Why crisis communications is a team sport

Crisis communications has largely always been viewed through the lens of careful messaging. When something goes wrong technical experts provide the facts, communications meticulously drafts the statement, legal signs it off and the organisation responds. Simple. But as anyone who’s been through the eye of the storm enough times knows, that idea of a sequential and orderly process couldn’t be further from reality.

Whether the issue is a cyber incident, a data breach or another high-impact event, there is a fundamental need for disparate – and often extremely unfamiliar – teams to operate in seamless synchronicity. Comms, Legal, IT – teams that are often left to look after their own ‘dance space’ with wildly different responsibilities, pressures and measures of success. But when a crisis hits, the need for them to come together – fast – cannot be underestimated. The effectiveness of any crisis response depends almost entirely on how well those disciplines work together.

That perhaps sounds obvious, but in practice, it rarely happens.

One of the recurring things we often hear is that these teams  – particularly when clients are using outside counsel and suppliers – often only meet properly for the first time once a crisis is already in full swing.

At that point, the cyber team is trying to establish what has happened while preserving evidence. Legal is assessing regulatory obligations, contractual responsibilities and future litigation risk. Communications is under pressure to provide reassurance to customers, employees and stakeholders. While none of those priorities are in conflict, the risk of ‘staying in your own lane’ becomes clear pretty quickly.

The best-prepared organisations therefore invest just as much time in building relationships between teams as they do in documenting escalation procedures. Communications leaders should understand how their legal and cyber colleagues operate. Legal teams should understand the pressures communicators face when audiences expect immediate answers. Cyber specialists need to have confidence that technical nuance can be translated accurately without compromising the integrity of the facts. But crucially, these relationships should not be built during a live incident.The worst time to become familiar with your policies, your protocols or the people you rely on is when things are going wrong.

What this boils down to is that crisis preparation needs to extend beyond documentation and plans. Instead, decision-making needs to be tested in the ‘good times’ which will help reveal far more than gaps in process for when the ‘bad times’ hit. This testing helps expose assumptions, clarify responsibilities and build the trust that allows organisations to make faster, better decisions when time matters most.

The organisations that manage crises most effectively are rarely those with the longest plans or the most sophisticated playbooks, they are the organisations where communications, legal and cyber have already learnt how to work as one team.

In a crisis, your response will never be judged by the strength of one function in isolation. It will be judged by how effectively every discipline comes together to protect the organisation when it matters most.