Would you ever dare to walk on stage at sold-out Carnegie Hall and play a Beethoven sonata without having practised hard? Probably not. It takes hundreds of hours of focused practice to reach mastery in any demanding craft. Yet when it comes to managing risk and protecting reputation, corporations often trust their “normal” organisational skills, their gut feeling or their quiet belief that “someone will know what to do” to carry them through a crisis.
They ignore the fact that steering through a high-stakes situation takes a different, non-BAU approach altogether. This is a dangerous blind spot.
Governance – the mandates, frameworks and approval chains that keep an organisation accountable – is slow, deliberate and steering, by design. A crisis is the opposite: fast, ambiguous and dynamic, demanding agile decisions in real time. How do you bring the two under one roof? Certainly not in the heat of the moment. The only way to reconcile governance and agile crisis management is to adopt governance before a crisis hits, so that when people are forced to improvise, they improvise within the boundaries it sets. And there is only one way to get there – train!
The reason is simple. Despite all the crisis-management governance and planning, the protocols, checklists and approval chains, in the end it takes real people who are living and breathing crisis – who have internalised what needs to be done, how and when, who have grown an instinct for the pitfalls, and who can think, manage, decide and act under pressure – in an unprecedented, business-critical situation. Aka crisis. You cannot acquire these capabilities by reading books or attending seminars. The people who own key roles in a crisis have to build the muscle themselves. And they have to build it the right way.
“You can train hard and still underperform. Crisis training is not a knowledge test. It’s about rehearsing behaviour.”
In my opinion, three aspects make training “right”:
- First, like in sport, you can train hard and still underperform when it counts. Why? Because many organisations treat training as a knowledge test: do we know our plans, do we know our roles, do we know where the protocols are? They miss the defining reality of a crisis – taking decisions under uncertainty. Are leaders willing to act in that environment? Can they think ahead and anticipate the consequences of their choices and the reactions of key stakeholders? A good training concept makes these challenges part of the exercise. Training is not about testing knowledge; it is about rehearsing behaviour.
- Second, it is not enough to train for a crisis once a year. A full simulation once a year – run by an external provider, with real-time injects and convincing social-media streams – makes for a fine ritual, but it is frequency that builds resilience and capability. Crises are managed by humans, and our brains and muscles depend on repetition and routine to build anything lasting. In my years in aviation, I saw this at close range: pilots do not earn their readiness in their annual simulator session. They run briefings and checklists before every single flight – small, constant refreshers that keep the routine sharp. There is nothing wrong with a tabletop or simulation once a year, but there have to be smaller training “bites” in between to build skills that last.
- Third, it is not only about what you train and how often, but also about who you train with. Readiness is rooted in efficacy on three levels – individual, team and organisation – and a holistic training programme has to address all three. Individually, every player needs to know precisely what is expected of them: the CEO, yes, but equally the crisis manager, the comms director, the heads of operations, of IT, or the general counsel. As a team, they need a deep understanding of everyone else’s role in the crisis room – who decides what, and where one person’s responsibility ends and another’s begins. And as an organisation, there has to be a shared understanding of how the company sees crisis in the first place – and that shared understanding is nothing other than governance, lived and breathed rather than just “on file”.
Get all three right, and you gain an essential cornerstone of readiness – and the odds grow that your next performance in front of a large audience will be worth the standing ovation. Because, as with any master craft, it will have been earned long before you enter the stage.
This opinion piece was first published in the UGA CCTT Readiness Newsletter Q3/2026. For more information about the CCTT Crisis Communications Think Tank, click here.