Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Tamara Littleton: Welcome back to What Just Happened, and I’m going to throw out the words that bring fear into the world: blue screen of death. Kate, what are we covering today? 

Kate Hartley: Just never what you want to hear, is it? So today we’re talking about an extraordinary event, actually, that took down eight and a half million computers. It cost the UK economy alone about £2 billion. It cancelled hospital appointments. It grounded flights. It stopped the banking industry in its tracks. It was huge. 

TL: And, of course, we’re talking about the CrowdStrike software update, or failed update, that caused outages to systems all over the world in 2024. So, Kate, tell us what happened. 

KH: So, on 19 July 2024, at 4:09 am, a security provider called CrowdStrike released a software update for its main tech platform, which is called Falcon, which is ironically designed to protect companies from cyber attacks that might disrupt them. And that update was released to Windows computers that were running Falcon. And that’s a pretty standard thing for a software company to do. It was four o’clock in the morning. You know, good time to do it. 

And CrowdStrike knows its stuff. It’s a huge business. It’s worth about $83 billion. It works with more than half the Fortune 1000 companies, and its Falcon platform is really widely used. So it’s used by all sorts of companies and all sorts of industries all over the world. 

TL: Which is a great business for CrowdStrike, but, as it turns out, not great when something goes wrong. 

KH: Not great at all. So, without getting super technical about how it happened, and this is how I understand it, so, you know, caveats, but because it’s a security system, it has a pretty high level of privileges in terms of how deep it can go into your company systems. It has to, because it’s protecting the system from really deep within it. That’s how I understand it. Technical people may challenge me on that, but that’s how I understand it. 

But there was a tiny flaw in one of the updates, which basically mismatched the new version of the update against the old one, so it wasn’t spotted in testing. And essentially, what happens is a part of the update pointed to a place that didn’t contain valid data, and Windows didn’t like that. That’s also the technical explanation, and that teeny tiny flaw created absolute carnage. 

So all these Windows machines crashed and showed, as you said, the blue screen of death that just causes absolute chill in your heart, doesn’t it? And then the machines tried to reboot, hit the faulty file again and crashed again. And there was a sort of loop of chaos. 

And CrowdStrike, to be fair to them, spotted that really quickly, and they issued an update very quickly, but it was too late for those eight and a half million machines that couldn’t boot, so they couldn’t apply the fix, because they couldn’t actually switch on the computers to apply the fix. So every single machine had to be manually fixed. And you imagine, I mean, that’s not a simple job in any way, but you think about physical computers, that can mean opening your computer in a dreaded safe mode, and then finding the file, and then deleting it, and then restarting it. 

So you’ve got to really know what you’re doing, and if you’ve got added security, like encryption on your machine, you’d need to find your recovery key. I mean, it just would have been absolute chaos. 

TL: I remember this so well, that the fallout was horrific. I mean, thousands of flights were grounded. The NHS was hit particularly hard, and all its appointments and patient record systems were taken down, which means GP appointments were cancelled. People couldn’t buy train tickets. 

Banking services were affected. TV stations were taken off temporarily, including Sky News and, I believe, CBBC as well. 

KH: It’s amazing, those poor parents, but it’s amazing, isn’t it, that teeny tiny one thing can just take out everybody, and it was called the biggest outage in IT history. And Delta was hit particularly hard. It estimated it lost, I think, $500 million in the days that it took to recover its systems. And we’ll come back to that later on, because there’s a whole kind of Delta sub-story to this. 

TL: So how did CrowdStrike respond, and also Microsoft too, because obviously this was pretty catastrophic for Microsoft as well. 

KH: It was, and they responded really quickly, obviously, as you’d expect. They said about eight and a half million Windows devices had been affected. And that sounds like quite a lot, but Microsoft was really clear that this was less than 1% of all Windows machines. 

And they put out a blog post on the 20th that made it very, very clear it was not a Microsoft issue. They were saying that absolutely upfront, and they named CrowdStrike as the source of the issue, quite rightly. I think in this case, we don’t always think it’s the right thing to do to put the blame on a third party, but in this case, I think it was, and their statement was great. 

And it must have been a huge headache for them, but they worked really closely with CrowdStrike and also with other cloud providers like Google and AWS to get things back up and running. And their statement acknowledged that although the percentage affected was small, they said they knew that it had a really widespread impact because of the number of critical services that use CrowdStrike. 

