Contemplating What Constitutes an Organizational Crisis
It can be hard to envision what would constitute a crisis for your organization until you’re facing one. At a company where I once worked, thousands of bills intended to be mailed to customers were found strewn around a public park in the center of town. Oops! Nobody needed a definition of a crisis to know that this was one. Talk about a public humiliation! Indeed, the impact on an organization’s reputation is one of the things that might make a situation qualify as a crisis.
Despite the difficulty, defining what constitutes a crisis is a good starting point for handling one. After all, no matter how inundated with problems your organization is—or you and your team are—a crisis is much more than yet another of the multitude of everyday problems. And it’s more than coping with matters that are unexpected but mundane, such as the coffee not being delivered to the conference room during an executive meeting.
A crisis is a problem on a momumental scale—a disturbing and unexpected event that, if not addressed promptly, risks putting your organization in jeopardy. Even if your own organization isn’t specifically targeted, it can be caught up in the chaos that accompanies the crisis.
In years past, it was easier to trivialize the potential for a crisis, and many organizations did just that—insisting that whatever the potential crisis was, it wouldn’t happen to them. Now, sadly, the issue goes beyond isolated, company-specific disasters to include natural disasters, workplace violence, technological meltdown, security breaches, collapse of the telecommunication infrastructure, and terrorist attacks, and all too many organizations have experienced one or more of these.
Of course, in the moment, it doesn’t matter if an unwelcome situation qualifies as a crisis based on a predefined set of criteria; the key is to be able to respond appropriately. Doing that entails having a plan. After all, crises don’t follow a script. But the very process of planning prepares you to respond: It gets you in the mindset of considering what’s important when the unimaginable happens. And, of course, it helps if you identify sources of weakness or vulnerability so that you can take steps to avoid a crisis in the first place.
