An often overlooked crisis communications tool – which has more power than many people give it credit for – is the after action report (AAR), or “lessons learned report,” if that sounds more familiar. A well-written AAR has several inherent benefits: It provides your leadership with a clear picture of you/your team’s important incident actions. […]
Tag Archives: Planning
Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1, and U.S. National Hurricane Preparedness Week is May 25-31. If you live and work near the U.S. east or gulf coasts, or in the Caribbean, preparedness week is a good time not only to make sure that you’re prepared in general, but also that you’re prepared to conduct crisis communications in […]
Public opinion has often driven operations during disaster incident response. Successfully establishing and operating a joint information center can make your incident management organization part of the conversation with a well-informed public; not doing so can put you “behind the story,” playing catch-up to rumors and misinformation. When multiple organizations are in the same fight to […]
I live in one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities,” which is a program funding innovative thinking and action to overcome issues that challenge preparedness, response and recovery during crisis. Norfolk for instance, where I make my home, faces issues of serious coastal flooding problems and the inadequacy of its infrastructure to support mass evacuations. Resiliency is easy […]
If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “nature always moves toward an end,” the definition of the Greek word telos will be easy to understand: it is the end, purpose or – even better – the completion toward which everything in the world moves. The quote above is Aristotle paraphrased, and so is this, “art imitates […]
The Crisis Communicator 