The hardest part of a crisis isn’t the crisis. It’s the vacuum it creates. In the first hour, three things start filling that vacuum at once: journalists with deadlines, employees with questions, and rumours with no author.
You don’t get to control whether the vacuum is filled. You only get to decide who fills it first.
Silence is a statement
An organisation that says nothing for six hours has, in effect, made an announcement: we didn’t see this coming. That’s why the first deliverable is never the perfect statement. It’s a holding statement — short, honest, and true for the next four hours:
“We’re aware of reports about X. We’re investigating now and will share confirmed information as soon as we have it. The safety of our people is our first priority.”
It answers the only question the audience is asking at that moment — are you awake? — without guessing at facts you don’t have yet.
One source of truth
The most common self-inflicted wound is inconsistency. Sales says one thing, the spokesperson says another, and an executive tweets a third. Suddenly the story isn’t the incident anymore. It’s that nobody inside the company agrees on what happened.
So the first 60 minutes has one non-negotiable rule: a single approved line, held by a single team, until it’s officially updated. Everyone else — however senior — points to it. I’ve watched a 500-person reorganisation stay calm largely because every manager was reading from the same page.
The order I work in
- Confirm the facts I have — and label the ones I don’t. Never speculate on a cause.
- Name the people who need to know first — employees, customers, regulators, then media. Your own staff should never learn about it from a headline.
- Draft and clear the holding statement. Short beats comprehensive.
- Stand up one channel for updates, and log every question that arrives.
- Brief the frontline. The person answering the phone is your real spokesperson.
Translate, don’t withhold
During a nationwide network outage, the instinct is to hide the technical detail. The better move is to translate it: what happened, in plain language, without legal exposure, and with genuine empathy for the people affected. Engineers gave me the facts. My job was to make them human without making them untrue.
Measure it after
A crisis is a campaign with a very short runway. Track share of voice, sentiment, and coverage volume against your baseline — using the same measurement discipline you’d apply to a launch — so the post-mortem is about what happened, not about who felt it went well. The playbook you write after the dust settles is the one that saves you next time.