Throughout everybody’s life, we all encounter one absolute constant—crisis.
The old adage, “It’s not a matter of if, it’s when,” holds true.
This universal law predates us, eradicating species through extinction events before we walked the Earth. Crises and how we respond to them were first depicted in cave drawings and stone etchings. With the advent of written language, these events and how people handled them found homes on cuneiform, papyrus, paper, and the Internet.
As far as we know, cultures around the world have always had a dedicated word for crisis. Examples include Krisi (Greek), Mgogoro (Swahili), Musiba (Arabic), Sankat (Hindi), Temostli (Aztec) and Wa’soka’pii (Blackfoot).
My latest book, Crisis: A Global History, provides a historical analysis of crises across the world and time through the framework of nine major crisis types—conflict, disease, economic, environmental, famine, natural, organizational/reputational, social justice, and technological.
Through historical investigative narrative and a crisis management lens, the book discusses what happened and how, planning and prevention efforts, the response and impact, and what went well or could have been done better. The key question the book works to answer is, why do we keep making the same missteps?
The answer I come to should not be a surprise—successful crisis mitigation, prevention, and response usually comes down to effective leadership.
These decision-makers take the facts as they are, adapt to them, can be creative in their proposed solutions, and keep everything on the table with nothing being too radical if it will address the problem. They also usually do not worry about legacy.
This pitfall can force leaders to play it safe, sometimes doing nothing or hoping the emerging issue or crisis will go away. It is important to note that caution is very different from legacy.
Decision-makers should exercise caution without being narrow-minded and be able to act on solutions that benefit the greater good without taking into account how people will view or remember them down the line. Considering one’s place in history can be a certain path to ensure it does not treat them well.
Economic vs Famine Crises
United States President Herbert Hoover is an interesting example in that he experienced both the heights of amazing leadership and the doldrums.
While many high school students are aware that Hoover is widely regarded as an unsuccessful U.S. President because of his administration’s failed Great Depression crisis response, most probably do not know that he led one of the most successful fights against famine in history. His work was so significant that it earned him the nickname “The Great Humanitarian.”
During World War I, ten million Belgians and French living in war zones were facing starvation. Under Hoover’s leadership, the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) provided food for over five years. Its success relied on supply chain management strategies, a discipline Hoover was very familiar with from his time in the international mining business in countries that included Australia, China, Russia and Myanmar.
In addition to using Hoover’s business acumen, the CRB also had to negotiate with Germany that their group would not spy for the Allies or provide them aid.
This illustrates the reality that sometimes effective crisis response includes incorporating elements one might not have imagined.
To accomplish goals, the crisis manager has to be open to any idea. The organization’s efforts were so successful that they continue to influence relief groups around the world over a century later.
Taking notice of Hoover’s immense success, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him the head of the new U.S. Food and Drug Administration after the country entered World War I. Hoover understood the need to bolster food production while encouraging rationing to increase food stores should we need future reserves.
After the war, Hoover returned to his work eradicating hunger in Europe. As head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), Hoover authorized 19,000 kitchens that fed 11 million Russians every day.
At first glance, it is difficult to understand how the same person can perform so well during one crisis and so poorly during another. Analysis shows that his leadership style probably played a major role. While his detail-oriented approach and superb administrative skills worked well to fight famine through straightforward operations and planning, his lack of conceptual understanding of The Great Depression’s scale, compounded by having to work with Congress to get things done, hamstrung him.
Even with Hoover’s dismal economic crisis performance so fresh in the collective mind of U.S. citizens, his stellar famine crisis work was not forgotten. After World War II, President Harry Truman appointed Hoover head of the Famine Emergency Committee to make sure people did not starve.
A New Form of Communications Helps Win the Civil War
Not surprisingly, one of history’s greatest leaders—President Abraham Lincoln—embraced new technology. Contingency and redundancy measures are common crisis management practices, as is maintaining an existing technology, while gestating another that is expected to emerge exponentially more powerful.
After identifying the crisis of slow message delivery, the U.S. War Department embraced one such new technology—the telegraph and its Morse code, named for the technology and code’s inventor, Samuel Morse. Used for the first time as a means of military communication during the Civil War, the telegraph revolutionized information-sharing with its speed and helped prevent mass casualty events. Messages that would have taken days or weeks to receive now only took minutes or hours, with part of that time necessary for the telegraph agent’s transcription of the series of dots and dashes separated by breaks into words.
Tom Wheeler writes of how Lincoln slept on a cot next to a telegraph during battles so he could more quickly receive and send messages. Lincoln understood that the South was at a significant disadvantage given its scarcity of telegraph lines that crippled its ability to communicate in real-time.
The commander-in-chief, who had only sent a telegraph or so a month during his first year in office, transformed into an enthusiastic adopter of the nascent technology. After evaluating the telegraph’s performance during battle and its high degree of effectiveness, he aptly and colorfully began referring to the communiques it sent as “lightning messages.”
One example of the telegraph’s use as a crisis management tool was the May 1864 Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, when Union General George Meade employed it to provide support for Union Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, preventing many deaths and injuries.
While neither side could claim a victory, the Union pointed to their long-term strategic win as the Confederates lost a heavier percentage of soldiers, in addition to charismatic leader General J.E.B. Stuart. Confederate General Robert E. Lee would surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House just eleven months later. This wartime communication platform went mainstream in the late 1860s after the Civil War. By the early 1870s, the telegraph was used globally.
