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Prepare Now for Crisis

Most of us have either heard of or used the expression Murphy’s Law: “If something can go wrong, it will.” Actually, there was a Murphy, Major Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems for the air force in the 1940s and 1950s. It is for him that the phrase was coined. When some high-speed rail tests went wrong at Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio, Murphy said, “If there is more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will result in disaster, then someone will do it that way.”

Murphy was associated with crisis and found that it’s not if but when a crisis will occur. If you accept that to be true, anyone at any time can expect the unexpected. Unwanted circumstances can change your life forever.

Two-thirds of crises should never even make it to the level of crisis. Most are smoldering and should be detected, and if they are, they ought to be dealt with responsibly.

Interestingly and ironically, in August 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted an emergency training session to discuss and determine the three most likely catastrophes to strike the United States in the coming years. First on the list was a terrorist attack in New York City. Second was a high-intensity hurricane hitting New Orleans. Third was a major earthquake in the San Andreas Fault.

All three were deemed potential crises. The first shocked the nation and destroyed our sense of invulnerability on September 11, 2001. The second tore a city apart in late August and early September 2005. The third has frightened millions with tremors over time.

FEMA anticipated well these potential crises. Unfortunately, people of responsibility did nothing to prevent or prepare for their happening.

Organizationally, one way to determine the health of an organization’s brand is to conduct a crisis audit. That can involve examining business protocols, management actions, or the attitudes of stakeholders. All brands are vulnerable and are defined as much by what others say about them as by what they say about themselves.

The twenty-first century is an era of perception relevance. Organizations can help their cause by having discipline, transparency, and accountability in all they do.

When I was assigned to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1974, anticipating crisis was the furthest thing from my mind. An institution that had thrived since its founding in 1802, West Point had a pattern of predictability. However, its institutional foundation was shaken in 1975 when President Gerald R. Ford signed into law the admission of women to the three service academies. It became a vexing crisis for them all.

As the media relations officer for the military academy at the time, I experienced an onslaught of media attention. The first class of women entered in July of 1976. Months later, 220 cadets were alleged to have cheated on an electrical engineering exam; 152 were ultimately expelled, but not before enormous institutional scrutiny. It was the largest honor scandal in the history of West Point.

The superintendent of the military academy at the time was the late Lieutenant General Sidney B. Berry, an extraordinarily gifted officer some felt was destined to be the army chief of staff one day. He never rose that far, it could be argued, because of the crises that consumed his tenure as superintendent.

Crisis was in our lives each day as we worked through the tumultuous period of these two challenges. I spent many an hour in General Berry’s company working through these two episodes we had never predicted or had crisis plans for. I felt crisis-tested like never before.

That was the case until my phone rang at 6:45 the morning of December 12, 1985. Then the media relations division chief for the U.S. Army, I received a call from the Army Command Center in the Pentagon. I was told that a charter airplane had just crashed upon takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland. Seeking more information, I instinctively turned on the television in my office, and there appeared a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter in a yellow slicker describing the tragedy that lay behind him.

As it turned out, aboard that airplane were 248 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and eight crew members from the carrier Arrow Airline. The soldiers were returning to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, from a six-month United Nations peacekeeping assignment in the Sinai. All aboard perished.

This was the largest military air disaster in the nation’s history. For me it was a crisis of epic proportions. I learned the hard way about the common elements of a crisis. It occurs with suddenness, it causes time compression, it demands a quick response, it interferes with normal organizational performance, and it creates uncertainty and stress.

For those of us involved, the response was immediate. I installed an 800 number and a bank of telephones in my Pentagon office. I augmented my staff to help answer the flood of calls. A crisis response team was dispatched to Gander by 2 p.m. that day. An investigation into the cause of the crash was launched. Remains were recovered. The next of kin of all who perished were notified.

It was a crisis that went on 24/7 for weeks. As the chief spokesman for the army, I handled hundreds upon hundreds of media inquiries for months. I also had to deal with the mood of the public, which changed from sympathy, to blame, to anger. How could we have used a charter airplane as opposed to one from the U.S. Air Force to ferry our troops home? The answer that the fleet of air force cargo planes was not large enough at the time seemed inadequate. I thought the crisis would never end, and I deeply regretted that the army didn’t have a crisis plan for such disasters.

Just as risk management is the proactive approach to unforeseen calamities, crisis management is the reactive response to things that have gone wrong. What kinds of things? Everything from a natural disaster to a technological one and from malevolence to misconduct.

Murphy had it right when he described a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome. These unwanted events can affect any organization as well as its publics, services, products, or good name.

Because they typically occur with suddenness, such as the events of 9/11, or result in uncertainty, as happened with the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, one needs to have a crisis plan in place beforehand.

Far too many managers and leaders are in denial—it can’t happen to us. Not on my watch. Actually, it not only can but probably will happen. Crisis is everywhere and affects organizations in every way.

Smart managers recognize that an organization recovers best when it is prepared for a crisis. You need to help your boss with that form of recognition. You can also persuade the boss to have an ideology that is built on ironclad ethical and professional behavior. Senior managers must have both a plan and procedures in place to execute that plan well.

French general, statesman, and president Charles de Gaulle had it right when he said, “Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own.”