Most crisis response companies have a team page. Headshots, names, titles, countries. Ours does too.
It’s an honest thing to put up. Clients want to know who is coming, and most of those photos belong to someone who has genuinely done the work. But it’s worth being clear about what a page like that can tell you, and what it can’t.
It tells you who’s on the roster, and where they’re based. It doesn’t tell you whether those people have ever worked together, and that’s the part a page like this can’t show you.
If you’re looking at a roster of forty people spread across twenty countries, the real question isn’t how much experience is on the list. It’s how many of the forty have been in the same room in the last year. How many have trained on the same procedures. How many could tell you, without checking, what the person next to them is responsible for in the first four hours.
Experience is real, but it doesn’t automatically transfer. Someone who has handled a crisis once has learned something valuable: what a grieving family sounds like at hour six, what it takes to deal with demanding regulators. That stays with them. But most of what made them effective the first time was never theirs alone. It was the plan they were working inside, the people they already knew, the systems already in place. Move that person to a different country, a different client, a team of strangers, and a plan they’ve never read, and a lot of that experience stops doing any work for them.
There’s a harder question too, one that doesn’t get asked enough: was the experience even good? We assume experience means learning, but it doesn’t automatically. Someone who worked a badly run response has three weeks of practice doing it wrong, and unless somebody corrected them, that’s what they carry into the next one.
None of this is an argument against experience. It’s the best raw material available. But raw material has to be worked into something the rest of an organization can use. That means surfacing it, arguing over it, and writing it into a procedure that someone who wasn’t in the room can follow and train on. A lesson that only lives in one person’s head leaves the organization the day that person does.
That’s what separates presence from capability. A team page promises somebody near your incident, wherever it happens. Whether that person can actually function as a team with the stranger next to them depends on whether they’ve trained on the same plan.
I wrote the full version of this on Substack. It goes deeper into what “expert” really covers in a response this complicated, why even a good outcome doesn’t prove much, and what a company owes its own experience once someone has lived through something worth learning from.
Read the full piece on Substack →
Jeff Morgan is the founder of Aviem International, a global emergency response firm that helps companies prepare for and respond to mass casualty events.