TL;DR
Most companies don’t have a PR problem — they have a decision problem. Communication reflects decisions; it doesn’t replace them. The best crisis response starts with clear leadership judgment, not better messaging.
In a recent blog post, I made the case that you don’t have a PR problem — you have a leadership problem. The feedback was, let’s say, spirited. Some folks pushed back and some agreed loudly. A lot of people had follow-up questions. So I’m going to keep going, because there’s a lot more to unpack here.
Here’s the core idea I want to drive home: communication reflects decisions. It doesn’t replace them. If you remember nothing else from this post, remember that.
Now let’s get into why so many “PR crises” aren’t really PR crises at all.
Not All Crises Are Created Equal
Before we go any further, it helps to acknowledge that crises come in different flavors.
Some are entirely outside your control. A natural disaster — a hurricane, an earthquake, a wildfire. A violent act on your premises caused by someone unrelated to your business. These things happen, and how you respond matters, but you didn’t cause them.
Some are adjacent to you. A supplier’s product gets recalled. A partner company implodes. You’re tangled up in it through no fault of your own, but you still have to manage the fallout.
And then there are the self-inflicted ones. Executive misconduct. A company lying about performance. A product that didn’t do what the company said it did (you know exactly the examples I’m thinking of). These are the crises that genuinely sink companies, and they almost always trace back to decisions — not to messaging.
It’s the third category I want to focus on, because that’s where leaders get this wrong over and over again.
How Crises Actually Get Built
Bad stories don’t appear out of nowhere. They don’t drop from the sky on a random Tuesday. They’re built slowly, quietly, layer by layer, often over months or years.
Here’s the pattern, and I see it constantly:
A shortcut gets taken. A complaint gets ignored. A behavior gets tolerated. Somewhere in the organization, someone notices and thinks, “Hmm, this might be a problem.” But nothing happens — because it’s inconvenient, or uncomfortable, or just not urgent enough to deal with right now.
Until it is.
Until a customer speaks up publicly. Until an employee posts something on LinkedIn. Until a reporter calls and asks a question no one wants to answer. And suddenly, everyone is in a conference room talking about “messaging” and “getting ahead of the story” — trying to figure out how to position something that, frankly, never should have happened in the first place.
That’s not a communication problem, that’s a leadership and decision-making problem. And the longer leaders pretend it’s the former, the worse the latter gets.
It’s a lot easier to fix a sentence than it is to fix a decision. So that’s what people try to do. But the sentence isn’t the issue.
Why “Fast and Fuzzy” Makes Everything Worse
Everyone says you have to move quickly in a crisis. I’ve said it. It’s true. But there’s a catch nobody talks about: clarity matters more than speed.
When leaders rush out something incomplete, overly careful, or so hedged it could mean anything, they don’t actually fix the problem. They create a second one. Now you’ve told your audience two things: you don’t understand what happened, and you don’t have control over the situation.
You know the phrases I’m talking about. They show up in every press release of a company in trouble:
- “We’re looking into it.”
- “We’re taking this seriously.”
- “We’re committed to…”
They sound like action. They mean absolutely nothing. And people — real people, customers, employees, regulators — know it.
In a moment of crisis, your audience isn’t just listening to what you say. They’re evaluating you. They’re asking:
- Do you understand what happened?
- Do you understand how serious it is?
- Do you take responsibility?
- Are you actually going to do something?
If the answer to any of those is unclear, trust drops like a rock. And once trust is gone, no amount of polished messaging is going to bring it back.
In a crisis, you may not control what’s happening around you, but you can absolutely control yourself — what you say, how you say it, and when you say it.
What Actually Works (And Why It’s Harder Than It Sounds)
Here’s the formula that actually works in a crisis. It’s deceptively simple:
Say what happened. Say what you’re doing about it. Say what happens next.
That’s it. No adjectives. No spin. No paragraph that starts with “We value…” followed by some line about “an abundance of caution.” Just the truth. Clear, direct, and specific.
Sounds easy, right? It isn’t.
If you’re struggling to say it clearly, the decision behind it probably isn’t clear either. Maybe you don’t actually know what you’re going to do yet. Maybe you’re trying to dodge accountability. Maybe people internally are still arguing about the right path forward. Whatever the reason, that lack of clarity shows up in your messaging every single time.
That’s why the best communicators aren’t just good with words. They’re good with judgment. They push for clarity before messaging. They ask uncomfortable questions. At my firm, Double Forte, we ask a lot of them: How did this actually happen? You want to say this, but you also want to say that, and those two things contradict each other — which one is actually true? Why didn’t anyone act on this sooner?
And here’s the thing — we don’t help draft anything until we get real answers. Because if we don’t know the truth, we can’t help. We’ll just help make it worse.
So a pro tip for anyone hiring a PR or communications firm: hire one that knows how to ask uncomfortable questions. The agency that just nods and starts writing? That’s the agency that’s going to help you bury yourself.
You cannot communicate your way out of something you decided your way into.
Better Decisions, Better Communication
The companies that handle crises well aren’t better at messaging. They’re better at deciding.
They decide faster. They decide more clearly. They stand behind those decisions, even when those decisions are hard. And because of that, their communication is simpler — and a lot more believable. Not because it’s been polished within an inch of its life, but because it’s true.
So the next time someone in your organization says, “We have a PR problem,” pause and ask a better question: What decision got us here? That’s where the real work is. Everything else is just cleanup on aisle five.
Communication doesn’t fix bad decisions. It reveals them. If you want better communication, start with better decisions. Everything else flows from there.
Want more on this topic? Listen to the full episode on the Everything Speaks podcast.