Within minutes of a major crisis, the phones start ringing. People who think a family member might be involved don’t wait for a company statement. They call the company directly, right away.
Within hours, the room fills up.
Insurance shows up. Lawyers show up. PR consultants, regulators, investigators. They come to headquarters, or to the site itself, and they come fast. Every company that has been through a disaster has sat in that room. Most of them sat in it once, with no idea what they were walking into.
Here is what surprises people: everyone in that room belongs there. The lawyers are supposed to be careful. That is their job. The insurance people are supposed to think about cost and risk. That is what they were trained to do. The PR people are supposed to think about how it will look in the news. None of that is wrong. A company in crisis needs all of them.
So the problem isn’t that someone is doing a bad job. The problem is what happens when everyone does a good job at the same time.
Each one sees the crisis through the lens of their own profession. Each one pulls a little in their own direction. Nobody in that room is arguing for a bad outcome. But the room leans one way, toward protecting the company. Toward caution, careful wording, and saying as little as possible.
And the people with the most to lose are not in the room at all.
I have spent more than thirty years doing this work, in aviation, rail, maritime, and other industries. I have watched this happen more times than I can count, and I want to be clear about what I am describing. There is no villain. Nobody sits down and decides to treat families badly. What you get instead is a room full of good people, each one right about their own piece, adding up to a result that helps no one. Not even the company.
That is the crowded room. Getting through it well is one of the hardest things a leadership team will ever face, and almost none of them have done it before.
The good news is that the way through is not complicated. It is just uncomfortable. It means treating all that expert advice as information, not as the plan. And it means making a call the room will not make on its own.
I wrote the full version of this on Substack. It covers what families actually need in those first hours, which is a much shorter list than you would think. It covers why playing defense usually creates the exact disaster it was meant to prevent. And it looks at companies that did not survive the way they handled things, including one that could not have prevented the event in the first place.
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.