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Crisis & PR Patterns

Speak honestly and quickly when things go wrong.

Methods for communicating honestly with the outside world when something goes wrong. For founders, communications leads and spokespeople, the cards cover preparing in advance, assessing the first hour, making a first statement, apologising so it counts, facing the media, handling online storms and rumours, informing your own staff and rebuilding trust afterwards. Misleading spin is flagged so you can refuse it.

56 cards · 8 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

• Prepare7Could you respond within the hour tomorrow?
• Assess7Is it clear what you are facing?
• First Words7Have you said something true, quickly?
• Apologise7Would your apology convince the people harmed?
• Spokesperson7Can your spokesperson handle the hardest question?
• Storms And Rumours7Are you answering the crowd in the right place?
• Inside7Did your staff hear it from you first?
• Recover7Have you shown people what has changed?

A few cards

Prepare

Reputation Risk Scan

Name the few things most likely to cost you trust, before one of them happens.

First Words

Within The Hour

Say publicly that you know, as soon as you know, even with few facts.

Spokesperson

Pick The Spokesperson

Choose someone credible, calm and close to the facts, and never send them out unarmed.

One card in full

Inside

Staff Before Press

Let employees hear it from you before, or at the same time as, the public.

Staff who learn about a crisis from the news feel betrayed, and they're right to. They are also your most trusted ambassadors: their friends and families will ask them what's going on. Telling them first, or at least at the same moment, protects both their trust and your credibility.

How to use it

1. Add staff to the sequence in your notification plan, ahead of or alongside the public statement.
2. Use a channel that reaches everyone fast, including frontline and part-time staff, not just those at desks.
3. Send the same facts as the public statement, plus what staff should do.
4. Where timing rules or counsel prevent telling staff first, tell them at the same minute and explain why it wasn't earlier.
5. Tell them when they'll hear more.

Example

A school sends staff a short message at 7:45, fifteen minutes before the letter to parents goes out, so teachers aren't caught off guard at the gate.

Watch out

• Telling only managers and asking them to cascade. Messages arrive late, unevenly and altered.

It is part of Who Hears First; send it as an Internal Briefing Note, then follow with Leaders In The Room.

Recipes

• Earn It Back: Close the crisis on agreed criteria, then show the changes with evidence, report on every promise including the late ones, invite outside scrutiny, measure trust over months and learn without blame.
• Ready For The Interview: Choose a credible voice, map what is true and provable, rehearse against the worst questions, answer first, give real reasons for what you cannot say and treat every word as quotable.
• Sorry That Lands: Size how much the blame is yours, then write an apology that names the harm, owns it in the active voice, cuts the hedges, carries the remedy and promises only what you can deliver.
• Stop A Rumour: Track where a false story is moving, decide whether answering would help or spread it, sort the voices, correct it with the truth first and reply where it began, from one set of facts.
• The First Hour: Call it, separate what you know from what you have heard, list who is hurt, bring in counsel, say something true in public and name when you will speak again.

Missions

• Build a crisis kit: from "we have no plan" to a ranked list of scenarios with a playbook for each, a team roster with deputies, an agreed sign-off path, fill-in templates and a rehearsal date in the diary.
• Get through the first day: from "it's breaking now" to a confirmed fact log, an approved holding statement, a staff briefing note, the order in which people hear, and the time of the next update.

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