What if somebody dies? What is a helicopter crashes? What if somebody dies in a helicopter crash? What if it’s a car accident? What if somebody gets lost in the woods? What if somebody gets lost in the woods, and a helicopter crashes into them?
Life is full of what-ifs, friends. All of these situations would be tragic and horrible, and you’ll be one to talk about them. Public Affairs and crisis comms planning can be a morbid business when you’ve got to ask yourself questions like these.
But are they the right questions?
You can’t predict every contingency – even though it’s sometimes tempting to build it all into your Public Affairs guidance or staff estimate. It doesn’t necessarily do harm to put in the extra work and consider five or 10 or 30 different ways things could go wrong, but chances are you aren’t investing your time for your organization’s maximum benefit. Instead of going down the “what if” whirlpool, here are the MaxDisclosure rules for contingency planning.
Show where and how you can reinforce context. You can’t and don’t need to predict every bad scenario, but you do need to show some example statements and Q&As demonstrating ways to stay on message when you and your spokespersons are in reaction mode. You can do this with two or three general contingency examples, applying with your forever lines and must-haves.
Know the situation as well as your operations officer does. For all the contingency planning I don’t do, I make up for it by following my units’ activities very closely. This way, we adjust and take action in real time rather than spend precious time gathering facts or playing catch-up after an unexpected catastrophe. It takes less than one minute to start your briefing card. We like to use that minute when we know the situation’s context, so we position ourselves accordingly.
Pay attention to your commander. He or she are likely discussing “risk to mission” and “risk to force” with their subordinate and higher headquarters commanders. Align your contingency planning to this and you’ll be speaking their language.
(Photo by Senior Airman Justin Armstrong, DVIDS)
