I hear, “Why is it so hard for people to just admit they messed up?” quite often when discussing issues in my crisis management and communications work, often with a sigh of frustration from a client who is dealing with someone who is doubling down on a mistake instead of owning it. Thankfully, the answer is simple: our brains are wired to protect us from the psychological pain of being wrong. Taking accountability can seem like a threat to our identity. So how do we shift out of that...

When a company decides to reduce its workforce, the focus is almost entirely on the financial and operational logistics. Spreadsheets are balanced, severance packages are calculated, and legal risks are assessed. The most critical element, which is how the decision is communicated, is frequently treated as an afterthought. This oversight is a strategic mistake. A workforce reduction is a crisis, and how an organization manages it serves as a public stress test of its leadership, culture, and...

Many organizations don’t have a crisis management plan. They have a document, usually saved on a shared drive nobody has opened since 2019, filled with generic statements about "valuing our customers" and a phone tree that includes three people who no longer work there... When things go wrong (and they will!), the absence of a functional strategy can cause measurable financial damage. The PR firm 5WPR recently quantified this, finding that poor crisis communications cost US businesses an...