When the Lizard’s alter ego - Jim Preen - wrote the international best selling page-turner ‘Communication Strategies’ (Write your incident communication plan now) for the British Standards Institution the publisher said that nowhere in the book could the word crisis be used. Now given that our company is called Crisis Solutions that got me thinking.
Is there now no such thing as a crisis? Or if you think there is, then are the two words interchangeable? I have a suspicion they are not.
Would it be fair to say that a crisis is one step up from an incident? Or perhaps you could say that an incident is someone else’s problem and a crisis is something you have to fix yourself. So my crisis is your incident!
Definitions will vary from company to company depending on the business they are involved in, but one colleague suggested that an incident becomes a crisis when it cannot be solved following standard operating procedures. Or perhaps an incident becomes a crisis when it’s not managed correctly.
All of which reminds me of the old joke about the difference between Brits and Americans in a crisis.
To Americans ‘the situation is serious but not hopeless’.
To Brits the ‘situation is hopeless, but not serious!’
