There is a particular moment I have seen play out in boardrooms many times. The crisis plan has been drafted, reviewed, approved and filed. Someone confirms it will be revisited annually. There are nods around the table, a sense of quiet satisfaction and the agenda moves on.
It is an entirely understandable moment. It is also, in my experience, the moment when organisations are most at risk of confusing two very different things: having a plan and being prepared.
The comfort of documentation
Organisations invest a great deal in crisis documentation, and rightly so. Manuals, escalation processes, communication templates, stakeholders lists, holding statements – all have value. A good plan brings order to something inherently disordered. It answers the question every board asks: are we ready?
Or rather, it appears to.
The trouble is that a document can only ever describe what should happen. It cannot make anything happen. And the reassurance it provides is often strongest in precisely the organisations that have never had cause to open it.
I have sat with leadership teams in the early hours of a genuinely difficult situation, and I can tell you what almost never happens: nobody reaches calmly for the manual, turns to the relevant page and follows it step by step. The plan may inform what people do. But the crisis is not being managed by the plan. It is being managed by people who are tired, uncertain and under pressure.
What a crisis actually tests
The moment something goes seriously wrong, the nature of the challenge changes. It stops being an administrative question and becomes a human one.
Contradictory and incomplete information arrives. The facts you need most are the facts you don’t yet have. Journalists are calling before the Executive Team has agreed what it knows, let alone what it thinks. Colleagues who are normally decisive begin to hedge. Colleagues who are normally measured want to act immediately. Everyone is aware that whatever is decided in the next hour may be examined, line by line, for years afterwards.
This is the real test: not whether the escalation process is correctly designed, but whether the people at the table can think clearly, decide quickly and communicate credibly while under scrutiny. Ambiguity, not chaos, is usually the hardest part. Chaos at least demands action. Ambiguity demands judgement.
And judgement, under pressure, behaves differently than we expect.
The gap between the plan and the person
I have watched this hold true in corporate crises again and again. Capable, experienced leaders, people who make significant decisions every day, hesitate when the situation is unfamiliar. They second guess instincts that would normally serve them well. They wait for certainty that isn’t coming. Sometimes they defer to whoever sounds most confident, even if they are not right.
None of this reflects a lack of intelligence or commitment. It reflects a lack of experience of this particular kind of pressure. Most executives have simply never had to make consequential decisions with partial information, in compressed time, in front of an audience. The first time they do it should not be the time it really counts.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training” – Archilochus, Greek poet.
The uncomfortable implication is this: an organisation’s crisis response will not perform at the level of its documentation. It will perform at the level of its people’s preparation. Those are rarely at the same level.
Why rehearsal changes the outcome
The good news is that this gap can be closed, but not by writing a better plan.
Confidence under pressure is not a personality trait. It is a product of familiarity. Leaders who have already experienced the disorientation of a fast moving situation, the incomplete picture, the competing demands, the pull between speed and accuracy behave differently the second time. They recognise the feeling. They know that early uncertainty is normal rather than a sign of failure. They have learned, through experience, which of their instincts to trust.
This is why realistic simulation matters so much, and why I have come to see it as one of the most valuable investments a leadership team can make. Not as a compliance exercise, and not, importantly, as a test of the plan. The plan is not the point. A well designed simulation covers so much more than the plan can capture: assumptions, leadership behaviours, communication flows and how a team actually works together when the temperature rises.
Simulations expose weaknesses while the stakes are still low. They reveal that the escalation route everyone assumed was clear is actually understood differently by three separate people. That the CEO and the Director of Communications have quietly incompatible instincts about when to go public. That the team’s decision making slows dramatically once legal risk enters the conversation. These are things no document review will ever surface and things you would much rather discover on a Tuesday afternoon than at two o’clock in the morning with the story already running.
Just as importantly, teams that have practised together respond together. They have a shared vocabulary, a shared memory of difficulty navigated and a realistic understanding of each other’s strengths under pressure. That shared experience is a form of organisational capability, and like any capability, it is developed, not documented.
If I have learned one thing from years of standing beside leaders in difficult moments, it is that people perform under pressure according to what they have practised, not what they have written down. Communication in a crisis is a behaviour, not a script and confidence is earned through rehearsal long before it is needed. That is why I place such value on immersive simulation: it lets leadership teams experience the uncertainty, ambiguity and pace of a developing crisis without the real world consequences, and it strengthens the things a plan never can: judgement, leadership and collective decision-making. Cognitas Global’s view360global platform is a good example of what this looks like in practice. It places teams inside realistic, evolving scenarios where they make decisions together, feel the pressure build and then review honestly how they responded. The outcome is not a validated document but something far more useful: better conversations, sharper judgement and a leadership team that has met a crisis before and knows it can meet one again.
A closing reflection
None of this is an argument against planning. Keep the manual. Keep the templates. Keep the contact lists up to date. They matter, and in the middle of a crisis you will be glad of them.
But be honest about what they can and cannot do.
Plans are important. But plans don’t make decisions. People do. Plans don’t stand in front of cameras, or reassure anxious employees, or weigh an impossible trade-off with the clock running. People do all of that, and they do it well or badly depending on whether they have ever done anything like it before.
So, the question worth asking your leadership team is not Do we have a plan? Almost everyone does.
The question is: have the people who will carry that plan ever actually experienced a crisis before being forced to manage one?
If the honest answer is no, then the document in the drawer is offering more comfort than protection. The quality of your response will depend far less on that document than on the people around the table, and on whether they were given the chance to practise while it didn’t matter so they are ready when it does.
About the author
Abby Mangold is the Founder of Mangold Consultancy and a trusted advisor to CEOs, boards and executive teams. A former journalist with decades of experience in media training and crisis communications, she has spent her career preparing senior leaders for the moments when their judgement, credibility and communication come under scrutiny and standing alongside them when those moments arrive.
Abby has coached executives minutes before difficult interviews, supported organisations through genuinely testing situations and been in boardrooms where critical decisions are made. Her focus is not on what leaders should say, but on how they think under pressure.
About Mangold Consultancy
Mangold Consultancy works with senior leaders and organisations on:
- Crisis communications: counsel before, during and after an incident
- Media training: journalist-led preparation for interviews, press conferences and scrutiny
- Crisis preparedness and simulation: designing and delivering realistic exercises, in collaboration with Cognitas Global, that test decision-making, leadership behaviour and communication under pressure
- Executive coaching: building the confidence and judgement leaders need for high-stakes communication
- Reputation counsel: advising boards and executive committees on issues with the potential to become crises