Stop trouble the smart way – by not letting it start in the first place
There’s a reason we’re quite fond of the saying, “the best form of crisis management is crisis prevention.” Sure, the big publicity comes from swooping in to salvage a disaster in progress, but few realize that, in the vast majority of cases, the proper prevention protocol would have prevented that big, expensive crisis from ever getting started.
In an Employee Benefits News article by Andrea Davis, Bernstein Crisis Management president Jonathan Bernstein offered up an analogy that illustrates this perfectly:
Bernstein says a crisis management plan should have two components: prevention and response. “The closest analogy I’ve found is the difference between fire prevention and firefighting,” he says. “Firefighting is the type of crisis management that makes the news, but the people who save organizations and people the most money, by far, are the fire inspectors.”
Many execs balk at doing in-depth crisis prevention when they find out that, GASP, it’s actually going to cost money, but the next time you encounter resistance, explain it like this – would you rather check for faulty wiring or replace your destroyed building? Put that way, it’s an easy call.
In our experience with real-life cases, the cost of crisis prevention is but a tiny fraction of the potential cost of a full-blown crisis. Sure, there’s a (virtually nonexistent) chance that you might never actually encounter a serious crisis, but when you discover your roof’s on fire, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/