'No' to the Mushroom Factory!

There’s a protest sign that I see if I head west from Crisis Solutions-land and it always makes me smile. It’s not about climate change, bad government, political corruption or housing. It simply says ‘Pinvin says no to the mushroom factory’.

Now I don’t have all the facts, and maybe this mushroom factory is going to be huge and the whole of the village of Pinvin will be in its shadow. But I’m at loss to see how anyone can get quite so hung up about a mushroom factory. I mean, you might have something much worse on your doorstep. Perhaps a canned fish factory. Or a nuclear power station. But the people of Pinvin, Worcestershire, have obviously decided that a mushroom factory is what they don't want.

And that made me think - a crisis for one person is not necessarily a crisis for another. It might be business-as-usual. It might be an ‘incident’. So what does that mean for crisis response in an organisation? Well, the important point is that EVERYONE must know when we are in a crisis situation. No ifs or buts. That’s because in a crisis we use different team structures, phraseology and decision-making criteria. It’s important that everyone in the organisation KNOWS that this isn’t business-as-usual.

My favourite example here is when we worked with an internet service provider in Europe. The CEO had got us in because they had been in the middle of a TV interview describing a new product launch when the interviewer said “And what do you have to say about the fact that most of the South West of the UK is without internet today?”. Our beleaguered CEO hadn’t heard. The reason was because the IT people had logged the outage as a “P1 incident”, but there was no mechanism for going any higher. Senior management, including the Board, were blissfully unaware. We had to help them with crisis activation and escalation processes, communications protocols and team responsibilities.

In any crisis it’s important to know the criteria for calling a crisis. If you can’t do that then you have no hope of activating an effective crisis response.