Crisis? What crisis?

The Lounge Lizard, on behalf of Crisis Solutions, has been keeping himself busy lately, putting together a book that will be published shortly by the British Standards Institute.

It’s called Exercising for Excellence and tells you everything you need to know about running successful crisis simulations.

Well that’s what I thought it was about until the BSI said oh! no! you can’t use the word CRISIS – there is no such thing as a crisis anymore there are just INCIDENTS. Spooky huh?

So when The Lizard’s wife rams her ladyship’s car into a controversially located wall, is that an incident or a crisis?

Personally I like the word crisis, the dictionary on my computer describes it like this: a situation or period in which things are very uncertain, difficult, or painful, especially a time when action must be taken to avoid complete disaster or breakdown.

It describes an incident as: something that happens, especially a single event.

Now The Lounge Lizard and his cohorts at Crisis Solutions work in business continuity and crisis readiness and I know which definition describes what we get involved in.

Plus we are called Crisis Solutions so we like the word crisis – Incident Solutions seems a little flaccid. And where are you now, if not in The Crisis Lounge?

But of course we didn’t want to irritate our friends at the BSI as they are kindly publishing our book so in an attempt at not allowing an incident to turn into a crisis we immediately climbed down and removed all trace of the word crisis.

Actually we got away with one - a direct quote from Dr Henry Kissinger who memorably said, “Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full.”

Anybody got any thoughts on this? Perhaps we need to get our definitions sorted out. What is a crisis? What is an incident and how do they differ?