Most organisations experience failures from time to time, either of their own making or caused by third-parties. But if your name is on the front of the shop shouldn’t you be taking full responsibility?

The Little Princess Trust is a worthwhile charity doing great things. Not only do they offer children and young people experiencing hair loss due to cancer treatment a free real hair wig. They also fund essential research which aims to deliver more effective and kinder treatments for all cancers affecting children and young people.

A team can’t afford to prevaricate in a crisis - and it is tempting to wait for the perfect picture to emerge before making a decision.

We frequently see the effectiveness of crisis management teams compromised due to not having co-ordination support in place to take teams through the process of responding effectively to a crisis.

So many organisations say that they have prepared and rehearsed their communications response to a crisis, yet time after time we see real crises breaking in the media with no comment from the organisation at the centre of the problem.

The first part of the Crisis Solutions’ capabilities is ‘activation’. Activation of a crisis team is the process by which an organisation switches out of ‘business-as-usual’ role and engages itself with the crisis.

At Crisis Solutions we have developed and constantly refined a crisis management benchmark which we use to evaluate every organisation.

One theme that seems to emerge regularly from our crisis exercises is the difficulty in getting clear messages agreed and issued in the early stages of a crisis. There are three key questions your comms team needs to be able to answer right now.

On 19 December the Cabinet Office published a new 'Resilience Framework' describing how the UK prepares for and responds to emergencies. Is it teaching grandma to suck eggs?

Here are our '12 New Year Tips' that cover some of the common crisis management pitfalls we witnessed in 2022.

Activation of a crisis team is the process by which an organisation switches out of ‘business-as-usual’ role and engages itself with the crisis.

For any team, the ability to adapt and think outside of their day-to-day sphere can yield spectacular results, and no more so than in a crisis.

We normally steer clear of politics in our blogs but we’ll make an exception this time!

Crisis management is not just about dealing with the unexpected - it’s also about managing situations that you hope aren’t going to happen, but just might.

I try not to repeat content when writing blogs and newsletters, but the escalating energy crisis means that individuals, organisations and even governments are having to consider impacts that weren’t apparent even a few months ago.

When you are flying a plane - there’s nothing as useless as altitude above you!

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There’s nothing worse than a desktop exercise or crisis simulation that people don’t want to attend because they think it’s going to be a waste of time.

In the past we have thought of crisis communications as largely reactive - ’something has happened to our organisation - now we must respond’. But that has changed.

It’s tempting to fixate on pandemics and cyber attacks because our recent experience skews our thinking in that direction. But the next threat might be, for example, energy supplies.