3 Examples of a Crisis Management Plan

John Spacey, March 08, 2020

A crisis management plan is a plan to handle a crisis after it has occurred. This is a type of action plan that details efforts to recover from a serious problem. The following are illustrative examples of a crisis management plan.

Crisis Management Plan

A full crisis management plan is a five part action plan with the following sections: assessment, immediate actions, ongoing management, communications and recovery assessment. These can be viewed as the stages of crisis management whereby you assess the crisis, implement a tactical solution, determine root cause, implement a permanent solution and communicate the crisis to stakeholders. At the end of the crisis, you may additionally perform a recovery assessment to improve these processes in future. In the following example, an electric utility experiences a widespread outage of its grid after an ice storm and develops a plan to recover services.

Action Plan

Crisis management is a high speed activity that prioritizes action over excessive planning. As such, a crisis management plan can simply be a list of anything that you plan to do to address a crisis. For example, a bicycle helmet company that discovers that its products are defective and have caused a number of serious injuries may quickly list some of the things they need to do to address the problem.

Crisis Communication Plan

Crisis management often requires timely communication to a variety of stakeholders. Such communications often have legal, reputational and financial implications such that they may be carefully crafted to avoid unintended consequences. All this calls for a plan that identifies elements such as your target audience for each communication and who needs to approve each message.