Jon Harmon, Strategic Communications

Plan ahead to avoid free-falling panic

By Jon Harmon

Imagine a tree trimmer working high above the ground, suspended in a safety harness. Before she makes the first cut with her light-weight chain saw, she surveys the limbs below, and the ground even further below. She makes a quick plan in her head, just in case everything goes wrong and she finds herself tumbling down. She needs to know which limbs she might reach for, to slow her fall, and she needs to know this before she starts falling, before it’s all just high-speed panic.

That tree-trimmer is you, metaphorically speaking, if you’re leading an organization of almost any type. You make sure the processes your people are following are robust, protecting them as well as your end users. You ensure that plenty of safety measures are in place to keep processes running smoothly. But you still look around for things that could go wrong. And you develop a plan ahead of time, so that if things deteriorate into free-fall, you know what to do, what to reach out for that can prevent disaster.

That’s why you need a robust crisis management plan, including a crisis communication plan that leans into transparency, while never letting your message get ahead of your evolving understanding of what has happened and might be continuing to happen. Your crisis communications plan will reduce the chances that you make matters worse by saying the wrong things—or by saying nothing at all.

But maybe you don’t think disaster can possibly strike your organization, and you don’t need a crisis management plan. Or that you’ll get around to it when other priorities lighten up. In that case, metaphorically speaking, you’re a tree trimmer, high above the ground, with no safety harness at all. That’s no way to work—and not a responsible way to lead an organization. People can’t be expected to make the right decisions when they’re in panic mode. Planning, preparation and practice will go a long way toward ensuring that even sticky situations are handled thoughtfully, preventing matters from getting much worse.

Guest blog by:

Jon Harmon
Jon Harmon Strategic Communications
[email protected]