Can you profile the perfect crisis manager?

What qualities are required in a disaster and is it possible to profile individuals who might be effective crisis managers? Jim Preen writes in Continuity Central.

The recent anniversary of 9/11 reminded us what good looked like in a crisis – it looked like New York City firefighters and of course Rudolf Giuliani, the mayor of New York in 2001.

Prior to the catastrophe Giuliani had been a divisive figure and by no means universally popular, but cometh the hour cometh the man. He seemed up to the job in both word and deed. When asked how many people he thought had died in the tragedy his immediate response was “more than any of us can bear.” Perfectly capturing the public mood at the time of overwhelming crisis.

So what qualities are required in a disaster and is it possible to profile individuals who might be effective crisis managers?

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Perfect profile

The police use profiling to target potential criminal offenders.

The Lizard asks: Can you profile the perfect crisis manager?

There might be an article coming on…

A pilot’s guide to crisis management

Richard Whitby, CFO at Crisis Solutions, has a highly entertaining article in the new edition of Risk UK. Click here to see the article and the rest of the magazine.

Here’s a taste:

A pilot's guide to crisis management

“Final check, then apply full power,” says the instructor. I’m hunched over the controls of the Cessna light aircraft, my palms sweating and my head full of figures. The pilot of a 747 couldn’t be concentrating any harder.

Final Check means a quick glance over the myriad dials in front of me to ensure that ‘temperatures and pressures’ are normal. Then it’s the Big White Numbers check which means making sure the runway number given by air traffic control matches the huge numbers painted on the runway in front of me - thereby ensuring I’m on the correct runway and not about to meander in front of a 737 on its way to Majorca.

Flying is all about logical planning, together with the training and flexibility to deal with any eventuality, which strikes me as the same set of skills you need for crisis management.

Social media policy

A couple of posts back I highlighted an article about social media. I’ve had a couple of comments along the lines of: ‘Well that’s very interesting, but what are we meant to do about it?’

The answer is your company should have a social media policy – so as a public service and to get you started here’s a checklist to get you underway:

• Employee Facebook policy
• Employee personal blog policy
• Employee Twitter policy
• Employee Linkedin policy
• Corporate blogging policy and approval process
• Corporate blog commenting policy
• Corporate YouTube policy

Developing scenarios

Jim Preen provides some advice on how to set up convincing business continuity exercise scenarios.

Terror blasts, white powder attacks, pandemic flu, cyber crime, the list goes on. At the sharp end of business continuity it really is one damn thing after another.

We seem to spend our lives frightening the life out of crisis management teams by dreaming up the best possible scenarios to test their response and the company’s business continuity plan. So what makes for the top scenario - one that really tests the plan and the players?

Read the full story here.

The anatomy of a social media crisis

Good article by Erica Swallow at Mashable on the Altimeter report on soc media crises.
Definitely worth a look. Here's a taste.

Social media crises are on the rise, but 76% of those that occurred since 2001 could have been diminished or averted with the proper social media investments, according to a report by Altimeter Group released on Wednesday.

For the report, entitled “Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally,” Altimeter Group analyzed 50 social media crises that have occurred since 2001 and found that those reaching mainstream media have risen steadily through the past decade, with just 1-2 incidents per year in the first five years and a total of 10 social media crises last year alone. The report also sheds light on exactly how social media crises arise and how companies can avoid them.

Click here to read more.

Is this a crisis or are we just having a bad day?

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!’