Crisis communication fails not because institutions communicate badly but because crisis creates conditions in which good communication is structurally very difficult.
Why Crisis Communication Is Different
Crisis communication fails at rates disproportionate to the communication quality of the institution in normal conditions. The specific conditions that crises create are well-identified: information is incomplete and rapidly changing, making the accuracy-timeliness tradeoff acute; the stakes are high, creating institutional caution about communicating anything that might turn out to be wrong; the audiences are multiple with different information needs; and the institutional communication infrastructure is itself disrupted by the crisis it is supposed to communicate about.
Pre-Crisis Communication Architecture
The institutions that communicate most effectively during crises are the ones that have built the communication architecture before the crisis. Pre-crisis architecture includes: designated communication roles and authorities that activate in crisis conditions; audience maps identifying which stakeholders need what information through which channels; and communication protocols specifying how to communicate under conditions of incomplete and rapidly changing information — how to signal uncertainty, how to update prior communications, and how to maintain consistency across simultaneous messages to different audiences.
Crisis communication fails when it is improvised under conditions that make improvisation difficult. It succeeds when it activates a pre-built architecture designed specifically for the conditions that crises create — conditions that are predictable even when the specific crisis is not.
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