Crisis planning's most important implement: the drill

Communication World, Dec, 1997 by Larry Kamer

A "crisis team" is formed. It reviews well-known crisis responses, such as the Exxon Valdez, Tylenol, and, more recently, Hudson Foods. It decides which ones were done well and which were done badly. It vows to emulate the leaders and do everything to avoid the mistakes of the bad guys.

The team writes a contingency plan for dealing with some of the situations that most worry management. The plan is circulated, other executives and attorneys offer their input, and the plan is put into final form.

The plan goes into a binder which is distinctively marked CRISIS MANAGEMENT PLAN, and gets distributed to all members of the crisis team, who make a place for it on their office bookshelves. A grateful CEO sends letters of thanks, and the hard-working members of the team can get back to their real jobs.

Your organization has just dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee time, outside consultants and attorneys, and reproduction expenses to produce a crisis plan.

And, despite all this, you are probably no better able to handle a crisis than you were before.

Readiness = Plans Preparation Practice

By itself, a crisis plan won't help your organization out of a crisis. The only way to do that is by building a responsive organization, guided by the right values, whose skills are honed. And the only way to do that is by putting the organization to the test - through exercises, simulations and drills.

Never before has there been a time when business, government, and not-for-profit organizations' decision makers have been more closely held to a bottom-line standard for their actions. Programs and people are expected to add value or equity, or they must be considered at risk.

It is hard to imagine a more career-shortening situation than failure to foresee a predictable crisis or mishandling one in a way that costs the organization large sums of money, damages its reputation, or which may harm or kill people. Given the mind-bending nature of a crisis - the heavy emotionalism, the media coverage, the organizational short-circuiting - it is difficult to understand how so many senior managers believe they can "wing it" if a crisis hits.

Crises are predictable. Virtually all of the crises that may affect your organization have likely plagued someone else. A substantial body of knowledge is available about these situations. Crisis teams can write effective plans, deploy appropriate resources and prevent crises from turning into disasters. However, the only way to truly test these capabilities is by putting them to the test.

No one knows this better than the oil industry.

The Other Kind of Oil Drilling

In many industries whose operations are characterized by great risk - oil refining and transportation, nuclear power, airlines - drills are an accepted part of life. Leading oil companies, such as Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, BP, Shell, Occidental and others, take extraordinary steps to ensure that their simulations and drills have the look and feel of a real-world disaster.

Much of this focus on drills can be directly traced to legislation passed by the U.S. Congress - and copied by many other governments, states and provinces - in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Principal among these is the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (or "OPA 90" for short). OPA 90 specified the need for physical safeguards, such as double-hulled tankers, and mandated major oil shippers to conduct emergency response exercises at least twice a year.

"OPA 90 was a major contributing factor in enhancing the industry's ability to respond to crises," says Tom McCloskey, a Seattle-based consultant who works with major oil companies on drills and training to sharpen emergency response capabilities. "It's established a framework, legal and regulatory, that requires a variety of regular exercises that collectively have resulted in companies being better prepared."

Most important, says McCloskey, it's gotten companies into the habit of rehearsing their responses to nightmare scenarios, such as major oil spills.

"I don't think you can respond well to emergency or crisis situations unless you practice. There are a lot of things you have to have in order to perform well: management commitment, a strong organization, people who understand their roles in an emergency. To get there, people need to be trained, and they need to be exercised."

This practice is especially important when the incident crosses international boundaries or other jurisdictional lines.

Michelene Brodeur, a communication officer with the Canadian Coast Guard in Vancouver, B.C., has observed and participated in a number of joint spill-response exercises involving both the Canadian and U.S. Coast Guards.

Brodeur says that exercises that involve multiple agencies and companies, are "quite useful" for testing intangible items - such as human emotion and bureaucratic behavior.

"They're important for testing the procedures of a plan, and in the case of joint response, it helps to outline who does what - how the cooperative effort will work. You get to know if one organization has requirements for approvals that might slow up a response to the media, or who is most skillful at a particular task. It helps to get things going as quickly as possible when the real thing happens," she says.