Issue
Does not stop business as usual, does not need escalation to senior leadership, and does not threaten material impact on people, environment, operations, reputation or the bottom line. It stays with whoever owns it as part of their normal job.
Self-check
Issue or crisis? Five questions before you escalate.
A short framework from the Crisis Ready® course, built by crisis communication authority Melissa Agnes and taught inside the My PR Partner Crisis Masterclass. Answer five questions about the situation in front of you and get a plain read on whether it needs full escalation or normal handling.
- Built on the Crisis Ready® framework
- Five questions, two minutes
- No sign-up required
What is the difference between an issue and a crisis?
An issue is a situation your team can handle inside normal process. It does not stop business as usual, it does not need escalating straight to the top of leadership, and it does not threaten material impact on people, the environment, operations, reputation or the bottom line. A crisis does all three.
Melissa Agnes, the crisis communication authority behind the Crisis Masterclass, teaches three tests for a crisis: it stops business as usual to some extent, it needs immediate escalation to the top of leadership, and it threatens material impact on one or more of five categories. Miss any one of the three and you are managing an issue, not a crisis.
Scale decides the rest. The same event can be an issue for one organisation and a crisis for another, because whether something crosses the line depends on the size of the impact against your capacity to respond with the people and process you already have. That is why the checklist below asks about the situation in front of you specifically, not situations in general.
Three-part test
Issue, crisis or emergency: which is it?
Melissa Agnes's Crisis Ready® framework sorts any situation into one of three categories. Here is the short version of each. The exact wording is quoted in full further down the page.
Crisis
Stops business as usual, forces immediate escalation to the top of leadership, and threatens material impact on people, environment, operations, reputation or the bottom line. Whether it counts as one depends on scale against your capacity to respond.
Emergency
Needs immediate action to protect health, safety, life, property or the environment, with hands on the scene right now to assess it. An emergency can turn out to be an issue or a crisis, but it is never a non-issue.
Try it
Run the check on the situation in front of you
Answer for the real situation in front of you, not a hypothetical one. The five questions below use the same tests Melissa Agnes teaches in session two of the Crisis Masterclass, plus her test for an emergency, so the verdict reflects the framework the rest of this page is built on.
Five-question self-check
Issue or crisis? Answer for the situation in front of you.
Built on Melissa Agnes's definitions. It is a sorting aid for a leadership conversation, not legal or safety advice.
1.Has business as usual stopped, or slowed, to some extent?
Not "is this unpleasant". Are people unable to do their normal work, serve customers or run the school day because of it?
2.Does it need immediate escalation straight to the top of leadership?
Melissa's test: would the chief executive, principal or board chair be pulled out of a meeting, a holiday or their sleep for this?
3.Does it threaten material impact on people, the environment, operations, reputation or the bottom line?
One category is enough. "Material" means it crosses a threshold your organisation has set, or would set if it had to.
4.Does the scale of it exceed your capacity to respond effectively with the people and process you already have?
The same event can be an issue for one organisation and a crisis for another. Capacity is the difference.
5.Does it need immediate action to protect health, safety, life, property or the environment?
This is the emergency test. An emergency can be an issue or a crisis, but it is never a non-issue: someone goes to the scene now.
Answer all five to see where the situation sits on the continuum.
Definitions
What makes a crisis a crisis
This is the definition the Crisis Masterclass workbook opens with. It is the most quotable line in the course, and it is worth having word for word.
A crisis is an event, incident, or emergency that does THREE things: it stops business as usual to some extent, it requires immediate escalation to leadership (they get pulled from meetings, vacation, or sleep), and it threatens material impact on one or more of 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)
Definitions
What an issue is
An issue is not a lesser crisis. It is a different category altogether, with a different owner and a different process.
An issue is an event, incident, or emergency that does not stop business as usual, does not require escalation to senior leadership, and does not threaten material impact on the five categories above.
