So you and your company are facing a crisis. Maybe a big customer is not satisfied with the quality of your service or product, maybe you have messed up in some way that has shaken the confidence of your shareholders and/or customers. Whatever the crisis you’re probably backed against a wall with very little room to maneuver and the next few days will be make or break for you and/or the company. Well I am here to tell you that it’s happened before and it will probably happen again. I will try to summarize what I have learned from my experiences and maybe give you a few hints on how to take control of the situation.

Don’t panic

This seems to be obvious advice. But believe me many people underestimate this and the moment they face a crisis they panic. They act before thinking, communicate before clearly understanding the issue and usually make things much worse. Take the time to calm yourself down, calm your team down and try to get everyone focused on the issue at hand.

Establish control

To face a crisis it will take concentrated effort, no big sweeping action will help so forget that. The most important thing is to establish a place where your team will be physically present if possible or at least from where you will coordinate and communicate your response to the crisis. To put your feet on the ground and to understand the issue you will need data. Setup a process to collect and analyze data in regards to the issue, document it well and have your best people analyze it. This will allow you to understand the scope of the crisis and hopefully show you where to start looking for the problem.

Work systematically

Establish a process – usually it goes like this:

1. Collect data
2. Analyze & Detect issues
3. Suggest action
4. Challenge action
5. Approve
6. Take action
7. Go to 1.

I can’t tell you how many iterations you will need but from my experience this works. In the first iterations you will maybe catch only few issues but once your team gets into this process the iterations will be quick and you will be able to pin-point issues much better and therefore solve them much quicker. Try to keep everyone focused on the process – people tend to celebrate the first detected issue as the root cause but usually it’s not. It takes time to find the root cause (that is why it’s a crisis) and there is no quick-fix.

Communicate to stakeholders

Communication with your stakeholders is obviously very important. Not only the pissed off customer but also your management, owners, shareholders, partners.  Communication is important because usually to solve a crisis you will need help. And your stakeholders are usually the key to additional resources so be sure to get them involved asap. Be clear about the scope and the impact of the crisis and give them data to support your assessment of the situation. Before communicating make sure what you tell them is accurate and that they really want or need to hear it right now. In times of crisis patience is in short supply so make sure you don’t waste their time with useless information.

Show progress

As soon as everyone (you, your team, the stakeholders) understand the situation it is important to show progress. You have put everyone on alert, you have asked for emergency resources so everyone will expect you to deliver results. Usually this does take some time but as soon as you make progress do share it but again with hard data. Saying: “We are doing our best and have already made some progress!” is not going to cut it and is in the “useless information” category. Share exactly what you have achieved and what are the next steps.

There I hope this helps. It may seem this is focused on technological problems but I can tell you most of these recommendations are applicable in any type of crisis. Someone please send this to BP.