Crisis management awareness

A multinational organization with offices in Europe and America wishes to train and practice all local and special crisis teams. Various crisis scenarios about security, reputation, social media and safety must be addressed in the exercises. How to create an “out-of-the-box” challenge regarding crises?

Origin

A multinational organization with offices in Europe and America wishes to train and practice all local and special crisis teams. Various crisis scenarios about security, reputation, social media and safety must be addressed in the exercises. How to create an “out-of-the-box” challenge regarding crises?

Challenge

Safety is of utmost importance for this innovative and future-oriented player in the chemical industry. Which means that crisis management is synonymous with safety. But how do central, regional and local crisis teams react when the crisis suddenly affects image, social media, security or accidents? Are the teams prepared for that? Do team members understand the implications and where does knowledge come from?

Approach

A major step in the awareness and understanding of crisis management was accomplished by training and exercising all crisis teams in one year using unusual scenarios.

An interactive approach was taken by having the input for the crisis team provided by one of the regional Emergency-Response teams rather than through us. This meant actively training in two European locations at the same time. By subsequently including interviews with some senior Vice-Presidents by our media partner, the liveliness of the scenario was complete.

Commitment

Thanks to a combination of tabletop exercise with a strategic scenario at corporate level, this approach guarantees the involvement of top management. This is in contrast to the obligatory fire and evacuation drills to which many link a weak crisis scenario! This does not mean that fire and evacuation drills are not important. On the contrary! But these often are not very challenging for the crisis team itself.

Result

All crisis teams have since been trained several times and DutchRisk is involved in the revision of the crisis plans and the crisis structure.