Before the Phone Rings
How preparation before a crisis determines the quality of your response when it matters most.
Crisis Doesn't Build Character. It Reveals Preparation.
By Rebecca
For more than three decades, I've stood beside people and organizations on the worst day of their lives.
A fire. A death under circumstances no one saw coming. A violent incident on the property. A ransomware attack that froze every clinical system in a building full of people who needed care that very hour.
I've been in the room when the call came in. And I've sat, years later, in a deposition, watching a single sentence—spoken too quickly, in the chaos of those first moments by someone who meant well—become a piece of evidence.
I built my career in senior living and healthcare, where the stakes are highest and the margin for error is smallest. But here's what I understand now that I didn't fully grasp early on, and it has nothing to do with any one industry: the crisis itself is rarely what defines an organization or a person.
What defines them is the response.
And the response is usually determined long before anyone knows there's going to be a crisis at all.
That's as true for a founder, an executive, or a public figure as it is for a 200-bed community. If people place themselves, their money, their health, or their loved ones in your hands, you're one bad day away from needing a plan you should already have.
The First Hours Shape the Next Several Weeks
A crisis compresses time. In the first few hours, an organization—or a single person—makes a series of decisions that shape everything that follows.
Who speaks, and who does not.
What gets confirmed, and what is held back.
Whether the people closest to you hear it from you first, or from someone else.
When we make these decisions for the first time under pressure, we tend to make them poorly. That isn't a character flaw. It's physiology.
Adrenaline is a poor lawyer and an even worse communicator.
A statement made in the heat of the moment—in a boardroom, in a hallway, or in a text sent too quickly—doesn't disappear when the moment passes. It becomes part of the record.
So the real question is never, "What do we say now?"
It's, "What did we decide—in writing—before the phone ever rang?"
A Crisis Plan Is More Than a Document
Most organizations treat a crisis communications plan as a marketing asset—something that lives in a binder no one opens until it's too late.
I'd ask you to see it differently.
It's closer to a legal instrument.
The contact lists, pre-approved messaging, and decision trees identifying who speaks and who remains silent aren't bureaucratic formalities. In regulated industries, they may intersect with attorney-client privilege, quality assurance protections, and regulatory requirements. That's why I tell clients legal counsel belongs in the room when the plan is written—not to make it cold, but to make it survivable.
The principle extends well beyond any single industry.
The people I've watched navigate crises well—a facility facing a wrongful death claim, an executive responding to a public accusation, a leader whose organization suffered a cyberattack overnight—all shared one characteristic.
They had thought it through before they needed to.
They knew who would speak.
They had language prepared that was honest without being reckless.
They weren't inventing it during the worst hour of their professional lives.
There are three reasons to build that kind of plan, and not one of them has anything to do with good press.
- The first is speed. Preparation removes friction during the hours that matter most, allowing you to execute instead of deliberate.
- The second is discipline. A plan clearly identifies who is authorized to speak while protecting everyone else from saying something that sounds compassionate at 9:00 p.m. but becomes damaging evidence in the light of the next morning.
- The third is recovery. A real plan extends beyond the acute crisis into the work no one photographs: rebuilding trust, retaining your people, protecting your reputation, and keeping the organization moving forward. The worst day is loud. Recovery is quiet—and it almost always takes longer than anyone expects.
Two Types of Crisis. One Kind of Preparation.
Crises don't all arrive the same way.
The sudden crisis is the one we naturally picture—unexpected, immediate, and fast.
The smoldering crisis is quieter and, frankly, often more dangerous: a developing pattern, a relationship slowly deteriorating, or a problem that has been visible for months to everyone except the people who most needed to recognize it.
By the time it surfaces publicly, consequences have already begun.
I've watched both kinds destroy organizations that were doing genuinely good work.
I've also watched both kinds be managed exceptionally well—not because those leaders were luckier, but because they'd done the quiet work beforehand.
The difference is timing, not preparation.
The same disciplines serve both.
What's Changed—and Why It Matters to All of Us
The events most likely to demand a coordinated crisis response have expanded dramatically in recent years, and that expansion isn't limited to healthcare.
Cybersecurity threats sit near the top of the list. Healthcare remains one of the most frequently targeted sectors, but no industry is immune. These events come with their own timelines—breach notifications, regulatory reporting requirements, forensic investigations—and one unbreakable rule:
Your public response cannot get ahead of the facts.
Then there's synthetic media.
Fabricated videos.
Cloned voices.
AI-generated content designed to look and sound like you—or someone your audience trusts.
The same technology transforming our workplaces has also made establishing the truth far more difficult during the critical hours when speed matters most.
Finally, there is the relentless pace of social media.
A video posted before lunch.
A one-sided account reaching thousands before you've gathered the facts.
The old approach of "We'll issue a statement by the end of the day" no longer works in a world that moves by the minute.
The Hardest Sentence
There's one sentence in every crisis response that's harder to craft than all the others combined.
It's the one that sits at the intersection of compassion and liability.
Here's what I've learned after decades in those rooms:
Sympathy is not the same as admitting fault.
Many jurisdictions, including Tennessee, have laws that generally protect expressions of sympathy from being used as evidence of liability in civil cases. Genuine compassion isn't just appropriate—it's the right thing to offer. What crosses into far riskier territory is assigning blame or accepting responsibility before the facts are known.
A person experiencing profound loss deserves authentic humanity.
You deserve words that won't unnecessarily create legal exposure.
Both things can be true simultaneously.
Good preparation allows you to honor both.
This is also why silence is rarely the right answer.
Silence doesn't keep you out of the story.
Very often, silence becomes the story.
The strongest response is honest, measured, and prepared—delivered with a steady voice on a day when nothing feels steady.
This Is Bigger Than Any One Industry
I built my career where the stakes are highest and the margin for error is smallest.
But the longer I do this work, the clearer it becomes that the underlying lesson isn't industry-specific.
Any leader entrusted with the confidence of others is one difficult day away from needing to respond with clarity, speed, and integrity.
Any professional who has spent years building a reputation can watch it become complicated in a matter of hours.
Any person navigating a public accusation, a family crisis, or a professional failure faces the same fundamental truth:
The response matters just as much as the event.
And the response is shaped by the decisions made before it ever became necessary.
The leaders I admire most—in healthcare, law, business, and life—aren't the ones who've never faced a crisis.
They're the ones who prepared for one.
They knew their values well enough to speak from them under pressure.
They knew whom they could trust.
They had already considered the language they would use.
And they possessed a clarity about who they were that didn't disappear when circumstances became difficult.
That steadiness isn't luck.
It's the quiet, ordinary work done long before anything goes wrong.
A crisis may be unpredictable.
It should never catch you unprepared.
So here's the question—and it's one worth answering today, not in the hour you need it:
If the call came in within the next hour, would you already know who you are in that moment?
What you stand for?
Who you'd lean on?
What you'd say?
Because the people who answer "yes" aren't the ones who've never been tested.
They're the ones who decided—long before the test—that they would be ready.
With purpose,
Rebecca
