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My name is Mr. Nitin Mantri
and the Group CEO of Avian WE,
which is a large communications
consultancy based out of India.
I'm also the president of
international communications
consultancy organizations,
which is the parent body for
all member associations for
communications across the world.
Today I'm going to speak to you
about crisis communications,
the process, the way it works,
and what do you do when you
are stuck with a crisis?
0:25
What is a crisis?
The Dictionary defines crisis as
a time of intense
difficulty or danger.
Indeed, a crisis and event of
a nature or magnitude that
changes or has
the potential to change
the way an organization,
government, or an individual
conducts its operations.
It involves potential
to actual loss of life,
serious injury as a result
of an organization, individual,
or a government's actions and
impacts ongoing operations
and reputation,
thus creating what we call
an unstable and dangerous situation.
We're currently facing the most
unsettling and dangerous
crises of our times.
The COVID 19 pandemic,
like all crisis,
the coronavirus outbreak
also hit us suddenly.
The impact might be extending
further than what we think.
UN Chief Antonio Gutierrez
has called the pandemic,
the most challenging crisis
since the Second World War,
the unimaginable human
and economic costs.
A crisis can strike
us at anytime,
create uncertainty,
and is seen as
a threat to important goals.
More so, in today's VUCA World.
1:30
Imagine if you
were the person at
BP headquarters in 2010
who got the first call,
a drilling platform
in the Gulf of
Mexico had exploited and sunk,
killing 11 workers and
allowing oil to leak into
the ocean at a rate of
43 barrels a minute,
what would you do?
Which colleagues would
you convene and which of
the innumerable problems
would you address first?
Would you put out a
press statement or
a tweet or send the
spokesperson to the scene?
Would your focus
be on maintaining
the situation or actually
leading the company through it?
Well, welcome to the VUCA
World we all live in.
VUCA is a managerial acronym
that stands for volatile,
uncertain, complex,
and ambiguous.
According to researchers,
volatility refers to
the speed of change in
industry market or
the world in general.
The more volatile the world is,
the more and faster
things change.
Uncertainty refers to the extent
to which we can confidently
predict the future.
The more uncertainty world,
the harder it is to predict.
Complexity refers
to the number of
factors that we need
to take into account,
the variety and the
relationships between them.
The more complex the world,
the harder it is to analyze.
Ambiguity refers to a lack of
clarity about how to
interpret something.
The more ambiguous the world is,
the harder it is to interpret.
In this fast evolving,
complex world,
where social media gives
people the power of
anonymity and misinformation and
fake news is more likely to be
believed and shared
than the truth of
very thin line separates a
best-case and a
worst-case scenario.
Any moment a crisis can present
itself and disrupt
supply chains,
threaten business continuity and
bring our hyper-connected global
economy to a grinding halt.
