A smoldering crisis can be hard to detect. When the situation bursts suddenly into flame and into public view, the organization is genuinely surprised. The root cause of the surprise is that the problem has come to be accepted as the way things are. I once led a crisis tabletop exercise for a business that […]

Crisis managers must have thick skins. They make decisions that WILL be second-guessed by many. Because most people—even their colleagues—will not be privy to what the rejected options were, the option they chose will look like a bad choice. Chances are that it was. The problem was that the others were worse. That is often […]

Bill Gates used his time at the podium during the recent Munich Security Conference to issue a stark warning. He sounded an alarm to tell people that a terrible pandemic is coming and the world is not ready. I have worked on pandemic planning for more than a decade and was a leader in the […]