The situation is real, the facts are incomplete, and several people are waiting to be told what to do. What happens now shapes the next several months more than anything decided later.
The governing error is not panic. It is the reasonable instinct to establish the full picture before acting, held while three clocks nobody controls continue to run.
People before institutions
Where anybody has been hurt, everything institutional waits. Not as an ethical flourish but as the actual first item.
Attend to the injured. Make the situation safe. Reach the family directly and personally, before they hear it from anybody else, and do that yourself rather than through a communications function.
An organization that gets this order wrong will not recover the position, and the failure is remembered in the community for a decade. It is also, in practice, the most common serious mistake, because the institutional obligations arrive with more noise and more people asking.
Establish what is known
Before deciding anything, separate three categories and keep them separate out loud.
Confirmed: verified by somebody who saw it. Reported: told to us by somebody, not yet verified. Assumed: what we are inferring.
In the first hours these blur constantly, and the blurring is where the worst decisions come from. A reported figure repeated three times becomes a confirmed figure with no verification having occurred, and the organization then acts on it and occasionally states it publicly.
The recorder should mark each item in the log with its category. It costs nothing and it is the discipline that most reliably prevents the second crisis, which is having said something untrue.
The clocks you do not control
Waiting for complete information feels prudent because the cost of acting early is visible and the cost of waiting is not. Three things expire while you wait.
Statutory and contractual deadlines. Reporting obligations to a regulator, notice provisions to an insurer, licensing requirements. These have fixed periods, they begin when the event occurred rather than when you finished understanding it, and missing one converts an incident into a separate and worse problem. This is why counsel and the insurer appear early in the notification order rather than after the picture is clear.
The account being formed elsewhere. People affected are already talking. Within hours a version exists, and it becomes the baseline everything you say afterward responds to.
Your own people. Staff who learn from outside sources conclude they are not trusted, and that conclusion outlasts the situation.
Say what you do not know
The resolution to the tension between speed and accuracy is not a compromise between them. It is a form of statement that is complete while the facts are not.
Here is what happened. Here is what we do not yet know. Here is what we are doing now. Here is when we will say more.
That is publishable within hours, it commits to nothing that may prove wrong, and it establishes the organization as the source. Leaders resist it because it feels like admitting inadequacy. It reads to everybody else as competence, and the alternative is a complete statement three days late responding to somebody else’s account.
Whatever date you give for more information, meet it. A follow-up that does not arrive when promised does more damage than the original uncertainty.
What not to do in the first hours
Do not speculate about cause. Not publicly, not internally, and particularly not in writing. Early cause theories are frequently wrong, they are quoted later, and a written speculation about fault will be read by people who were not in the room.
Do not assign blame. It is not knowable yet, and doing it early tells everybody that the organization’s first instinct under pressure is to locate a person.
Do not make commitments you have not costed. Assurances given in the first hours to calm a situation become the standard you are held to, and the person giving them usually lacks the authority they are exercising.
Do not let everybody talk. One voice. Everybody else refers enquiries, which requires having told them so.
The tempo after the first hours
Set a rhythm early rather than working continuously until people fail.
A short standing check-in at fixed intervals, twenty minutes at most, where the picture is updated and actions are confirmed. Fixed times mean nobody has to interrupt to find out where things stand, which is what consumes the coordinator otherwise.
And send people home in shifts, starting sooner than feels right. Anything running past a day requires people who slept, and the person least able to judge whether they should be relieved is the one who has been there longest.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD