When a difficult situation reaches your organization, chances are good that you will be dealing with two crises at once.
The first is the event itself, and that will be more than enough to occupy all your focus and resources. The second is the pressure of communicating clearly and sensitively. Unfortunately, that is where things often go off the rails.
Whether your situation started with a complaint that has started gaining traction online, or a safety incident on a job site, or a leaked email, or something far worse, things can get out of hand quickly if you did not already have a plan in place. Reporters will often phone well before your own leadership team is up to speed.
In those early hours, employees can feel uncertain and leadership can feel exposed. Stakeholders want answers, but information is often incomplete. And the decisions made in the first day or two can shape the long-term reputational impact, even more than the event itself ever could.
Across some thirty years of helping organizations communicate, we have seen the same pattern consistently playing out. Organizations rarely lose trust because something difficult happened to them. More often, the trust is lost in how they communicated during and after the crisis.
Types of crises this work addresses
Crisis communications counsel applies to a wide range of situations. Some develop quickly. Others build slowly over weeks or months or years.
Operational and safety incidents. Workplace injuries or fatalities, industrial accidents, site evacuations, service disruptions, product recalls, food-safety questions, and incidents that bring sudden public attention to a normally quiet operation.
Financial, governance, and audit situations. External or provincial audits with public findings, executive-compensation controversies, board or governance disputes, restructuring, insolvency or creditor protection, procurement irregularities, and ministerial or regulatory reviews.
Leadership and personnel matters. Sudden departures of senior executives, misconduct allegations, internal investigations that move into public view, labour disputes, and harassment or workplace-culture investigations.
Privacy, cyber, and information events. Data breaches, ransomware incidents, leaked documents or recordings, hacked social-media accounts, and AI-generated audio or video that imitates executives or staff.
Reputational and online events. Social-media storms, viral customer complaints, activist or community campaigns, sustained negative coverage, and misinformation about your organization spreading faster than it can be answered.
Regulatory and legal exposures. Investigations by regulators, litigation that has moved into public view, class actions, compliance failures, and environmental or licensing concerns.
Different situations call for different responses. Some are short and intense. Others play out over months across employees, customers, regulators, donors, alumni, and the wider public. We can work with you to read the situation, find the right shape of response, and uniquely coach the people who have to deliver it.
What this work actually is
This is crisis communications. Calm, experienced judgment about what to say, when to say it, who should say it, and what tone will keep trust intact while facts continue to emerge.
Ideally, most crisis communications work is done before anything has happened. For some organizations that means building a plan from scratch. For others it means refining or stress-testing a plan they already have, or coaching to provide practice and confidence in expressing the message clearly. The plan, the spokesperson roster, the message library, the holding statements, the approval chain. Tabletop exercises, scenario reviews, and quiet conversations up front can lower the chance of ever needing a louder one in the heat of the moment.
When a situation does develop, Lorne can be there to offer strategic guidance and help craft key messages. He can offer coaching for the spokesperson who will need to step in front of a microphone or a room full of managers, employees, or stakeholders. When the moment calls for hour-by-hour management of a live event, he works alongside your key players to guide their responses. Part of that work is watching for the strategic moments where the conversation can credibly shift from reacting to a difficult event to re-establishing a more confident, forward-looking story. Those pivots, well timed and grounded in real action, often shape the long-term reputational outcome more than any single statement during the heat of the moment.
After the immediate event has passed, we can help you plan and deliver a controlled recovery with employees, customers, regulators, and the wider public, to rebuild confidence where it has been shaken and reinforcing it where it has held. This is where reputation can heal or harden, and much of the difference comes down to how the communication is handled.
Where this lane begins and ends
Your legal team, your cyber-incident responders, your HR investigators, and your operations managers all play their own vital roles. Clear crisis communication can help ensure they are all in sync with the same messaging. Strategy, crafting the right message, spokesperson preparation, stakeholder counsel, and tone and pacing all play key roles. Lorne has spent enough time in these situations to know where his advice helps, where it would only get in the way, and how to make the communications side of the response easier for everyone else at the table.
Why this matters more now than it used to
A generation ago, a difficult situation often took days to become public. Today it can take minutes. A screenshot, a social post, a customer review, or a piece of AI-generated audio or video can move a private matter into a public narrative before your leadership team is even aware of the gathering storm.
Once a crisis hits, stakeholders expect clear responses. They look closely at leadership and they ask, even if they never say it out loud:
- Do these people understand how serious this is?
- Are they being truthful?
- Are they listening to the people affected?
- Do they sound defensive?
- Will I be able to trust them once this is over?
The organizations that come through these moments well are the ones whose leaders sound caring, prepared, and honest in the moments that counted. Polished news releases rarely move trust on their own. Calm, credible leaders often do.
The rarer half of the work: preparing the person, not just the message
Most communications consultants will help you write a statement. Far fewer will sit with the person who has to deliver it and coach them until they feel ready.
That is the extra detail and discipline that Lorne brings. He has coached hundreds of students, educators, executives, doctors, and other professionals for high-stakes communication. Posture, pacing, eye line, breathing, bridges, and the art of recovery when a question lands harder than expected.
In a crisis, this can matter more than the wording of any statement. A well-written line read by an unprepared spokesperson can do serious damage. The reverse is also true. A calm, prepared leader can carry a difficult message and still hold the room.
Lorne brings both halves of this work to a single relationship, with one point of contact.
Where the experience comes from
Lorne Pike has spent more than 30 years in communications, marketing, facilitation, public engagement, and communication coaching. The crisis work has included counsel for one of Canada’s oldest companies through a creditor-protection process involving more than $13 million in debts, an engagement that ended with a far better outcome than anyone expected. It has also included media training for the management teams at one of Canada’s largest public college systems. Other work has included counsel for college administrators, emergency-response planners, medical professionals, business owners, and political leaders, in moments where every word mattered.
As a member of the International Association of Facilitators, Lorne has led public consultations, focus groups, and emotionally charged stakeholder meetings where the room needed someone with a steady hand. That side of the practice matters, because crises rarely play out as a single release or media availability. They can play out at staff assemblies, board reviews, town halls, regulator briefings, and one-on-one conversations.
When a conversation is worth having
A few of the signals worth a call:
- You are building a crisis communications plan from scratch, refining one that has gone stale, or would value a senior outside view on the plan you already have.
- You want to run a tabletop exercise, refresh a message library, or pressure-test a current plan.
- A new senior leader is taking on a public-facing role and would benefit from preparation before, not during, their first challenge.
- A board, a regulator, or a major stakeholder has raised a question your team is not yet ready to answer publicly.
- A product issue, recall, or safety concern is on the horizon and you want to think through the communication before it becomes urgent.
- A situation has already begun to develop and you would value a second opinion from someone outside your day-to-day team.
Calling in the early stages of any of these will always cost less than calling later.
A quieter kind of advisor
The kind of counsel most organizations need in these moments is not a large agency with a war-room atmosphere. It is one experienced advisor who is thoughtful, calm, strategic, discreet, and easy to trust quickly. Someone who will tell you the hard thing in the room rather than the comfortable thing in the hallway.
If that is the kind of relationship you have been meaning to put in place before you need it, reach out. Whether you want to be prepared for a crisis or are dealing with one already, let’s begin with a steady conversation and a clear next step. Book a free 15-minute consultation call or fill out our form.
