Chapter 3
Crisis Planning

Once you have a comprehensive list of your organization’s vulnerabilities—either by developing it yourself or by bringing in an outside consultant to assist you—your next step is writing your crisis plan.

And yes, I said writing your plan. The idea that you can get by in a crisis because “we all know what to do” is guaranteed to lead to organizational chaos. “Winging it” is not a crisis plan. Responsibilities, protocols, actions, messages, and more must all be spelled out clearly so there is no confusion in the heat of the moment.

Get it all down in writing, circulate it to ensure consensus, tweak as necessary, then use it (I talk more about that in the next chapters).

Is there a format you should follow? No. Is there a template you can use? Yes and no. There are crisis plan templates available (for free) on the Internet, but I’ve yet to find one I think has value for real-world application. More importantly, I’m generally not in favor of “template” crisis plans; I believe their “fill in the blanks” approach is antithetical to the kind of rigorous thinking writing a crisis plan should entail.