When the Crisis Playbook Stops Working
Most crisis communications plans are built for familiar problems: a service outage, a contained incident, a situation with known facts and predictable questions. They assume a degree of order.
The crises that actually test leadership rarely cooperate. They arrive incomplete, escalate unevenly, and trigger emotional responses long before the facts are settled. In those moments, the standard playbook often stops working.
From the outside, the best responses can look “unexpected.” Not because leaders are improvising, but because the situation demands judgment beyond the assumptions the plan was built on. Unexpected tactics aren’t a creative risk. They’re what disciplined leadership looks like when alignment is clear and conditions are abnormal.
What “Unexpected” Really Means in a Crisis
For senior leaders, it’s worth being precise. “Unexpected” does not mean unplanned, reactive, or reckless. It means the response doesn’t follow the usual script because the script no longer applies.
When this happens, leadership teams face a choice: force-fit a familiar response and hope it holds, or adapt deliberately with clarity and control. When leadership is aligned, adaptation looks intentional. When it isn’t, the same moves feel chaotic. That difference has very little to do with communications and everything to do with leadership.
Choosing Visible Leadership When Distance Would Be Easier
Video messages in a crisis are often described as a tactic. In reality, they’re a leadership decision.
Showing up early, plainly, and without overproduction signals accountability. It tells stakeholders that leadership understands the weight of the moment and is willing to carry it publicly. This only works when executives agree that presence matters more than comfort.
When alignment is missing, video gets delayed, over-scripted, or avoided altogether—not because it’s ineffective, but because leadership hasn’t agreed on who owns the moment or how much exposure is acceptable. Aligned teams don’t debate whether visibility is risky. They understand that absence is riskier.
Communicating Process Before Certainty
Another response that can appear “unexpected” is communicating before all the facts are known. From a leadership perspective, this isn’t premature disclosure. It’s process transparency.
Stakeholders don’t expect perfection in a crisis. They expect structure. A message that explains what is happening, what is being reviewed, and when the next update will come establishes control without speculation. That requires leadership alignment around a simple truth: acknowledging uncertainty is not weakness, and silence without explanation creates far more reputational risk.
When leadership agrees on that principle, these updates feel steady and intentional. When it doesn’t, organizations default to silence and lose trust they rarely regain fully.
Treating Emotion as Strategic Input, Not Disruption
Crises are emotional by definition. Ignoring that reality doesn’t make responses more rational—it makes them less credible.
The decision here isn’t about tone polishing. It’s about posture. Aligned leadership teams authorize language that acknowledges frustration, fear, or disappointment without inflaming the situation or overcommitting. They understand that facts alone don’t stabilize trust.
This isn’t soft thinking. It’s situational awareness. When leaders treat emotional response as data rather than noise, communications land with credibility. When they don’t, even accurate messages sound detached.
Speaking Differently to Different Stakeholders—On Purpose
One of the clearest signals of leadership alignment is comfort with differentiated messaging.
Employees, customers, investors, and the media are not looking for the same thing in a crisis. Pretending otherwise is a leadership failure, not a communications one. Aligned teams decide what the core truth is, what varies by audience, and who owns each conversation.
From the outside, this can look unexpected. Internally, it reflects clarity. Without alignment, organizations cling to a single, diluted message that satisfies no one and frustrates everyone.
The Pattern Leaders Should Notice
Across all of these examples, the pattern is consistent: unexpected responses succeed when leadership alignment makes them coherent. They fail when alignment is missing—not because the moves are wrong, but because authority, tone, and intent are unclear.
This is why crisis communications can’t be treated as a downstream execution problem. It’s a leadership function first.
