations normal operations and also could have political, legal, financial and governmental impact on it’s business.”

Despite the term crisis management, there is no way to “manage” external influences. What can and must be managed is the response. To do this effectively there must be an understanding of the public and political environment in which the crisis is occurring, the culture and inner workings of the organization facing the crisis, and human nature or how the persons and groups involved will most likely react.

Understanding human behavior in reaction to a crisis can be divided into five general categories of percentage. There will generally be 1% that are immediately favorable and unfavorable. 45% leaning favorable and unfavorable and 8% will be the opinion leaders who have great potential to influence the rest and who are willing to discuss the issue with an open mind. Too often, those dealing with a crisis will become focused on the zealots who compose the 1% favorable, not realizing that these people do more harm by illustrating their unreasonable support and will even turn off those who lean favorable. The wise choice is to focus on the 8% that make up opinion leaders. They are not necessarily politicians or people of education, they comprise members of every class and position but typically not those with any notoriety in the public.

This understanding along with significant preparation time attempting to anticipate as many likely crisis as possible will lend itself to better management of people in the crisis.

Example


A few months ago the radio station I work for decided that they were going to release the current morning show host and move me from the afternoon to the mornings. They wanted to turn the change into as much media generating action as possible so they decided to issue a “gag” order on all employees and play music for two days instead of talk. This would give the listeners the impression that the station might be switching formats. It was anticipated that the removal of the morning show host would create a crisis of some degree. And that by creating the perception of a larger crisis that all talk would be gone including myself, when the true changes were announced it would be a more desirable alternative in the minds of talk radio listening publics. Management selected one person who had the authority to make any statements to the press and none were made until the true changes were revealed on the following Monday. The statement clarified the stated reason for playing music was so that every audio could be retooled and the hardware could be installed for the new syndicated program. I believe for the goals of reducing potential crisis and maximizing exposure to the new line up, the crisis management plan was more success than failure.