Business does not operate in a vacuum or an immune environment. Increasingly, companies face constant and diverse risk emerging from multiple origins. Strategic flaws, regulatory risks, funding gaps, territory pitfalls, public relations disasters, large-scale governance problems, health and safety incidents and cyber attacks are all triggers of crisis in businesses. In today’s hyper-connected world, an internal crisis (that previously would take days to evolve) turns into a company or project disaster in minutes. The impacts are manifold: projects are disrupted, strategic focus is shifted, operational priorities sidelined and fresh thinking by the organisation’s key persons is severely diluted. Badly managed, a corporate disaster can wipe out a company and possibly also the financial and business reputation of its owners.
As strategy specialists we understand that things do go wrong in business and in these peculiar circumstances our role is to help the companies address the crisis rather than escape it or avoid its ramifications. This is why when we are engaged to assist a company, we set up and deploy a Crisis Management Team (CMT) which brings together the full scope of a multi-disciplinary team in a ‘war room’ to firstly understand, secondly react, thirdly rapidly recover and fourthly to pro-actively install the changes needed to benefit from the lessons learnt throughout the crisis.
In deploying the CMT, we do not sit in as spectators in the client’s boardroom but take on the leadership of the situation, we immerse ourselves in the situation with the benefit of fresh thinking and experience in delivering solutions. Our focus is on ensuring that each single decision taken is protecting shareholder value and mitigating further risk exposure, containing damage and rapidly setting the path towards recovery. We draw upon our knowledge repository and our vertical expertise to empower our CMT to handle strategy, internal and external communications, financial monitoring, data management and a structured decision-making process enabling the adoption of rational and value-driven decisions.
Our strategy to engage in long-term relationships with our clients, enables us to deliver this approach in a rapid reaction context, with our response time being minutes and not days. A crisis cannot wait for paperwork or long-drawn planning. Addressing a disaster too late is as damaging as not addressing at all. Moreover, the longer it draws on, a crisis tends to spin-off new crises and threats, which would need to be equally managed.