The Need

Whether they are in the public or the private sector, few crises are handled well.  How can major organisations such as Toyota, Network Rail, Cadbury and British Airways,  get it so wrong?  

DCM is based on our research into why, despite plans in some cases, things really go wrong inside crises, and on what is needed to make a significant difference in crisis handling performance.

What we discovered

Crises are handled badly because:

1. The crisis team is affected by trauma and this severely affects their judgment, particularly when hard, reliable facts are scarce. (see our article Combating the denial syndrome)
2. At the outset of the crisis, little information is available, and is unreliable or uncertain.
3. Crisis management plans are good at providing a framework for the logistics of the crisis but do not address or support traumatised decision making.
4. The decisions that have to be taken are completely different to those that team members are experienced in – and they have to be taken far quicker, and often under the glare of the media spotlight.

How DCM helps

DCM is a structured process for handling a reputation crisis.  It can be provided as hard copy and/or software, in both cases with training for its use.

A decision support environment

DCM provides a complete environment for high level crisis decision making and management.  It incorporates simple tools for the crisis team to continually reappraise the key uncertainty factors each time new critical information is received – cause, breadth, repeatability and perceived blame – and to take action accordingly.  This maintains their alertness to all possibilities, and allows them to track, in graphical form, the direction of both emerging information and media allegations & conjecture.  As a result, they can anticipate new directions in the crisis and dynamically adapt their response strategy accordingly.

A dynamic crisis record

The crisis record can be invaluable both during the crisis and as a post-crisis audit.  It acts as the crisis response team’s focal point by providing a searchable record of known, unknown and uncertain information, media allegations, team actions, assumptions and decisions, and the relationship between them.  Thus information or assumptions later found to be invalid can be tracked to decisions and actions so that they can be corrected or reversed.  

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