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Each year, organizations recognize the need to learn from crises. Unfortunately, too many of these organizations overlook some important lessons and ignore ways to improve their crisis learning. Presented in this article are seven lessons that organizations should be learning. The lessons are divided into four categories reflecting the interlocking phases of crisis management: prevention, preparation, execution and evaluation.
Introduction
Crisis management is a diverse and complex process. The messages organizations deliver to stakeholders after a crisis hits, the crisis response strategies (CRS), are a vital part of this process. Crisis response stategies include what an organization says and does - its words and its actions. For nearly a decade, researchers in a variety of fields have been exploring the dynamics of CRS. Special consideration has been devoted to "matching" the CRS to the crisis situation. The link is vital because communication research has proven that situations do affect message selection [12]. Simply put, some message strategies should work better than others in certain situations. Research indicates the same holds true for crises. Certain CRS work better in certain crisis situations [6].
This article draws upon the diverse writings on CRS to construct a set of "lessons" for would-be crisis managers. The lessons are guidelines managers can use when trying to construct their own post-crisis messages. The available crisis response strategies and the structure of crisis situations are used to develop the CRS lessons.
Crisis Response Strategies
A number of researchers, drawing from diverse sources, have established lists of potential crisis response strategies [1, 3, 9, and 131. Exhibit 1 distills these ideas into one compre hensive list. The list includes only those strategies appearing in two or more sources. Exhibit 1 presents and defines both the seven major CRS and their related sub-strategies. The order of the CRS reflects a "defensive-- accommodative" continuum, with "attack-the-- accuser" the most defensive strategy and "full apology" the most accommodative strategy. Defensive strategies emphasize protecting the organization while accommodative strategies emphasize helping the victims. Attack-- the--accuser and denial share the goal of eliminating the crisis. Both strategies maintain that perceptions are wrong - no crisis exists. If there is no crisis there is no harm to the organization. However, any victims are completely discounted because no...