This is the true story of how a multinational company successfully avoided a business crisis. The moral of the story, however, is not limited to industry but applies equally as well to the public sector.
We’ll get to the story in a moment.
Even though a “crisis” may seem to begin at a single point in time - the hurricane makes landfall, the business faces bankruptcy - it may actually begin with decisions made, or not made, long before the crisis event. The decisions made to strengthen Florida and California building codes mean that many hurricanes and earthquakes aren’t crises there, even though similar hurricanes or earthquakes would be crises elsewhere. The decision-not-made to improve New Orleans’ levees (despite the frightening outcome of the simulated Hurricane Pam) made the real Hurricane Katrina much worse than it had to be. In other words, it takes more than brutal winds and rain to make a hurricane a crisis. It takes lack of preparedness, too.
The same holds true in business. The recent pirate attack on the Seabourne Sprint luxury cruiser off the coast of Somalia was an emergency; it wasn’t a crisis, though, because the captain, crew, and vessel were prepared (due to decisions made), and fended off the attack. The theft of confidential consumer records from Experian wasn’t a crisis because thieves tried to get in. It became a crisis because they succeeded in getting out.
Mark Chussil is a Founder and Senior Director of Crisis Simulations International, LLC He is also Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. Mark designed CSI’s DXMA™ crisis simulator (patent pending) and ACS’s award-winning ValueWar® business simulator. He has published extensively, and he has lectured and consulted on six continents. He earned his B.A. from Yale and his M.B.A. from Harvard.
