Managing emergencies, crises, and disasters successfully means recognizing the patterns of adverse exposure, success, failure, and defeat. Understanding these patterns enables The Lukaszewski Group to prepare management's actions, emotions, and expectations before and during emergency situations.

Business organizations rarely close the doors and cease operations because of a crisis situation, no matter how catastrophic. However, a high-profile crisis can generate serious temporary harm to reputation, credibility, and integrity. We focus on limiting the scope of crisis visibility, reducing mistakes, and controlling surprise. Our communication strategy stresses focus, control, and patterns of positive action. We use six key crisis preparation steps:

• Visibility analysis
• Vulnerability analysis
• Key issue identification
• Scenario development
• Message development
• Installation, tools, and testing

Equally important in crisis management is understanding the various dimensions of crisis situations that need to be managed sometimes sequentially, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes at different times. But virtually every crisis situation has these crucial dimensions that require special attention, if not specific planning, and most importantly, management awareness and participation. The dimensions of crises include:

• The competitive dimension
• The employee dimension
• The emotional dimension
• The geographic dimension (all crises are local at the start)
• The legal dimension
• The public policy/community dimension
• The victim dimension
• The visibility dimension

For more specific information, please go to TLG Practice Areas.