But I’m just going to read the end of their statement because I think it’s really interesting, this bit. So the end of their statement said: this is also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritise operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist. Well, that’s fairly obvious, I would say, as we’ve seen over the last two days. 

The statement goes on to say: we learn, recover and move forward most effectively when we collaborate and work together. We appreciate the cooperation and collaboration of our entire sector, and we’ll continue to update with learnings and next steps. 

TL: That collaborative approach in a crisis is fascinating, isn’t it? And as a consumer, there is definitely a level of reassurance that everyone involved is working together to fix it, and we’ve seen that approach in other incidents. I know that, most recently, the M&S crisis that we covered in a recent episode, where Tesco and other supermarkets came to M&S’s help in terms of distribution, for example. But back to CrowdStrike. How did they respond? 

KH: Well, I don’t think they responded very well, to be honest, in terms of comms, certainly initially. I think they got better. But if you think about, you know, there were a lot of ordinary people who had never heard of CrowdStrike. I think it’s very well known in the tech and the business world. It’s a very big provider, but if you’re not working in that sector, or you’re not in security, there’s no reason really why you’d know them. And, of course, then the first time you hear about them is for all the wrong reasons. 

TL: And your first response really matters, doesn’t it? But like a lot of B-to-B companies, I guess they just weren’t used to communicating openly and publicly, and all the media and social media attention. And, as you say, it doesn’t sound like they did a great job initially. So what did they say? 

KH: Well, the CEO, George Kurtz, posted what I thought was a fairly corporate statement on X, and it’s worth, it’s quite long, but I think it’s worth reading out in full. So his statement said: CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. So you can see there, single content update. They’re trying to kind of minimise it. 

Then it says Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. Again, fair enough. This is not a security incident or cyber attack, and I think that was a really important thing to say in that statement. Actually, the statement goes on to say: the issue has been identified, isolated and fixed, and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates. We’ll continue updates, and we’ll continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. 

We further recommend organisations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilised to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers. It’s quite dull, isn’t it? 

TL: I mean, it’s a bit blah, blah, blah. 

KH: I’ve read it all out. I should have summarised it. 

TL: I mean, to be fair, it does state the facts. Yeah, it’s good to reassure people that it wasn’t a cyber attack, as you said. It’s lacking accountability and doesn’t really touch on the magnitude of the problem. 

KH: Because I go straight to the comments on these things, as I know you do. I mean, it’s part of our jobs, isn’t it? But the comments are hilarious under that thread. So a few people are saying things like, you know, oh, missing, we screwed up, and we’re sorry in that statement, which is a fairly obvious omission, I would say. 

But also, some people are pointing out, and I think this is quite interesting, that the statement sort of pushes responsibility to the customers. They’re saying, we recommend organisations contact us. It sort of says that the fix has been deployed and now it’s up to you. It just doesn’t really, I don’t know. I just, I don’t think it shows, yeah, not much humanity. Yeah, no, exactly. 

TL: It feels quite robotic, not very human. And that’s a really common mistake we see in those initial company responses in a crisis. But I imagine there’s a liability issue here, that they wouldn’t have wanted to take liability, something else we often see in a crisis. So do you think there was maybe a legal pressure not to apologise? 

KH: I mean, I’m sure there was, and in the US particularly, where liability can run into, you know, huge amounts of money. But there’s also this issue that I always go back to, and you’ve heard me say this many times, which is, I think they probably were liable. So does it matter if they admitted liability? Now, obviously, I’m not a lawyer. This is in no way legal advice, people, but it was their update, so I kind of think they were liable for it. So why wouldn’t you then apologise, or at least acknowledge what your customers are going through in some way? 

TL: Yeah, and the issue with very corporate language is it can really come across as uncaring, and I’m sure that wasn’t the case. I’m sure they really did care what was happening, and that line, our team is fully mobilised to ensure the security and stability of customers, that doesn’t really reflect the experience of those customers. 

KH: Is that the line you thought was quite dull? 

TL: Which is it? Yeah, it’s all a bit sort of customer service-like, really, isn’t it? And maybe that was what. Maybe they just weren’t used to it, as we said, but it does show a lack of empathy, which is something that we always talk about in crisis situations. 

