4. Conclusion

Excerpt

In the introduction we shared the story of a training session on decision making and crisis communication during industrial incidents, led by one of the authors in October 2007 for a world leading industrial company in its field. At that time, a senior manager from the company’s headquarters disclosed a very serious problem in his organisation. Namely, in case of incidents at one of their facilities, the company's executives are unable to get credible information from subordinates through the internal hierarchy during the first few hours or even days. Indeed, their subordinates only ever share calming and reassuring reports about the scale of incidents and risks, even when the situation on the ground is much worse. We were lost for an explanation by the senior manager as to how such a problem could have arisen, let alone for practical solutions how to solve it. One year after the last crisis communication training, the company experienced the largest disaster in its entire history: tens of workers died and the company paid billions to reconstruct the damaged production site over several years. Many months beforehand, there had been early warnings about a risky deviation of the equipment that eventually caused the disaster, but such information did not reach headquarters in time to prevent the disaster. …