Events that Inspire Formal Crisis Management
Many crisis practitioners get into the business to solve for the corporate organizational and reputational crises that pepper today’s news. Often, these crises are avoidable and stem from their own faulty, negligent, or intentional financial or operational mismanagement, fraud, cybersecurity breaches, and quality assurance practices.
While most are sudden, sometimes a lack of awareness, planning, and regulations creates conditions for organizational and reputational crises to gestate out of sight as smoldering crises.
Corporations’ experiences with and responses to crises have influenced the innovation and application of crisis management principles, leading to the development of more structured stakeholder research, planning, preparedness, communication, response, and evaluation strategies and tactics. Other organizations, including governmental, nonprofit, and smaller private sector entities, noticed how major businesses were benefiting from these new practices.
They adapted and incorporated them with Timothy Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). This transition was relatively easy, as SCCT is applicable to individual events. Its key to success is first establishing how stakeholders desire the organization to behave when confronted with a crisis situation and what they want to hear and/or see from them. This information helps influence not only the crisis response but also lays the groundwork for how the response and future action are communicated.
Charting organizational and reputational crisis responses from the past and their respective evolutions helps inform future ones. Effectively managed reputational crises can set the organization or individual apart as a leader in their field. This work comes through admitting fault if it exists and working toward actionable outcomes to better ensure it does not happen again.
Managing organizational and reputational crises has evolved with the advent of environmental scanning and preventive issues management. Some cases were successful, while many were not given non-existent crisis management practices often influenced by existing laws, knowledge, policies, and social mores that included unregulated financial markets, not understanding how diseases work, or simply not wanting anything to do with addressing a crisis or taking responsibility for it. More than ever, we demand that our organizations do the right thing, which has become infused into preemptive crisis response.
There are a number of crisis management sayings along the lines of “crisis presents opportunity” and “don’t waste a good crisis.” There is truth to these statements. A reasonable person understands that bad or uncomfortable things are going to happen. It’s how an organization handles crises and recovers from them that stakeholders will probably judge it. When a crisis occurs, honesty and transparency, the ability to take responsibility, and present an actionable recovery plan go a long way to maintain reputational health. Sometimes, as counterproductive as it seems, organizations can emerge from a crisis in a better position than before entering it.
The Johnson & Johnson (J&J) 1982 Tylenol case still stands over forty years later as a crisis and reputation management evergreen gold-star. J&J navigated multiple crises. The most tragic and hard-hitting was seven people dying from Tylenol packaging tampering when the over-the-counter drug was laced with cyanide in and near Chicago, Illinois. The other two crises were the State of Oklahoma lawsuit, alleging J&J was complicit in and promoting the opioid epidemic of the era, and its talcum powder products caused the cancer, mesothelioma.
Its storied crisis response included the hallmark tenets of effective crisis communication—transparency, speaking to what happened, what the organization will do to improve the situation, and infusing all messaging with empathy.
The CEO engaged actively with the media to communicate with the public about what transpired. J&J also acted quickly to pull 31 million bottles from shelves, compensated victims’ families and improved customer safety through tamper-proof packaging.
Long-term outcomes included the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandating tamper-proof guidelines and federal legislation criminalizing product tampering—the “Tylenol Bill.”
A Case Study in Effective Crisis Preparedness
Natural crisis events—more commonly referred to as natural disasters—can cause widespread, immediate damage and staggering loss of life. Given the increasing amount of aberrant and very sudden weather events, we need to learn from the past and prepare ourselves.
We have experienced global warming as recently as the past millennia, but nothing as accelerated as now. Humans also have lived through periods of cooling such as the Little Ice Age. Natural disasters can trigger economic, famine and social justice crises as financial systems, food access and social policy can quickly be impacted or lost as Hurricane Katrina’s death-grip on New Orleans so aptly illustrated, and still does in some parts of the city that include the Lower Ninth Ward.
In some cases, there is nothing we can do to stop natural events. However, as Mitroff’s Five Phases of Crisis Management Theory and the Incident Command Model laid out paths and history demonstrate, we can control our response with pre-planned warning systems, communications, emergency preparedness, and supply chains.
With creative and proper preparation, crisis response can be overwhelmingly positive. Teetering on a convergence of tectonic plates, the Japanese live on a day-to-day basis with the threat of earthquakes. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake—the largest in Japanese history—created a tsunami that killed 18,500 people. The waves from this natural crisis almost triggered a potentially catastrophic environmental crisis.
While Japan’s top-of-the-line earthquake early-detection and tsunami warning systems saved many people, the Fukushima Daiichi, or “Number One” nuclear plant, was deluged by the resulting tsunami. In addition to the warning system, the crisis response included immediate evacuation from the nuclear zone. Japan’s leading emergency preparedness practices made it possible for no one to die directly from the Fukushima incident (there was one lung cancer-related death reported in 2018).
In less than a month, coastal towns that had been blocked off were cleared and utilities restored. The advanced Japanese public health system helped many in need, and a building code was instituted that mandated steel, concrete, and thick timber for construction, vastly improving new buildings’ structural integrity.
Fukushima serves as an exemplar for overcoming and emerging from a crisis.
When people stare potential catastrophic events in the eye, prepare for them holistically and take part in practical scenario training, they are ready for what may come and can rise above the chaos of a crisis.
