Corporate crisis: The broken heart of communications
Communications is moving from treating crisis as an event to understanding it as a condition.
This shift was at the centre of a panel on crisis management at the Davos Communications Summit, currently underway in Switzerland.
The discussion, moderated by Katja Fasink, CEO of key7 Communications and Cyber Security, was nominally about crisis in 2025.
The deeper argument was broader, focusing on how public life has changed, and on how crisis now arrives as part of the operating environment rather than as a rare interruption.
A marked significant change
The most arresting formulation came from Maxim Behar, WCFA president and CEO of M3 Communications Group, Bulgaria.
We no longer have the luxury of hours, he argued. We have minutes. In practical terms, that means institutions now have a very short window to establish both the facts and their credibility. The first contest in a crisis is no longer only about information; it is about belief.
This is a marked significant change from the older model of crisis communications.
For years, the discipline was organised around response i.e. establish the facts, clarify the sequence, issue the statement, correct the record.
The assumption underneath that model was that the truth, once properly articulated, would carry weight.
Today, truth enters a far more unstable public arena, shaped by outrage, identity, digital acceleration, accumulated mistrust and emotional interpretation, by the time an institution responds, judgment is often already forming.
Crisis now travels differently
This is why crisis can no longer be framed as something that happens “out there”, in the abstract realms of geopolitics, markets or statecraft.
In my contribution to the panel, I pointed to the Roedean and King David school tennis fixture as an example of how quickly large political and social tensions localise.
South Africans saw this recently when the fixture became a national controversy, drawing allegations of antisemitism, a public apology and, ultimately, the resignation of Roedean’s head of high school.
A tension many would have treated as global or ideological quickly moved into a school environment and unfolded among children, parents, and communities.
Crisis now travels differently. It enters daily life with speed and very little warning.
Trust is a precondition
Once a crisis is understood as a condition, the communications task also changes. It is no longer enough to ask whether the statement is accurate, legally sound, or well-timed.
The more pressing question is whether the institution has enough standing for its account to be believed while the facts are still settling. In this environment, being right and being believed are no longer the same thing.
Diego Biasi, PR and digital strategy consultant and founder and CEO of BPRESS Italy, sharpened this further.
Crisis, he said, can happen at any moment, and investment in customer trust and brand authenticity can shape how the narrative unfolds under pressure.
He is right.
Trust is no longer a reputational reward that follows a well-managed response. It is the precondition that determines whether a response has force in the first place.
Institutions that have built credibility over time arrive in crisis with something to draw on. Those who have not are often trying to manufacture trust in the very moment they need public confidence.
Emotion outruns formal communication.
Sergii Bidenko, reputation and crisis advisor at SEC Newgate Ukraine and member of the management board of ICCO, brought in another dimension that communications practitioners sometimes understate.
He described corporate crisis through the metaphor of a broken heart, emphasising the need for support, clarity and calm.
That language is useful because it captures the emotional structure of crisis.
Institutions often think they are managing facts. The public is frequently processing shock, fear, betrayal, anger and exposure.
In that gap, emotion outruns formal communication.
The first wave is led by reaction, fragments, screenshots, commentary and moral interpretation. By the time the official position is ready, the event's emotional meaning may already be circulating.
The stratgic lesson
The strategic lesson is clear. The future of crisis communications will not be won by speed alone, even in a world measured in minutes.
It will be shaped by whether institutions have done the slower work in advance, building trust, aligning leadership, strengthening culture, developing credible relationships and behaving consistently enough that their voice carries authority when it counts.
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