What Is Crisis Readiness?
Most Australian boards have sat through this meeting: someone tables a crisis communication plan, everyone nods, and it gets filed away until something has already gone wrong. Melissa Agnes, founder of the Crisis Ready Institute and lead teacher on My PR Partner's Crisis Masterclass, built her framework around rejecting exactly that habit. Here is her definition.
What crisis readiness means, in her words
So crisis ready from the Crisis Ready Institute means to be culturally prepared for any type of situation that can negatively impact people, the environment, the economy, and ultimately the business. When I talk about Crisis Ready, I'm talking about, I just said the word cultural. It's not about having a plan that sits on a shelf. Planning is essential, but it's more about having a culture, a way of thinking, a way of being, a way of interacting, a way of seeing things, and then a way of planning and preparing that truly sets you up for success. So that when something does occur, that your team instinctively knows how to work together to resolve the situation in a way that deescalates it quickly.
Month one of the Crisis Masterclass is this exact distinction, culture over paperwork, taught in full with Melissa's own worksheets.
See inside the programWhat Is the Crisis Response Penalty?
Melissa calls the cost of getting this wrong the crisis response penalty, a term she coined writing her book, and it applies from the moment a crisis lands.
So the crisis response penalty is what happens when you ineffectively respond to a crisis in the right timeline. So successful crisis management happens when the right actions are taken to fix the situation, to right the wrongs, to stop the bleeding, to do whatever needs to be done from a tactical, actionable standpoint that needs to happen while simultaneously you communicate effectively to all relevant stakeholders internally and externally.
What a Slow Crisis Response Costs You
Every extra hour of silence adds up. Melissa names three compounding costs:
And the longer you take to effectively respond to a crisis, three things happen. So the more it becomes everybody else's story, but yours. ... And every business is only successful when they're trustworthy and when they're credible, right? Trust is everything.
- "The more ownership of the narrative you lose."
- "The more trust and credibility you therefore destroy."
- "The more material impact you and your organization will suffer as a result."
How you label a situation in the first hour often decides which cost you pay first, the subject of a related read on issue versus crisis.
Connection Is the Goal
Where most crisis frameworks aim for de-escalation, Melissa sets a different target for every decision made under pressure.
For us at Crisis Ready, when you have connection as the goal, that means that you are always seeking to have authentic and strong relationships with those who matter most to your business. Without those relationships, your business will cease to exist, whether that's your employees, your investors, your board of directors, your vendors, your clients and customers. If you don't have strong relationships with your stakeholders, you're not going to have a successful business.
If you don't connect with people in your crisis communications, you will not resonate with them. You will just be noise, you will be unbelievable. You will lack credibility. If you don't resonate with those that you need to maintain and strengthen relationships with, then you won't own your own piece of the story. You won't own your narrative and you won't be able to influence them.
A Crisis Nobody Planned For
Melissa tells the story of a longstanding client, a crisis communication consultant in Europe who had taken every one of her courses. His publisher accidentally sent an early, error-filled draft of his first book to the printer instead of the final copy, and readers began mocking a crisis professional for a book full of mistakes.
So to have a partner, his publishers saying, we are not going to do that. We're going to be silent about it and pretend it never happened. And hope, hope is not a strategy. Hope that it doesn't come back to bite us, was unacceptable to him.
Mindset shapes everything in life, and mindset shapes everything when you're presented with a challenge.
Leadership Is About Impact
Melissa ties the story to a principle she repeats often: title has nothing to do with it.
And remember that leadership is not about rank. Leadership is about impact. So I really don't care where you sit on the organizational chart. If you are an intern at a brand new organization, fresh out of college, and you're listening to this, you're watching this, you have the most tremendous opportunity to step into this next evolution of your own leadership. And that is going to have impact.
The sequence for turning this month's thinking into an actual response sits in the Crisis Ready® formula.
Read the formulaCore Values Are a Promise
Month one's homework closes the loop: a mindset only holds if it matches real values.
So by understanding and deciding upon which of your core values are going to be in alignment with the mindset that you want for your organization, in this capacity, you are actually creating a promise, in other words, to stay in connection based on these core values with your stakeholders.
Melissa Agnes has spent two decades building this model with organisations before, during and after a crisis.
Meet Melissa AgnesWhat Month One of the Masterclass Covers
This session opens the 12-month Crisis Masterclass, run by My PR Partner with the Crisis Ready Institute. Co-founder Lyall Mercer introduces it plainly: "It'll blow your mind." See what the rest of the year covers at Inside the 12 Months, or start today with the crisis readiness checklist.
Frequently asked questions
What is crisis readiness?
Crisis readiness, as Melissa Agnes defines it through the Crisis Ready Institute, is a cultural state rather than a document. It means an organisation is prepared, in mindset, skillset and capability, to respond to any situation that could negatively affect people, the environment, the economy or the business itself, not because a plan exists on a shelf, but because the culture instinctively knows how to respond.
What is the crisis response penalty?
The crisis response penalty is the term Melissa Agnes coined for what happens when an organisation responds too slowly or ineffectively to a crisis. The longer an effective response takes, the more narrative ownership, trust and credibility an organisation loses, and the more material impact it ultimately suffers as a result.
What is a crisis ready culture?
A crisis ready culture is Melissa Agnes's term for the combination of mindset, skillset and capability that allows a team to respond well under pressure, without relying on a static plan. Mindset comes first: how leaders and staff actually think about challenges, tested against the organisation's real, lived core values rather than the ones written down.
What is the cost of a slow crisis response?
A slow crisis response carries what Melissa Agnes calls the crisis response penalty. Every hour of delay costs an organisation ownership of its own narrative, then the trust and credibility that narrative was protecting, and finally material impact on the business itself. The costs compound in that order, which is why speed matters as much as the content of the response.
Melissa Agnes
Founder, Crisis Ready Institute
Based in the USA, Melissa is a recognised leading authority on crisis communication, crisis leadership and brand protection. Best-selling author of 'Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World', and creator of the Crisis Ready® Model which has been globally recognised as having elevated industry best practice, she has worked with ministries of foreign affairs and defence, NATO and many other leading organisations. She presents the Crisis Ready course exclusively through My PR Partner in Australasia.
Melissa Agnes is the founder of the Crisis Ready Institute and creator of the Crisis Ready® Model. Her Crisis Ready course is available in Australasia exclusively through the My PR Partner Crisis Masterclass. See the program.
Quotes are drawn verbatim from session one of Melissa Agnes's Crisis Ready course inside My PR Partner's Crisis Masterclass. The Q&A on fear and the nervous system, and further detail of the mis-printed book story, have been trimmed for length and are not reproduced here.
