What is 'Best in Class' Crisis Management?

Lately we have been re-evaluating the ACID Test that we use here at Crisis Solutions. Those who have worked with us in the past will know what the ACID Test is, but for those not familiar it’s a benchmark we use to evaluate an organisation’s crisis management capability. It consists of scores of qualitative criteria that we can apply during a crisis exercise to produce a meaningful evaluation to help us articulate whether an organisation is ‘best in class’, ‘above average’, ‘satisfactory’, or ‘poor’. The ACID Test is a mnemonic covering what we believe are four key criteria:

• Activation (of the crisis framework in general and appropriate teams in particular)

• Communication (not just to stakeholders but to other teams in the crisis framework)

• Information-management and

• Decision-making.

We carry out this evaluation because it’s the most asked question before or (more often) after we run a crisis exercise for an organisation. For example, we might be asked ‘How did our performance compare with other global banks?’. Although the answer is no doubt of interest to the organisation I always like to probe around the question a bit because, in my view, there are a number of more interesting questions if you’re going to do some organisational navel-gazing, such as:

• “Where do we fit amongst other organisations aspiring to be ‘best in class’?”

• “What do we need to do to get from ‘above average’ to ‘best in class’?”

• “Do we want really want or need to invest the time and resources required to get from ‘above average’ to ‘best in class’?”

• “Where should we apply our efforts in order to improve our information-management?”

When we first started running crisis exercises over 20 years ago, most organisations saw a crisis exercise as a ‘tick the box’ activity and once the event was over that was it. But with the increasing focus on regulation in many industries and a real desire to minimise the operational and reputational impacts of a crisis, more and more organisations want to analyse their performance in a more granular way. The ACID Test allows them to do just that.