KH: Yeah, and they did get better, and I think they must have realised how it was looking, as you say. They weren’t necessarily used to communicating in that way. So George Kurtz went on to the NBC Today Show in the US, and he was very human, and he did apologise, and he explained what happened. So he obviously did kind of learn from that originally, and he was very clear about what the company was doing to put it right. 

But in that interview, the interviewers asked the million-dollar question, which was: how can one single update cause so much damage? And he explained what happened, but there was a backdrop of all these TV images as he was explaining what had happened and what they were doing to put it right. That was showing blue screens in Times Square, chaos in airports, and all that kind of undermined what he was saying a bit, which I think was a shame, because I think he was coming across as quite human at that point. 

TL: I can imagine the scene, actually. Yeah, awful. So something else happened, and I want to talk about it. Can we talk about the Uber Eats element of this story? Because didn’t they offer a $10 Uber Eats voucher, which is about £7.50, to their vendors to say sorry? How did that go down? 

KH: So I think it’s really important that you said to their vendors, because that is what they did. But a lot of people said they were offering it to their customers. And can you imagine if they’d offered Delta? I mean, yeah, that wasn’t what they were doing, to be fair to them. 

So they offered it to the people who’d been selling CrowdStrike and the people who were spending their evenings and weekends trying to get their customers back online. I guess they were trying to say, I mean, well, I don’t really know what they were trying to say, to be honest. It just seemed, yeah, it got ridiculed by absolutely everybody. Yeah, it was not a good move, I don’t think. 

TL: Well, I think they were trying to mimic how IT teams send pizza for when, you know, they have to pull an all-nighter. I’ve sort of worked in large corporations with huge IT teams where sometimes that’s what happens, and the boss gets the pizza in. 

But, of course, some people thought it was a scam, didn’t they? And, in fact, so many people redeemed it that Uber Eats reported the vouchers as fraudulent, and then it was slammed on national media. And CNN pointed out that you can’t even get a pizza for $10 on Uber Eats anyway. So a bit of a disaster there. 

KH: And they also pointed out that, at that point, there was no compensation available to those people, so the $10 was all they were getting at that point. 

TL: I mean, well-intentioned, I’m sure, but a bit of a face-palm moment. So let’s dig into the liability a bit more. As you mentioned, Delta, who I understand, sued CrowdStrike, and they were really badly affected by this, weren’t they? 

KH: Yeah, they really were. So they sued for $500 million because Delta said they had to cancel 7,000 flights after the error, and about 1.3 million customers had been affected, and that was many, many more than other airlines. United was the next most affected airline, and it had nothing like those kind of numbers. 

So Delta really struggled, I think, to get things back up and running. They were really badly affected, and in its earnings call after the event, it estimated the outage cost it $380 million in lost revenue and $170 million in associated expenses. But I just want to look a bit at the wording that was used in that lawsuit, because the wording was really brutal from Delta. 

So Delta said CrowdStrike caused a global catastrophe because it cut corners, took shortcuts and circumvented the very testing and certification processes it advertised for its own benefit and profit. That was one of the terms in the lawsuit. 

TL: Wow, they went there. That is pretty brutal, isn’t it? So how did CrowdStrike respond to that? 

KH: Well, CrowdStrike went on the defensive. And you can sort of see why. Actually, this is always the interesting thing to look at for me. So where the battle between legal and comms happens is very often after the thing is played out in the media, after the initial reactions. 

So I’m just going to read you some of the statements on CNBC. A CrowdStrike statement said Delta’s claims are based on disproven misinformation, demonstrate a lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works, and reflect a desperate attempt to shift blame for its slow recovery away from its failure to modernise its antiquated IT infrastructure. I’d love to see how the contract negotiations went after that statement. 

It also later said that Delta was to blame for its failure to do a staged deployment of the faulty update. So Delta then went back and said CrowdStrike had, and this is a quote, secretly designed software to bypass Microsoft security certifications in order to make changes at the core of Delta’s computing systems without Delta’s knowledge. I mean, that’s a whole new kind of thing to throw at it, isn’t it? It was really vicious. 

And there was a separate investor lawsuit against CrowdStrike, but that was dismissed by a judge in the US in January this year, in 2026. But the Delta lawsuit, I think, is still unresolved at the time of recording, although most people in the media seem to be saying that they don’t think they’re going to win it. 

