Mind-mapping crisis messages – Learn to do it NOW!
This is a series of articles that will help you understand mind mapping crisis messages. This process when done appropriately and successfully will ensure you will succeed.
Article 1 in this series – Mind-mapping crisis messages – Learn to do it NOW!
Do you know what you will say when:
¡ You have an active shooter on campus
¡ How about 3-hours into the incident?
¡ A gas line leak causes you to evacuate a dorm
¡ A flood watch is issued and flooding appears imminent
¡ When power fails and an all out effort to restore power is delayed by a strike
¡ When a student is raped, kidnapped, or simply disappears into the night
¡ When workplace violence hits your organization
A crisis grows, changes, and often deepens over time. Like all things in life – a crisis has a starting point, a middle phase and an ending. What you choose to say, who you will talk with and how you will reach them in these days of social media will change at every stage of the crisis.
Some of the worst mistakes are made by crisis communicators because they try to create the messages in the heat of the moment. Ineffective and hurried communications create major blunders and failures.
Simply, when the stuff hits the fan, stress levels are running to the extreme, managers and executives, administrators and supervisors are all uptight and tense, everybody wants to approve and contribute to the messages and if you are the crisis communicator you know you have an incredible feat at hand.
Over the next few blogs we will look at the seven stages of a crisis and how you can use a technique known a mind mapping messages at every stage from the early stages of warning, to assessing the risk, to responding, resolving and recovering.
If you take the time to learn the technique in advance you can create clear, concise mind maps that will help you at every one of the seven stages.
Here are the seven stages we will discuss and help you understand:
¡ 1. The advance warning and/or advance intel stage
¡ 2. Situation assessment – the stage where you assess pros/cons, good/bad/ugly
¡ 3. Communicating the response – how to communicate and to whom
¡ 4. Operational management – handling the operations to survive
¡ 5. Resolution and path forward prevention – resolving and moving forward to continuity
¡ 6. Business continuity – recovery – ensuring a recovery and ensuring continuous movement forward
¡ 7. Lessons learned – recalibrations – learning from what went right, what went wrong, the deltas needed and how best to recalibrate and be resilient
We will explain each stage over the next few blogs.
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