"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word crisis. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In crisis be aware of the danger-but recognize the opportunity." -John F. Kennedy
Crisis are unique moments in the history of an organization. An organizational crisis is a specific, unexpected, and non-routine event
or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty and
simultaneously present an organization with both opportunities
for and threats to its high-priority goals. An organization can have both intentional (unethical leadership, violence, sabatoge, ect.) and unintentional (natural disasters, the economy, disease, product failure, ect.) crisis happen. Scholars say that crisis' are unpredictable, but not typically unexpected. Crisis can be very threatening to an organization. Yet, it can also create opportunities to communicate in effective ways with stakeholders and to better prepare the organization for similar events moving into the future.
Scholars describe organizational crisis as evolving in three stages. They are: 1. Precrisis- signal detection, prevention, and crises. 2. Crisis- trigger that threatens an organization's survival or reputation. 3. Postcrisis- communication focuses on determining responsibility, communication with a wide range of stakeholders. Maybe apologizing, and establishing systems for coping with similar crisis in the future.
When there is a crisis in an organization communication needs to deal with both the internal and external stakeholders. These different stakeholders will all interpret the events differently. So how an organization handles crisis is very important. For some organizations social media is how they will handle the issue, for others the organization may hold a press conference, personally call clientes and employees, or send out cards. It is extremely important to know how to deal with crisis in the correct way to appeal to all an organizations different stakeholders. Within this blog section you will see some articles that talk about bad and good communication crisis.
Enjoy, and hopefully learn a few things to do and not to do if you are the one communicating on behalf of an organization for crisis.