Mind-mapping crisis messages – Phases 3 thru 7 of a Crisis -- Article 4 in a series

By Leland Darryl Armstrong posted 03-19-2013 19:02

Recommend

This is a series of articles that will help you understand the seven stages of a crisis and how to mind-map crisis messages. This process when done appropriately and successfully will ensure you will succeed in planning your messages before a crisis and better understand how you can use mind-mapping during and after a crisis. Article 4 in a series …

What is a mind-map and how do they help communicators develop crisis messages?

Mind-mapping messages is simply a systematic way to develop clear, concise, easy to understand and deliver crisis messages in advance of the crisis occurring, as well as during and after the crisis. The goal of such messages is to simplify often technical or complex situations and ensure a speedy delivery of the message to the right audience at the right time. Mind-mapping your messages can be done prior to, during and after the crisis has occurred.

At L. Darryl Armstrong and Associates Behavioral Public Relations LLC we suggest there are seven phases to understand underlying information needs necessary to mind-map messages

Advance warning or advance intel
Situation assessment
Communicating the response
Operational management
Resolution and path forward prevention
Business continuity – recovery
Lessons learned - recalibrations

This article deals with the third thru seventh phases of a crisis and lays the foundations necessary to engage in mind-mapping your responses.

Communicating the response

Once you understand the situation as best you can with whatever level of intel you have from the field, social media and real-time observations the time has come to communicate and handle the crisis.

However, before you step out to notify anyone think through exactly what it is you plan to do and use your team as a feedback system to ensure the messages are clear and well articulated.

Communications during this phase focuses on making your audiences aware of what is taking place, providing specific instructions – instructions that can’t be taken in two different ways by different audiences – and engaging the first responders in the actual operational handling of the event.

Operational management

It is during the operational management phase that movement toward resolution is hopefully underway. Communications during this phase is essential, especially if or when the crisis deteriorates and becomes even more complex. Frequently, during this phase a disconnect can occur, if crisis communicators are not careful, have been diligent and have good rapport with the operational managers. Often managers get wrapped up in “doing something” to handle the situation and forget to “tell others” what is taking place and why.

Therefore, a significant amount of communications must occur during this phase internally and externally. Operations should provide regular status updates to the communicator so the various audiences are informed in a timely fashion. It may be necessary to change the previous instructions given to your audiences, to control rumors and to conference with all team members and first responders to know what is taking place and the impacts of decisions; corrections as needed to operational decisions and consequently to information being communicated is not uncommon.

Resolution and path forward

Once the crisis is resolved and the team is comfortable with the status, communications to the audiences about the current status is essential. It is especially important to communicate what at that time is seen as the path forward to ensure that everyone understands what you think happened, why it may have happened (without speculating), what was done to resolve it and most importantly what is being done to analyze it and prevent it from happening again, so that a path forward plan can be developed.

Business continuity and recovery

It is often at this stage that organizations, that don’t have business continuity plan in place wish they had. It is one thing to recover from the crisis and crisis management planning is essential to do that; it is quite another to be able to get operations of the business back to normal as soon as possible and without a business continuity plan that is not possible.

Imagine, if you will, that you have had an active shooter on your campus. The scene of the shooting is a crime scene and will be inaccessible for a long period of time. A business continuity plan takes this into account and has a pre-planned way of dealing with the space loss. Without a robust and resilient business continuity plan, recovery will take longer and the perception quickly drawn by the media and public can be one of incompetent or at best incomplete planning.

Healing should always be the focus in the recovery phase and it is difficult to start that process if you have not thought through, as an example, the need to have contracts in place for additional counseling services following an active shooter incident.

Lessons learned and recalibration phase

Communications during the lessons learned and recalibration phase is important when it comes to the internal team, first responders and your partners. During this phase, an aggressive and comprehensive review of the crisis, how it was handled operationally and by the crisis communicator is essential. All positives and deltas should be captured for an ongoing database that can be shared with all the crisis team and your partners.

We recommend that the lessons learned facilitation take place within 72-hours after the end of the crisis with all parties that were involved in the crisis attending and participating. It is best to use an independent and neutral facilitator for this exercise.

Summary

Each of L. Darryl Armstrong and Associates seven phases of a crisis and their explanation lays the groundwork for the ultimate goal of mind-mapping your crisis messages. They are designed to help you analytically and logically think through the crisis and how such events evolve and by understanding each phase you better understand the informational needs required at each step.

Blogs