Definitions
Where emergencies fit
An emergency sits across both of the categories above. It is a test of urgency, not of scale, and it always triggers an immediate response.
An emergency is an event or incident that requires immediate action to manage or mitigate threats to health, safety, life, property, or environment, that needs hands on deck right now to assess and respond, and that can be either an issue or a crisis, but is never a non-issue.
Scale, not severity
The continuum, and why the label carries a penalty
Issue and crisis are not two boxes. Melissa Agnes places them on a single continuum, and where your organisation sits on it can change by the hour.
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.
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 crisis response penalties.
Crisis Masterclass month two builds this framework into your own high-risk scenarios, with a worked example.
See the programSet them before you need them
Thresholds of impact
A threshold is a number, a headcount or a deadline you set in advance, so the call does not have to be made from scratch under pressure. Melissa Agnes points to seven categories worth setting one for.
- Environmental
- Financial
- Legal and regulatory
- Operational
- People, internal and external
- Reputational
- Social and societal
So at the onset of COVID... 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.
Inside the Crisis Masterclass, month two walks through setting thresholds for your own high-risk scenarios.
See what's insideWhere this sits
Where this sits in the Crisis Masterclass
This page covers the definitions and the self-check. The full framework, with worked examples and a template for your own high-risk scenarios, is month two of the Crisis Masterclass, delivered by Melissa Agnes and Lyall Mercer. For the fuller story behind these definitions, including the thought exercise Melissa uses to teach the distinction, read Issue or Crisis? Why the Label Decides the Response. Once you know which one you are looking at, month three's Validate, Relate, Prove formula is what you say next. And the free crisis vulnerability checklist is a good next step if this page raised more questions than it answered.
Who built this framework
The framework behind the check
Built directly from the Crisis Ready® course Melissa Agnes teaches inside the My PR Partner Crisis Masterclass, delivered in Australia with Lyall Mercer.
Lyall Mercer
Co-founder, My PR Partner
A former journalist with more than 25 years of front-line public relations experience, advising governments, executives, heads of state, industry associations and schools, and coordinating international media conferences.
Melissa Agnes
Founder and CEO, Crisis Ready Institute
A recognised authority on crisis communication, crisis leadership and brand protection, and best-selling author of Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand.
Melissa Agnes teaches the full framework, with worked examples for your own high-risk scenarios, in the Crisis Masterclass. Read more about her work on the Melissa Agnes page.
Common questions
Issue or crisis questions
Can a positive event be a crisis?
Yes. The framework tests for the effect, not the tone of the event: whether it stops business as usual, forces escalation to the top of leadership, and threatens material impact. A sudden spike in demand can do all three just as easily as bad news can, if it outstrips your capacity to respond.
Who decides whether something is escalated?
The framework does. If a situation meets the three tests, it is escalated straight to the top of leadership by design, not by someone's judgement call on the day. Setting that threshold in advance, before a real situation arrives, is what stops the decision becoming a debate in the moment.
Is a media enquiry automatically a crisis?
No. A single enquiry your team can handle inside normal process is an issue, not a crisis. It only tips over when it stops business as usual, needs leadership involved immediately, and threatens material impact on people, environment, operations, reputation or the bottom line.
How do we set our thresholds?
By scenario, not by comparing one situation to another. Melissa Agnes uses two businesses facing the same event with different cash reserves: one had a two-week threshold before panic set in, the other had eighteen months. Set a quantifiable threshold for each of your high-risk scenarios in turn.
What if we treat an issue as a crisis?
It carries its own version of the crisis response penalty: unnecessary stress on the team, resources pulled toward something that did not need full escalation, and credibility spent for no reason. Treating a crisis as an issue is just as costly, so the label has to be accurate in both directions.
Next step
Know the label. Then know what to say.
You now know whether the situation in front of you is an issue, a crisis or an emergency. The Crisis Masterclass is where you build what happens next: thresholds for your own high-risk scenarios, and the Validate, Relate, Prove formula for what you actually say.