Why the Difference Between an Issue and a Crisis Matters
It's 4pm on a Friday and the phone won't stop. A school principal has an email from three angry parents. A council general manager has a burst water main and a reporter on the line. A CEO has a Slack thread about a product fault spreading fast. Each has about thirty seconds to decide: does this wait until Monday, or does it go to the board tonight? Call it wrong either way and it costs something real.
Getting the difference between an issue and a crisis right
Melissa Agnes spends a full session of the Crisis Masterclass on this distinction alone.
In the meantime, it's really important for a few reasons to get your definitions right. One, mislabeling a crisis as an issue or an issue as a crisis can very easily and very quickly escalate harm to the organisation. So what I like to call the crisis response penalty and squander trust, reputation, and brand equity, even if just put at the most basic of level, if your team believes that a situation is a crisis, when really it's an issue that's gonna cause a lot of stress internally, and even just from that standpoint, you and your team deserve to not have that stress when you don't need it.
Month three of the Crisis Masterclass turns the label into a script, with the formula for what to say once you know which one you're facing.
See the formulaWhat Makes a Crisis a Crisis
Agnes doesn't hand you a fixed definition. She gives you a test.
A crisis is an event, incident, or emergency that does THREE things: 1. Stops business as usual to some extent. 2. Requires immediate escalation to leadership (they get pulled from meetings, vacation, or sleep). 3. Threatens material impact on one or more of these five categories:
- People internal and/or external
- Environment planet and/or economy
- Operations ability to function
- Reputation trust, credibility, brand equity
- Bottom line financial impact
Scale of impact against your capacity to respond: same event, different organisation, different answer.
What an Issue Is
An issue isn't a lesser crisis. It's a different category.
An issue is an event, incident, or emergency that: does NOT stop business as usual; does NOT require escalation to senior leadership; does NOT threaten material impact on the five categories above. Issue management is part of someone's job description. It's handled within normal operations without major disruption.
Where Emergencies Fit
An emergency sits beside both categories, not between them: a test of whether people need to move right now.
An emergency is an event or incident that: requires immediate action to manage or mitigate threats to health, safety, life, property, or environment; needs hands on deck RIGHT NOW to assess and respond; can be either an issue OR a crisis (but is never a non-issue).
The Continuum: From Non-Issue to Issue to Crisis
Agnes places all of this on one scale rather than three separate boxes.
So essentially, when we're looking at issues and crises, we have to remember that they kind of exists on a continuum. So if you were to have a scale in front of you and here was non-issue, and then we have a little bit of an escalation, and that goes to issue, and then we have a little bit more of an escalation, and that goes to crisis, where a crisis ready organisation lives, the vast majority of the time is in that non-issue to issue level.
That scale sits differently for every organisation. Her favourite illustration is Zoom, the video conferencing platform that saw demand surge at the start of COVID.
All of a sudden Zoom had an influx of demand and market opportunity to really position themselves and to really scale their business up, right? So here we had a crisis for a lot of different companies and an opportunity for another company. So just kind of sharing this to reiterate how a crisis for one doesn't necessarily translate into a crisis for another or a crisis for all. So it's really important for your organisation to clearly understand and set the criteria around what is a crisis for you?
The Crisis Masterclass is Melissa Agnes's full course, delivered in Australasia through My PR Partner.
Meet Melissa AgnesThresholds of Impact: When Does an Issue Become a Crisis?
Once you have your five categories, the next job is making them specific. Agnes points to seven areas worth mapping.
So when you're looking at your thresholds of impact or your thresholds of escalation, some areas of impact that you want to look at are environmental, financial, legal, and regulatory, operational people internally and externally, reputational and social and societal.
She demonstrates it through financial runway, comparing two real businesses from the early weeks of COVID.
So at the onset of COVID, when people were starting to work from home and to be on lockdown and businesses didn't know what tomorrow held, the businesses that had a financial runway of two weeks, for example, so after two weeks of not selling, they would have to close their doors or lay people off or just start cutting back, that for those businesses, two weeks was their financial threshold, at which point they would need to start panicking. Versus another company, for example, that might've had 18 months of liquidity and financial runway, meaning that they could keep their lights on, they could keep paying their people, they could make zero sales for 18 months before they actually began to panic and think, oh my goodness, we're gonna go out of business.
Session 2 of the Crisis Masterclass walks you through setting these thresholds for your own high risk scenarios, with a worked template.
See inside the programBoth Directions Carry a Penalty
It's tempting to assume the safe move is always to call something a crisis. Agnes is direct about why overreacting carries its own cost.
If your team is responding, or in this case actually reacting to an issue as though it's a crisis, what are the risks involved with that? What are the consequences involved with that? And reversely is true as well. If your team is responding or reacting to a crisis as though it's just an issue, what are the consequences and the risks involved with that?
Both present, both consequences, present crisis response penalties.
Where to Go From Here
Agnes built a five-question self-check for your own leadership team, using your own scenarios rather than a college student's laptop. Once the label is settled, knowing what to say next is what the rest of the Crisis Masterclass teaches.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an issue and a crisis?
An issue does not stop normal operations and does not need to go to senior leadership. A crisis stops business as usual, forces immediate escalation to leadership, and threatens material impact on people, environment, operations, reputation or the bottom line. The test is scale of impact against your organisation's capacity to respond.
What is a crisis, in one definition?
Crisis trainer Melissa Agnes defines a crisis as a situation that stops business as usual, requires immediate escalation to the top of leadership, and threatens material impact on one or more of five categories: people, environment, operations, reputation and bottom line. Whether it counts as a crisis depends on scale of impact against your capacity to respond.
Is every emergency a crisis?
No. An emergency needs immediate action to manage a threat to health, safety, life, property or the environment, but it can turn out to be either an issue or a crisis once your team assesses it. The one thing an emergency is never is a non-issue: it always needs some hands on deck.
Can a positive event ever become a crisis?
Yes. A crisis can come from a positive situation as easily as a negative one. A sudden surge in demand, a viral moment or rapid growth can threaten the same five categories, people, operations, reputation, bottom line, if an organisation lacks the capacity to manage the scale of what is happening.
Who created the issue versus crisis framework?
The framework comes from Melissa Agnes, founder of the Crisis Ready Institute and creator of the Crisis Ready® Model. In Australasia it's taught through the My PR Partner Crisis Masterclass, a twelve-month program she delivers with My PR Partner co-founder Lyall Mercer.
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.
Quoted material is drawn from session 2 of Melissa Agnes's Crisis Ready course and its companion workbook, delivered through the My PR Partner Crisis Masterclass. Passages are excerpted for length, one repeated phrase has been trimmed, and the workbook's crisis, issue and emergency definitions have been reformatted from bullet points into running text without changing her wording.
