The Four Stages of a Crisis

Life is incredibly unpredictable, and bad things happen. Crisis at the workplace can look like a single event, or a series of events that build upon one another. A crisis can interrupt workflow, cause financial hardships, interfere with security, and even cause loss of life or damage to assets. While mitigating all crises may be impossible, understanding the stages of a crisis and how to react can help.

Every single crisis situation will be different. Circumstances can change radically and rapidly, and you’ll be required to act as quickly and as effectively as possible. To give an example, a crisis within your organization could occur in the form of a bomb threat, a weather disaster, a computer hack, a strike, or unfavorable media coverage. Knowing and understanding the stages of a crisis will help you prepare as much as possible for the possibility, and also ensure you’re able to stay ahead of the evolution of the crisis. Once you understand the stages, you can learn how to help mitigate the crisis.

Understanding Crisis Ranges

There are four ranges that a crisis falls into, with different levels of impact and probability:

• Red — High probability, major impact
• Yellow — Major impact, low probability
• Blue — Low impact, high probability
• Green — Low impact, low probability

You’ll want to pay special attention to the red and yellow range of crises, since these are the most detrimental to your organization. If a red or yellow level of crisis occurs, and you’re completely unprepared, this will be much more harmful than not being adequately prepared for a blue or green crisis. It is, of course, impossible to prepare for every possibility, but keep in mind that many crises are business and geographically specific. Create a list of occurrences that could happen, and work from there in accordance to the following stages.

Stage 1 : Prodromal (Pre-crisis)

This stage is what is known as the pre-crisis. You may have no idea that a crisis could happen or even what type of crisis may occur. The key takeaway of this stage is that nothing has actually happened yet. That’s what makes this stage incredibly important. Ensure you’re analyzing the potential for a crisis to occur, and what this might look like. Then, you’ll be able to understand the impact it could have on your organization. This extends to employees, customers, and the bottom line.

At Geospark Analytics we place ourselves firmly against stage 1. Some companies are best at telling you that a crisis is happening in real time, but you can probably just turn on your local news to learn the same thing. We believe the value of our artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform that we call Hyperion is operating pre-crisis. Hyperion is your early warning system of declining stability to cue many programmed actions like shuddering a store or moving inventory or calling back travelers.

Stage 2: Acute

The crisis is actively occurring. There’s no perfect way to react at this moment, and it’s important to understand that some damage may occur. What you can’t do is simply ignore it. If you panic and shut down, you’re wasting valuable time that could be spent dealing with the active crisis. This will happen quickly, much quicker than any of the other stages. You must act now.

Stage 3: Chronic

This is the stage where you’re cleaning up the mess the crisis has left you with, in whatever form that might take. If you handled the acute stage well, then this won’t be as challenging. What this stage looks like helps to illuminate the importance of the first few stages. If you’re dealing with simply a loss of customers, profit, a negative image, or unflattering public option, you can likely deal with that. However, if the situation has turned more extreme, such as bankruptcy or a complete security breach with loss of highly confidential information, then this stage might last indefinitely.

Stage 4: Crisis Resolution

It’s time to turn your crisis situation into a learning moment. If you’ve successfully planned for a crisis, then that might look like one never occurring, because you’ve prepared properly during stage 1. Or, you may have acted quickly and effectively during stage 2. You can analyze what occurred and better understand how to react in the future, learning from your mistakes. Or, you can build upon what you’ve done correctly in this situation and know you’re prepared for a variety of crisis management.

Crisis Mitigation Strategies

Now that you know the stages a crisis takes, these are a few key strategies to help you handle the earlier stages, acting as damage control:

• Monitor Social Media Platforms — Track all relevant social media platforms through the lifecycle of your crisis. This will help you handle a crisis in real-time, connect with your audience, and make better decisions.
• Consider Technology for Risk and Threat Assessment — Using machine driven models and AI to measure levels of risk and threats to your organization can be extremely helpful. This approach can help you with automated warnings and reporting, analyze social media platforms, and overall provide data that you can then interpret. It can also significantly help you during the first stage of any crisis, as it can give you valuable insight into potential future threats.
• Leverage Messages — Ensure that every message you provide to your organization or customer is crafted and created with care. Be careful how you respond to a crisis, and ensure your words are appropriate and meaningful. Also be sure to remain as clear and concise as possible
• Embrace Redundancy — In a crisis situation, it’s better to repeat yourself than to leave out crucial information. Reach out across many venues in order to convey your message to everyone it’s intended for. If you have critical information, now is not the time to worry about coming across as annoying or paranoid. Get your message out there.

Understanding the stages of a crisis and how you can help with damage control is absolutely essential for your organization. Geospark Analytics can provide the AI to help you mitigate damages from a crisis far more extensively than human preparation could ever provide. You want any information you can receive before it breaks, solving a problem before it occurs. Contact us today to learn more about how our team can help you.