Crisis Leadership:
More Necessary but Difficult Than Ever
by Ian I. Mitroff
The Coronavirus calls into question the nature of effective Crisis Leadership, especially its lack, as no other crisis has. Indeed, as one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management, in my nearly 40 years of studying and advising organizations of all kinds, nothing even comes close.
During this time, I’ve been privileged to see what the best organizations do to prepare themselves for the all too real possibility of major crises not only happening to themselves, but to all of their relevant stakeholders, and surrounding communities. To accomplish it, they constantly reaffirm by giving their full support to the following key principles:
1. First and foremost, as painful as it is, they strive to tell the complete truth.
2. They constantly think about and prepare for the worst.
3. They think systemically for they understand that no crisis is ever a single crisis.
4. They reward not punish the bearers of bad news.
5. They embed Crisis Management along with some key program that the organization already takes seriously so that it will be done as automatically as possible.
6. Since even with the best of preparations, crises still occur, they strive to limit their harm by setting up Damage Control Mechanisms far in advance of their actual occurrence.
With regard to telling the truth, the best Crisis Prepared Organizations take it as an absolute given that in today’s world there are no secrets, Period! Literally anyone can find out everything about a person, organization, etc. It’s just a “click away.” The only question is what to tell when and how because the full truth, especially the more dreadful it is, will come out. The main issue is whether it will come out in your terms or that of others. The leader of an organization has to be prepared to answer honestly and truthfully why they were not as well prepared, if at all, for the crisis for which they are responsible. They will be judged on whether they accept full responsibility or not. Put somewhat differently, stonewalling it just makes the initial crisis worse.
To say that this is difficult is putting it mildly for it raises serious financial, legal, and public relations issues that ideally are hashed out in crisis training sessions long before a crisis occurs. Indeed, the sessions never end. Whereas legal counsel prefer to say as little as possible to limit liability, the heads of PR are inclined to say what is needed to preserve the reputation of an organization and its chief officers. The absolute worst time to work out the differences between the parties is during a crisis in which one is overly stressed and which demands one’s complete attention.
For another, the best organizations constantly think about and prepare for the worst. For instance, in the hopes of learning more about Product Tampering, one of the most important types of crises that apply to all organizations no matter what their business, I visited a major pharmaceutical company. I asked the executive in charge who agreed to talk with me what his company was doing to combat one of the worst fears of the industry. Without losing a beat, he said, “We formed a number of Internal Assassin Teams.” To which I blurted out, “You did what?!”
“Yeah, early on we realized that we knew more about our products than anyone else. So one day we held up a bottle of one of our major pain killers and we looked at it as if the cap were the front door and the sides were the walls of a house. We then asked ourselves, ‘How could a burglar get in, remain undetected for as long as possible, and thereby do the most damage?’”
“We quickly learned that there was no way to keep a determined burglar out so that the notion of tamper proof seals was not even a remote possibility. The best we could do was tamper evident seals so that if one of our bottles was breached a consumer would be alerted not to use it.”
In the years since, I have taken a few companies—sadly, all too few--through the exercise of an Internal Assassin Team as it applied to their organization. It allowed them to imagine and thus confront the all-too-real possibility of the worse, the Unthinkable, happening to them and their company. The point is that one needs explicit permission to imagine the worse and then to do everything possible to prevent it. Thinking the Unthinkable does not happen naturally on its own.
The Coronavirus shows unequivocally that it is anything but a single, well-contained crisis. Instead, it’s a myriad of crises that are simultaneously both the causes and the effects of one another. Thus, while the Virus is primarily a Global Pandemic, it unleashed a series of other crises that have not only fed off, but reinforced one another in unimaginable ways. Thus, it led to a Major World-Wide Economic Crisis; an Educational Crisis with the closing of schools; exposed the extreme vulnerabilities of Nursing Homes and Older Populations; the precarious working conditions of Medical Workers; the latent defects in the Entire Health Care System; Pervasive Anxiety Attacks, Bouts of Depression, and even Suicides; Increased Cases of Domestic Violence; Strong Anti-government Feelings and even Displays of Armed Resistance by Fringe Groups in State Houses; and so on.
While very few, if any, organizations could foresee, let alone prepare, for such a wide array of crises, the best do all that they can to think and act systemically. They realize that it’s absolutely futile to prepare for a single crisis in isolation. Once again, it shows the need to undertake exercises such as the Internal Assassin Team which forces one to Think the Unthinkable and prepare for it. If major crises have one thing to teach, it is this: If one is not prepared, every major crisis is more than capable of setting off an uncontrolled chain reaction of other crises that are every bit as bad, if not worse, than the original.
In this regard, the original Pandemic simulations were inadequate to say the least. Public Health Official have been warning for years of the need to prepare for a major Global Pandemic, but the warnings were systematically ignored and downplayed by the Trump Administration. But, there were no simulations for a crisis of the magnitude of the Coronavirus. Talk about a massive failure to think and act systemically.
With regard to the bearers of bad news, a front-page article in the Monday, March 30, 2020 edition of The New York Times is nothing less than absolutely devastating : The “Fail-Safe System that the Chinese set up to warn them of major pandemics failed miserably because it was blocked by local Party Officials .”[i] Chinese doctors in Wuhan who saw the first signs of the Coronavirus were prevented by local government officials from passing critical information on to Beijing because they feared that top officials didn’t want to “hear bad news.” Thus, in order to save their jobs, they not only failed to protect their own country, but the entire world. There’s no better example of the messengers of bad news killing themselves!
This is precisely why the leaders of the best Crisis Prepared Organizations go out of their way to praise and reward the messengers of bad news. Indeed, they constantly say to subordinates, “Tell me what I don’t want, but that I need to hear!”
To ensure that Crisis Management is taken with the utmost seriousness, everything is done to make it an integral part of as many functions of the organizations as possible. Thus, Crisis Management is a natural ally of Quality Control. The hope is to catch as many potential problems as possible before they become too big to fix. But then it’s also a natural ally of Operations and Security as well. In this way, connections need to be made to every other key function in an organization.
In addition, the best leaders are constantly learning from the experiences, both good and bad, of others in theirs and different industries. Unfortunately, most organizations have to be prodded into doing it.
Years ago in working with a major oil company, they completely discounted the possibility of Food Tampering because they “were not in the Food Business!” When I pointed out that their gas stations had mini-marts which carried food and pharmaceutical items, only then did the “proverbial light come on.” Only then did they take Product Tampering as a serious type of crisis for which they needed to prepare.
Most of all, Crisis Leadership requires that one be in touch with one’s emotions and that of others. Effective Crisis Management is much, much more than merely a cognitive or intellectual activity. It requires moral intelligence of the highest order.
In this regard, Social Media companies fail the test miserably. They’ve unleashed a monster without planning for how they are the perfect mediums for spreading dis and misinformation, outright lies, and conspiracy theories of all kinds. And because they did not give any attention to Crisis Management in the beginning, they did not give serious thought to effective Damage Control Mechanisms, which cannot be invented in the heat of a crisis.
We’ve never needed Crisis Leadership more than at any time in history. It’s made worse by the fact that the Coronavirus demands leaders across the globe. One leader can’t do it alone.
Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management.
He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley.
He Is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC.
Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley.
He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management.
He has published 38 books, his most recent is:
Techlash: The Future of the Socially Responsible Tech Organization, Springer, New York, 2020.
[i] Steven Lee Myers, “China Had a Fail-Safe Way to Track Contagions. Officials Failed to Use It,” The New York Times, Monday, Mrch 30, 2020, p. A1, A10-11.