Take one crisis your organization could plausibly face. Check, before it happens, how far your communication would get without improvising — and where it would start to.
Choose the scenario
Not “a crisis”. One specific event your organization could face — the more plausible, the more useful the check.
Four checkpoints
Each checkpoint comes from an Executive Insight Brief. Answer for this scenario as your organization stands today, not as the plan says it should. “Don’t know” is an answer — often the most useful one.
The first hours
Walk through the first hours of this crisis. Mark the last step your organization has prepared and could carry out today without improvising.
Your map
This check shows where your crisis communication would start to improvise for one scenario. It does not predict how a crisis unfolds, and it does not replace incident command, legal analysis or operational recovery. Clear communication cannot compensate for an action people are unable to perform, and good preparation does not guarantee trust or compliance. Every checkpoint rests on a published brief; none of them supplies a cutoff.
Next step
You now know, for this scenario, how far your crisis communication is prepared — and at which point it would have to be invented under pressure.
The harder part is building the missing steps before they are needed: release authority, the holding statement, protective instructions people can carry out, and a channel that still works when others fail. That is the conversation worth having.
Nothing you entered here has been sent or stored. If you continue, your map is attached to the contact form in this browser window; you can remove it there before sending.
Short answers first, then the briefs that read them, then essays and pages.