Examples of crisis, and organizations response to such events abound everywhere – and crisis frequently come from the most unusual and impossible to predict circumstances. If you were in charge of having your company prepared for a crisis would you have anticipated someone putting poison in Tylenol tablets? How about playing out a hoax of getting a syringe in your Pepsi can? Or, someone driving a truck through a plate glass window and shooting many of your customers as happened at Luby’s?

As we know, all of these things did happen. More importantly, if not handled properly, they can totally devastate a company. We tell our clients, it's not a matter of if your crisis will hit, it is a matter of when. Whether it's terrorist driven, acts against the government or just plain human error, your time will come. When it does, will you be prepared? Who in your organization will you call on to help manage the crisis? Who will be in charge? Who will be your spokesperson? Where will you meet to manage the crisis? What type of phones will you have on hand? Need some computers? What about copy machines? If, the crisis is of long duration, who will be the back up people? What will you do with the throng of media people that will be clamoring for answers? How about families of victims?

Believe me, your reputation, as well as that of the Company’s, will be on the line -- it's what we refer to as the window of vulnerability -- that period of time between occurrence of an emergency and the time it takes you to get organized to not only manage the crisis itself, but also to be in a position to communicate what you know. A time in which families, employees, supervisors, politicians, regulators, customers and yes, the media, are going to want answers. All of these audiences will also be scrutinizing your every move to see if you are in control. In fact, when we do our crisis communications drills, the outcome that amazes people the most is how many demands there are for information from so many different sources, how fast the demands for information hit them, and how long it takes to respond. We always find that managing the crisis from an operational standpoint, "cleaning up the mess" so to speak, takes less time than does the non-operational communications aspects of the crisis!  So, what do you need to do to ensure that you are prepared before your crisis hits.