TL: So shots very publicly fired from both sides. But let’s go back to the main actor in this, CrowdStrike. Did they suffer? 

KH: Not as much as you’d think, I think. So, not certainly in terms of stock price, if you take the longer-term view. So at the time, the stock price fell really significantly. It lost about a third of its value, which is obviously a lot, but it did recover pretty quickly, and by January 2025, it was back up to an all-time high. 

So shareholders didn’t seem to be very worried about it. Microsoft shares fell a tiny bit. I mean, literally, you know, per cent or something, but nothing really significant. Some other cyber companies saw their share price lift because the market thought people might start to diversify their buying a bit. 

But CrowdStrike actually held on to its customers. I saw a report that said it held on to something like 95% of its customers through that period, and actually, it’s grown since then, I believe. 

TL: But there are a few things that are interesting from this one. So the first is just how reliant so many businesses are on the same systems, which creates a real vulnerability. And I think that’s a really important takeout. And so what are businesses doing about it? 

KH: I think that really is, that’s the big thing, isn’t it? So Microsoft has launched a resiliency initiative to tighten its own security and reliability and to stop something like this happening again. So it looks at things like how users can recover their devices and how Microsoft can push an update to delete a flawed file. 

So there is some sort of responsibility, in a way, from Microsoft there. But then the Financial Conduct Authority, the FCA in the UK, published its list of observations after the event, and there were a couple of interesting things in there. So they noted that businesses should identify where their single points of failure might be in their infrastructure and technology, which again, is a fairly obvious thing to have to do, really. 

And how can they diversify those systems so they’re not so reliant on one single thing that could fail? And then they talk about things like changing update processes and understanding how they work with suppliers and things like that. But I think the big thing is, this is a board-level concern. This might seem like almost IT admin, but this is actually cybersecurity governance, really. 

But the thing I thought was really interesting in the FCA findings was they talked about the importance of communications in these kinds of events, and they said that firms with a really clear, well-executed comms strategy were much better able to update their various stakeholders and customers quickly, so they could, you know, kind of stop the worst of this happening. So I thought that was quite interesting, because obviously we always say comms is incredibly important in a crisis response. 

TL: Yeah, that’s probably done simulations as well. 

KH: Yeah, exactly. 

TL: But then there’s the thinking that we often see that if you’re a B-to-B company, you’re somehow immune from public scrutiny. But, of course, you’re really not, and sometimes the first time people have heard of you is when a crisis hits. And if you don’t have a very public profile, that’s really hard to deal with, as you don’t have the goodwill of the brand to fall back on. 

But everyone has to prepare for it. And it’s not dissimilar to Astronomer that we talked about on a previous episode of this podcast, where they were thrown into the limelight over the Coldplay cam incident. And basically, any company can hit a crisis and be thrust into the limelight at any point. There’s so much to dig into on this, and we’re going to do that with our guest just after this short break. 

Break

TL: Our guest today is Kristin Ingraham, who’s the managing partner US and global head of social media at Clarity. She’s also a founding member of the Clarity Global Crisis Council. And Kristin is an AI-native digital marketing advisor and strategic communications consultant with 20-plus years’ experience advising B-to-B and B-to-C brands, corporate, creative and crisis programmes. And we are delighted that she’s speaking to us today. 

Kristin Ingraham: I‘m so glad to join you both today. 

KH: It’s lovely to see you, Kristin. I’ll get straight into it, if that’s okay, and just talk about George Kurtz’s first statement that he made on X, because it ticked the boxes in terms of what had happened factually. But to me, it felt quite robotic, a bit corporate. I mean, they are a corporate, I guess, but he didn’t seem to take any accountability. It was really kind of trying to minimise the damage. 

I know that changed later on, but in something of this kind of scale, how damaging is it if you don’t get that initial statement right, if you come across as quite cold, and what should he have said, in your advice? 

KI: Yeah, I mean, I think so. I’m going to jump straight into putting my kind of global social media lead hat on. I do think it was the right decision to go straight onto a platform like X to be communicating directly to those who were impacted. You should go straight to the public. 

And I know a lot of times the C-suite is hesitant to do so, and my recommendation is that you should, but I agree. I think that the first attempt was really lacking. It was lacking in empathy. It was lacking a bit in accountability. 

