Well, not in public, anyway.

But the very nature of crisis communication is that you’re reacting to an unplanned event. By definition, you can’t plan for the actual crisis. But you can have at the ready a response plan.

As you frame your crisis communication plan, consider the whole spectrum of stakeholders with whom you must communicate. That’s what I advise in this recent story in The Network Journal:  business partners, suppliers, vendors and their influencers are just as important as the public, employees and customers.

Media training needs to pivot around messaging techniques that enable you to rise to any occasion — crisis or not. You can’t memorize ‘talking points’ in advance. But you can create a grid of key audiences so you can quickly develop messages — using the proven Wilson-Taylor approach, of course — appropriate for each.