Crisis Lessons from Apollo 13
I am a big movie buff and also have always been a big fan of all things outer space. So it stands to reason one of my favorite movies of all time is “Apollo 13.” But it is more than just a great film. The Ron Howard-directed movie starring Tom Hanks is one of the best dramatic depictions of an organization managing a crisis to a successful result.
One of the most important crisis lessons we learn is when the character played by actor Ed Harris succinctly summarizes the attitude you must have during a crisis. Harris portrayed Mission Control director Gene Kranz. At an important juncture in the crisis, Harris as Kranz says these words: “failure is not an option.”
While everything around you is seemingly going wrong, you cannot allow any thoughts of failure to enter your minds or the minds of anyone in your organization. Crises are survivable. How well you survive will depend on how prepared you are before the crisis hits.
Our approach to crisis management is what we call real crisis management. We focus on making sure we do everything we can to prevent crises from happening but are ready when they hit to manage through them successfully. The biggest obstacle to real crisis management is an organization’s unwillingness to make crisis management a part of their ongoing business model. Crisis management needs to be treated the same as any other important function.
There are five simple but important steps to developing a real crisis management program.
Pick the right players.
Step one is picking the crisis team. Start by identifying the key functions of your organization then select the right person to represent each function on the team. This is the core crisis team. It is now part of their job. This team should plan on meeting a minimum of four times a year in addition to when they are activated to manage a crisis.
Develop a single crisis process.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is reinventing a process each time a crisis situation arises. Instead, the crisis team needs to map out a single, repeatable process for managing all crises. If you wait until a crisis occurs to decide how to handle it, mistakes will be made and surviving a crisis successfully will be less likely.
Mapping out a single process for all crises gives your organization a place to start when an event begins. The best way to develop a single process is to review the last two or three crises that occurred and map out every step that was taken from beginning to end. Look for common steps taken in each one then develop your crisis process from there.
Identify all risks.
Step three is for the crisis team to meet and identify your organization’s possible risks. This is always an eye-opening experience for the team. It is impossible for one person to think of all the things that can go wrong. A collaborative team representing all functions of the company can do it. When the team has finished, there will be several sheets of paper covering the walls with more risks than anyone in the room could have imagined.
This is a key step in beginning to think about prevention of risks as opposed to just reacting to them as they happen. Now that the team fully understands all that can go wrong, they can begin the process of thinking through how to take immediate action to keep these risks from happening in the first place.
Craft key messages.
Once all risks have been identified, the team can begin to develop three to five key messages for each risk. Once again, the organization can get ahead of the game. By creating key messages around each risk before they are needed, there is a place to start creating the communications needed to keep all key audiences informed.
In addition, another technique to use to keep crisis message development simple is to build all statements by answering three simple questions:
What happened?
How does it affect our key audiences?
What are we doing about the crisis?
By using this shorthand approach, it removes the debate that can occur when trying to decide what to say to the media or any other audience.
Train the spokesperson.
The final step is to make sure your primary spokesperson is trained and ready to deal with the media and public in time of crisis. Everything else can be handled perfectly, but if the company spokesperson does a poor job of communicating how the crisis is being handled, it will diminish the outcome.
Besides the ongoing spokesperson, there are certain times of every crisis when the boss needs to make a public appearance. At the beginning of every crisis, it is the top leader the media should see first. This communicates the importance being placed on the crisis being resolved quickly. There are many examples of where the boss stayed away from the firing line during a crisis. Their absence spoke louder than any words from a spokesperson about how serious the organization was treating the crisis.
Follow these five steps and have your crisis team meet at least four times a year to maintain an ongoing assessment of how prepared your organization is for all crises. The agenda for these meetings will have three items on it:
Review organizational crises of past three months and identify key learnings
Identify any new risks that now face the organization
Discuss current crises outside the organization and identify learnings
In addition, your organization should put itself through a mock crisis drill once a year.
The ultimate goal of any real crisis management plan is to make sure your organization is prepared to deal with all crises, not just react to each individual crisis. The final scene in “Apollo 13” depicts the sheer joy and relief everyone at NASA felt when the space capsule appeared on the screen with its three parachutes deployed. That is how each of you will feel when you have successfully guided your organization through a crisis.
You may not be able to avoid all crises from happening. However, following these five steps will put you in the best position possible to get through every crisis successfully. Give us a call and we can help you get started today.
