The audit phase is about analyzing where your organization currently sits on the crisis ready spectrum, with the aim of being able to use that analysis as a baseline to determine the next steps towards becoming crisis ready. Every organization starts at a different point in their crisis readiness, and understanding where your organization sits is the foundation of knowing where to go.

When you conduct this audit, you want to examine everything, including:

• The organization’s current mindset in viewing and responding to negative events. For example, are they taken seriously enough in proportion to their potential harm? Are your teams proactive in mitigating potentially negative situations before they occur? Are your teams regularly rewarded for putting people above process and bottom line? etc.
• The organization’s current processes and level of preparedness. For example, if you have a crisis management plan in place, where does that plan sit on the crisis ready spectrum? Has your organization identified its most likely high-risk, high-impact issue and crisis scenarios? Do you conduct regular crisis management exercises? Have you put time and effort into preventing the preventable risks that pertain to your organization? etc.

The audit phase will help you craft a blueprint of where the organization currently is in terms of its crisis readiness and where it needs to go in order to build brand invincibility.

With the virality of social media, the twenty-four hour news cycle, and the interconnectedness of the modern world, everything moves at a faster and more hard-hitting pace than it used to. This becomes even more prevalent when you’re faced with a negative event. And, as we saw recently with Crock-Pot’s blindsiding incident, unwanted impactful attention can strike from anywhere—even a fictional TV show! This reality, along with the potential effects these incidents threaten to leave on a brand, needs to be understood by every person within the organization.

The blueprint you created from your audit gives you a clear snapshot of the level of education required. The goal is to build a consistent baseline of understanding for everyone who will be involved in developing and implementing the crisis ready program.

Having a comprehensive understanding and awareness of how news transcends borders in milliseconds, how a video can become viral and have a million views before you’ve even heard about it, or how a poorly worded tweet can prompt impactful backlash, will serve in helping you gain the necessary support and buy-in required for implementing the next phases of the model. It will also serve when it comes time to actually manage real-time issues and crises.

This is the phase where you begin to accumulate the data that you will need to build out your crisis ready program. Here, you will gather information by having conversations with your team, from the top leadership to your department heads, stakeholder owners, etc., in order to:

• Define what a crisis versus an issue is for your organization
• Identify the most high-impact and most likely types of issues and crises that pertain to your brand
• Understand the expectations and demands of your stakeholders in each of those situations
• Determine your current processes of internal escalation
• Understand how departments interact with each other and how information is currently shared
• Identify the organization’s current gaps, vulnerabilities, and strengths in its different processes, policies, and procedures

The more in-depth your investigation into your organization’s current processes and culture, the more practical your crisis ready program will be. That’s the point of this phase: to gather the data required to create a robust, scalable, and practical crisis ready program.

Now that you’ve gathered the necessary in-depth knowledge about the organization’s current processes, the next step is to start using that knowledge to design your crisis ready program, which is composed of two elements:

• Your hands-on crisis ready playbooks, which contain all the action plans and resources that will help guide your crisis management team through the first 24-48 hours of a breaking crisis; and
• Your crisis communication handbooks, which hold your scenario-specific crisis communication strategies and pre-drafted messaging.

Having these two elements will mean that you have a crisis ready program that can be leveraged to your advantage at the outbreak of a crisis, which is critical when effective early action means reduced negative impact. These action plans and communication strategies are also in place to help you excel at the two essential requirements for successful crisis management:

• The actions you take to manage the actual incident; and
• Your communication with stakeholders.

You cannot succeed in crisis management without doing these two things and doing them well and simultaneously. Having a program in place that’s scalable across issues and crises allows you to be ready for the worst, but also allows you to excel at handling the minor issues, meaning you will always have a solid strategy no matter what arises.

You now have knowledge, a program, and a framework that makes you crisis ready—almost. Planning is essential, but in this day and age it is no longer enough to solely rely on a plan. The goal of being crisis ready is to have a culture where your entire team knows how to identify rising risks in real-time, how to quickly assess the potential impact of that risk on your organization, and how to respond in a way that increases stakeholder trust and goodwill in your brand.

The implementing phase is where you begin to implement this culture by conducting simulations that are designed to test the program and strengthen your team’s issue and crisis management skills. As I often say on stage and to my clients, you never hope to experience a crisis, but in a crisis, you hope to have experience. This is the phase that enables your team to gain that experience.