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Crisis Management In The Media

CRiSIS Planning And Media COMMUNICATION EXPERTS

The Drill’s crisis management consultants make news headlines: Part of our crisis planning ethos is to try to help businesses shape the developing narrative via judicious media and stakeholder engagement, to take crisis-hit companies from unsafe ground to safer terrain.

Also, when crises break, media journalists/producers often ask Drill experts - all crisis management specialists - to offer insights and observations to boost understanding of the crisis communication issues at play. Our experts have vital international and hands-on crisis management consultancy expertise, which is transferred into our crisis management planning tools and crisis software.

Drawing on years of frontline crisis management consultancy, Drill staff enact crisis fixes and crisis solutions to help businesses overcome their PR and operational problems. Your crisis response plans can be improved just by reading some of the articles below, featuring our proprietary approaches and methodologies for crisis management puzzles. The articles do not constitute specific advice or counsel, but we believe their principles to be, without guarantee, thought-provoking! So when you’re ready for better crisis management planning or preparation, call us.

We hope you enjoy the read.

A client broke our crisis management simulator!!

Crisis management simulations are generally viewed as somewhat safe events, where - if you're a crisis manager, comms officer, business continuity director or risk specialist - you can test your crisis team through crisis rehearsal and crisis simulation exercises without real-life consequences!

Sounds ideal. But what if your crisis rehearsal is so realistic it becomes far from just a crisis simulation game? What if the accountability, concern and stress levels get so high that they actually put pressure on the IT technology that's powering the crisis simulation software ?

This actually happened in one of our crisis simulation summits recently: There they were; a healthy cross-disciplinary delegation, facing a series of challenging and escalating crisis simulation decisions. We had all the crisis management team types at the tables; the superheroes; the sages; the soldiers; the action men and action nomenclatures - but then we also encountered a pretty new type for crisis exercises; the crisis simulation power-poster!!

And it was the power-poster’s super-applied attention-to-detail which - temporarily - got our crisis simulator wires crossed! They posted so diligently that it fugaciously pushed our simulator beyond its capabilities.

In this particular event - an interactive crisis simulation training workshop - two of the logged in delegates were mega-archivists, supra-recorders, dogged documenters the likes of which we'd never seen using our system before. And while it was a joy to see their attention to crisis detail, one of these delegates (let's call him Ralph) temporarily 'broke' our simulator.

Now when I say broke, I actually mean it gave us a challenge that we nimbly needed to develop a fix for - and, in true crisis simulation fashion - that's exactly what we did during the event. Delegate 'Ralph' was such an applied archivist of all pressures, threats, decisions taken and actions assigned that he temporarily maxed out the column count we'd programmed in, for one documentation section of a particular exercise.

Normally, in a half-day interactive simulation, we'd routinely see around 15-20 actions noted in our crisis activity recorder. But 'Ralph' smashed our 50 actions limit, temporarily 'breaking the simulator' while we caught up and assigned more fields for him to populate.

So, yeah, while we were going about our business - to test your crisis management team - the client was testing the tolerances of our technology. And we loved that he did it!

After all, isn't that the purpose of a really good crisis simulation exercise; be it a cyber crisis simulation, emergency management incident or a reputation disaster simulation: To test what works, what doesn't and what can be damaged and fixed in responding to a crisis? That, absolutely, should be the purpose of the next crisis simulation examples you undertake. Crisis sims must help you find out what you can safely stress test, push to breaking point and then figure out what would be the ideal fix, often in a very truncated period of time.

And to all the 'Ralphs' out there who we haven't yet met...we love it when you bring on your diligent and data-hoarding best when you take The Drill Crisis Simulator. We love when you to put our tech to new levels of crisis test. After all, we have to stay on our toes to deliver 'business continuity' during an interruption to our normal service too. Because every simulation should test our mettle and our processes almost as much as it tests our clients'.

So; a client broke a small but significant silo of our crisis management software but far from it being a disaster, we had a plan for how to sort the issue and carry on with our digital and interactive crisis training workshop, with negligible interruption.

A big thank you to 'Wreck It Ralph'; by pushing the tech tolerance of our crisis training portal; you just made it so much stronger. We couldn't have done it without you, Ralphie.

Gerard McCusker