And while there were factual accuracies within it, it was missing, in my opinion, some of the most important facts, which are the expectation of when this will be fixed and what the timeline looks like. So for me, I focus more on, I call it round two. I think round two statement, they got just right and should be held up as sort of a best-in-class example. But round one was a miss. 

KH: Yeah, I agree. And I mean, I’d be quite interested to know your take on how that happened. And I think my view is that there’s this tension we see in pretty much every crisis, or every kind of big corporate crisis, where you have lawyers on one hand saying, don’t admit anything, minimise the damage, don’t kind of take accountability, don’t take liability. And then you have comms people like us saying, you need to sound human, you need to apologise, you need to, you know, tell people what’s happening. 

And I wonder whether they were feeling that tension, and particularly right after Delta sued them for $500 million. And I do wonder, I think we see sometimes that that instinct to protect against liability can actually end up doing more reputational damage. You know, it’s trying to save money or reputation in some ways, but actually ends up doing more damage. So I’d love to get your take on that and, in your experience, who wins that battle between legal and comms, and should it even be a battle? 

KI: The second part of that question is the right question. I think the biggest mistake that these organisations make is pitting those two departments against one another, instead of creating the social capital and the crisis preparedness of teaching them that they’re on the same team before they even need to be on the same team. 

I say it’s a little bit like taking your SATs, is it? You know, it’s always the last one, all of the above. You know, all of the above. It has to be a collaborative decision on how to answer. 

For me, when I think about crisis preparedness, I try to move it away from sort of legal department versus comms department and almost take it into a place that doesn’t have an immediate impact. Bear with me. I’m going to take you on a little journey. 

Maybe this is because I have family who have worked in the medical field, but it’s a little bit like medical malpractice. And, you know, the lawyer is always going to say, like, you know, don’t apologise for anything, admit nothing. And the reality is that most medical malpractice isn’t about, you know, a get-rich scheme or trying to get money from doctors. It is individuals who were impacted in their lives, just wanting to be acknowledged as humans. 

They want the apology. They want the accountability. And most times, they just want to know that it’s not going to happen to somebody else. 

KH: That’s so interesting. Yeah. 

KI: And so, if you can almost bring your legal and your comms department together and be like, picture this situation, then they sort of have a commonality. If they’re both looking not at the thing that they’re ultimately responsible for, they’re looking at a similar situation through the lens of humanity, and they get it. They get it that the end, you know, consumer or customer that’s impacted, they want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to be acknowledged. That is sort of crisis 101. 

KH: I love that, and I love that analogy. And I wonder whether, I mean, we have no way of knowing this, but I wonder whether if there had been that element of humanity and acknowledging what had happened, Delta even would have sued them for, I mean, we can never know that, right? We don’t know, but there is an argument sometimes to say that actually doing the right thing can avoid some of those lawsuits that come later. And yeah, I totally agree. We are in violent agreement on this, I think. 

KI: Like we do this for a living. 

KH: I know. Who knew? 

TL: I want to ask about the Uber Eats thing, because we were talking about how CrowdStrike offered vendors a $10 Uber Eats voucher as a thank you for fixing the chaos. And, you know, I can see perhaps what they were trying to do. 

KH: Although that was never going to, that was never going to stop someone suing, right? 

TL: But, to be fair, it was for the vendors, and it was, but CNN pointed out that you can’t even get a pizza for $10. So was this a misstep in your experience? What does a genuine gesture of goodwill actually look like in a crisis? 

KI: Yeah, I bring it back to everything I just said, like to be seen, to be valued, to be treated like a human. That didn’t happen. I think you have to look at the gravity of the situation. You know, we’re talking about millions of Microsoft Windows systems crashing, billions and billions of dollars in lost airline profitability, and businesses, and banks, and, I mean, hospitals went down. 

Like this is not, you know, oh, I couldn’t, you know, access my social media for a few hours. This is, you know, I might be missing a flight to a make-or-break life moment. I, you know, I might have a surgery rescheduled that is going to impact my life. I just think if you really understand the gravity of the situation, then you know that a $10 Uber Eats voucher is just woefully missing the mark. 

You know, it’s sort of certainly being like, I’m so sorry that you missed your grandma’s funeral, but here’s a smoothie. I mean, read the room. Yeah, read the room. 

