Crisis: Dangerous Opportunity?

Crisis is synonymous to business since its evolution. Traditionally, crisis was "an unexpected, unanticipated or surprising event". The focus, then, was more on post-crisis management, information dissemination and image restoration. The more contemporary approach taken by crisis experts and researchers is to break down crisis under different stages - incubation stage, acute stage, dramatic trigger event and post-crisis stage. A further understanding of the term crisis is that a crisis can be natural or man-made. Natural crisis, as the name suggests is usually beyond human control. A man-made crisis is one that is anticipated and can be detected. 

The role of public relations practitioners during the times of crisis can have two-fold results. Crisis communication can either pose a threat to the organisation's repute, objectives and profits or it can provide an opportunity to enhance the its profile, status and trust.

While the contemporary view of crisis is - "crisis is a natural phase of an organisation's development", it is vital to emphasize on issues management and risk communication. A public relations practitioner's boundary spanning role comes to aid to avoid a possible dramatic trigger event stage. Monitoring the environment, listening to what is being said about the organisation, it acts like an anti-virus software detecting the virus before it crashes the computer. Once this virus is detected, PR practitioners need to respond quickly and responsibly before external publics do.

The environment in which businesses thrive today is bigger, freer and more scrutinising. During crisis, the business community needs to pay attention to key stakeholders, especially, - media, both traditional and online and the non-profit sector and activists. The diversification of media has made it almost impossible, in the online landscape, to mitigate the impact of a crisis. There is space only for organisations who are open and honest, the rest learn it the hard way. Though words like transparency and honesty are arguable to its extent of projection in reality, it is vital for organisations to know that consumers have acquired great amounts of power through online and social media. Activism has soared leading to higher scrutiny, giving little space for making obvious mistakes.

The chaos theory, sensemaking theory and the organisational learning theory, undertaking contemporary crisis management, stress on the importance of environmental scanning, issue recognition, issues management and risk communication to help limit an identified man-made issue into an potential damaging crisis.

For further insights on crisis communication, here is a presentation:

How to manage a crisis ?

View more presentations from Philippe Roques