One of the defining creeds in crisis management is that the C-suite should know what is being said about the company and what impact that could have on the corporation’s reputation and their licence to operate. We call it Horizon Scanning and we help companies to do a 360-degree review of what is going on around it.
Key to this approach is intelligence gathering followed by intelligence sharing, both up and down the organisation. What is now evident is that this was not happening within the BBC, whose Director General resigned on Saturday night following failures in crisis management and internal communications.
A systemic failure is what it is being called and may yet have deeper problems for the future of the BBC. Nobody in any organisation (least of all those down the food chain) wants the CEO to be hands on everyday but it is incumbent at times of crisis - real or potential - for the leader and their team to do the risk analysis, what we term 'identifying the worst case scenario', and then work out what you could do to prevent it from occurring or at least mitigating the outcome. For that , information is required.
The BBC is one of the foremost external communications operations in the world; what this case has underlined is that you neglect internal crisis communications at your peril.
Then there was what has been described as the car crash interview on The Today Programme, which probably cost the DG his job revealing he didn’t read the papers or keep his eye on blogs.
BBC DG: I found out about the film the following day
John Humphreys Radio 4: “The following day. You didn’t see it before it was broadcast?
BBC DG: “No I was out.
For more information on how LINK can help you improve your crisis communications please contact us.
The Cabinet Office and the British Standards Institution are today launching a new crisis management standard to help businesses cope with unexpected emergencies like civil unrest, employee deaths, corporate espionage or natural disaster.