TL: Yeah, definitely read the room. And yeah, you’re talking about, you know, the chaos that was going on. But what’s interesting is that before July 2024, most people outside of the tech and finance world would have never heard of CrowdStrike, and then suddenly they’re on the Today Show. Their name is all over CNN. There are blue screens on Times Square. 

How differently should a B-to-B company be thinking about preparing for a crisis compared to a consumer brand that’s used to living in the public eye? 

KI: Sometimes I genuinely wonder if I’m in the minority on this. I’ve said for years that there shouldn’t be a difference, and maybe that’s because I started my career in consumer, and so I still, you know, I can’t break the habit of wearing that hat a lot. 

KH: Me too. 

KI: But I think, I think now more than ever, even a quote-unquote traditional B2B brand is actually a B2B2C brand, whether they are in crisis or in, you know, smooth sailing times. They do need to ultimately be thinking about not just how do I reach my customer, but how do I bring value and communicate my values to my customer’s customer? 

And in technology in particular, this is happening more and more. I mean, we’ve seen this in, you know, sort of white-labelled financial technology behind banks, you know, and when that goes wrong, you know, credit card companies and banks trying to throw them under the bus. But at the end of the day, it’s those banks navigating this, and CrowdStrike is certainly in that same vein. 

I think that they need to position it exactly the same. And I think in this instance, they also need to think about not just reacting to the moment, but what is it going to take to rebuild trust after that moment has passed? It’s funny because, you know, we see a tremendous recovery from CrowdStrike, which is fantastic, but I think reputationally they’re on a knife edge. You know, they really do have a very important recovery that’s still in progress today. 

KH: I think that’s really interesting, because you, I think you’ve hit on something that’s so important, which is they have recovered. But if this was to happen again, the impact would be even greater on their reputation, because they’ve done it once before, and people will only know them for that one thing outside of those industries that you mentioned. 

And we see this all the time, don’t we, B-to-B brands? We’ve just done a podcast on Boeing, you know, same thing. They think they’re a B-to-B brand, but actually they ended up kind of, you know, everybody knew who they were for all the wrong reasons. 

But, as you say, the stock recovered, they kept most of their customers, and they hit an all-time high, I think, by the January. So I think we’ve probably just answered the question I’m going to ask now. But does any of this actually matter? I guess the answer is yes, right? 

KI: My answer is yes. And I think you have to figure whose seat am I sitting in? If you’re in the C-suite, and financially you’ve recovered, customer-wise you’ve recovered, your stock has recovered, you’re going to think, like, this is a great success, because by those business and financial benchmarks, you have recovered. 

But this is why comms needs a place on that C-suite. I think it’s, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of the rise of the chief communications officer and the importance of that being an element of it, but reputationally, they are still in recovery. And it would be naive to say that they are fully recovered. 

The comms team knows that. I would say the marketing team probably knows that too, and I don’t know if there is an end date on that recovery. I think they will forever be held to a higher standard. The smallest mistake will resurface this moment in perpetuity, and so that puts them on a different playing field than their competitors, who they will still be allowed to have a catastrophic mistake and have the opportunity to again recover financially and as a business the way that CrowdStrike has. 

I don’t think that CrowdStrike will ever be afforded that opportunity again. 

TL: I‘m just going to throw in the last one, just because we’ve got you here and I want to pick your brains now. But are there any lessons here for a company that’s never faced a crisis, but kind of knows it’s only a matter of time? 

KI: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I go back to the thing that we said at the start: in a moment of crisis, too many corporations, businesses, organisations are having their internal teams sometimes meet for the first time, work together for the first time. So there is not an inherent trust built there. There is not the camaraderie of knowing that everyone is on the same team and pursuing the same goals. 

I think crisis preparedness is something that too many organisations don’t think about. They think crisis reaction is more important than being prepared. So even if it’s, you know, and I know obviously we all do this together, you know, a simulation is so important for building that social capital, or even just finding those moments. I hate to say, you know, sort of pour salt in wounds, but look at the crises of your competitors and analyse them together as a team, with legal, with IT, with your comms team, with your marketing team, with your C-suite. 

Find those moments where you can hear one another’s voices together in the room before it needs to be in the most high-pressure situation that anyone will encounter professionally. 

Outro

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