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I run an exercise with clients I call the Reputation Pre-Mortem. It’s one of the most unsettling things I do — not because I manufacture drama, but because what we find is almost always obvious in hindsight and almost never examined in advance.

Here’s how it works. Imagine a journalist is assigned a profile of your organization today. Not a crisis story — just a profile. They do what journalists do: Google your name and your senior team’s names. Check your reviews. Read your last few press releases. Scroll your social media. Pull up old news stories. Call a couple of people who’ve dealt with you. What story do they find?

Most leaders have never actually done this. They’ve assumed that because nothing’s on fire, everything is fine. But reputation problems don’t announce themselves before they become crises. They simmer in places leaders aren’t looking, until a journalist or a regulator or a plaintiff’s attorney finds them first.

What does your Google search surface? What does your employee review page say about working for you? What’s the ratio of positive reviews to negative ones — and more importantly, how do you respond to the negative ones? What’s the most embarrassing thing a disgruntled former employee could say about your organization that would be true?

That last question is always the one that gets quiet in the room.

The Pre-Mortem isn’t paranoia. It’s seeing your organization the way a stranger sees it, before the stranger is someone you don’t want showing up.

You don’t need me to run this exercise. Open a private browser right now and search your own name and your senior leaders’ names. Read what comes up. Then ask yourself: if this is what a journalist found before making a single call, would you be comfortable with that story?

If the answer makes you nervous, that’s the work. Better to find it now than to find it with a camera in your parking lot.

I’ll tell you exactly when you last took this seriously.

Every crisis plan is a fossil record. The scenarios you chose reveal what kept you up at night in the year it was written. The spokesperson list tells me who was in charge then, some of whom have probably left. The platform references tell me whether you were still calling Twitter “Twitter.” The holding statements tell me whether your legal team has loosened up since the last administration.

I pulled one out of a storage closet last year — the client had no idea it existed until I asked. The designated social media spokesperson had left the organization three years earlier. The section on “managing online complaints” referenced a platform nobody in the room recognized. The media contact list had fax numbers.

That wasn’t incorrect.  I mean it… there were fax numbers.

Here’s what bothers me about this: a crisis plan FEELS like a deliverable. It’s a physical object. It makes leadership feel responsible. It gets presented to the board, filed, and then quietly forgotten. Somewhere in that process, the organization decided that having the binder was the same thing as being prepared.

It isn’t. Preparation is a living thing. It gets updated when platforms change, when people leave, when your risk profile shifts. And it gets tested before the test is real. A plan that’s never been opened, run through, or stress-tested isn’t a safety net. It’s a trap — because it creates confidence you haven’t earned, in situations that punish overconfidence fast.

When’s the last time someone in your organization actually opened yours?

A company made a crisis worse with a single sentence. I still think about it.

Some of you may remember an 11-year-old slipped off a zipline at an indoor adventure park in Scarborough. He was okay — bruised, shaken, no lasting damage. The company had a clear window to respond like human beings. Here’s what they chose instead:

“We are aware of the incident and it is currently under review with our insurers and legal counsel. Given that this involves a minor, we are not providing interviews or comments at this time.”

OK now… stop for a second. Seriously…

“Under review with our insurers.”

This is Jeff writing this, not AI but seriously… at the risk of sounding like an AI bot: “Let that sink in.” If that doesn’t make you shiver, there’s something wrong with you.

Read that as a parent reads it. Not as a communications professional. As the parent of the kid who just came home from the hospital.

That sentence tells you exactly where the company’s head was. It wasn’t with you… it wasn’t with your child, or your family. It was with their… deductible!?

What happened next was predictable. The family’s belongings were still at the facility when they rushed to the hospital. Nobody from the company called to check on the child. Not that night. Not the next morning. Just that statement, and then silence.

Here’s the thing: they thought they were being careful. That “insurers and legal counsel” signaled responsibility. That saying nothing was safer than saying something wrong. Every part of that calculation was backwards.

That statement didn’t reduce their legal exposure. It INCREASED it — because it told a family their child was a liability line item.

A plaintiff’s attorney reads “under review with our insurers” and sees a gift. It’s basically a written confession that your first thought was the lawsuit, not the people.

The fix costs nothing. Call the family. Check on the child. Say sorry like you mean it. Talk about safety, not insurance. Be a business that acts like it cares whether kids leave your facility the same way they came in.

That’s it. But no…. they chose the harder path.

It feels like a misunderstanding.

Trust me, I’ve been there… Someone calls. They sound puzzled, not panicked. “Have you seen this?” They send a link, or a screenshot, or a tweet. Your stomach moves before your brain catches up.

This is what I call Danger Hour. Not because the story is loud yet. Because nobody is sure it EVEN IS a story.

Decisions made now lock in faster than people realize. Whoever speaks first to whoever asks first becomes the record. Whoever gets pulled into a meeting now misses the call that actually matters.

What to do in this hour: Stop. Get the right four people on a phone, not a Slack thread. Confirm what you actually know versus what you’ve only heard. Identify the next person on your team who will get a call from a reporter, and make sure they don’t pick up before you’ve talked.

Speed kills careers. Don’t let lack of speed kill yours. You don’t have to decide what to say… yet. That will come. Right now, you can decide who’s allowed to say anything at all.

If there’s a reasonable chance this is going to get talked about, don’t wait. You can issue a statement with who, what, when and where. Careers get broken on “How and Why.”

“Two fans have attacked each other at tonights Chris Stapleton concert. We’re aware of the issue and police have responded. We’ll have more information tonight at 10:30pm Eastern.”

There. You just bought yourself time.

Which is good… because you’re going to need to explain why the metal detectors weren’t working, how fans managed to get a gun into your venue, or why security didn’t respond right away. Those are the NEXT hours problems. You’ll get there soon enough.

Don’t try to fix it in the first hour. Just don’t make it worse before you understand it.

Joe Fontana had a 30-year political career — three decades as an MP, federal cabinet minister, and eventually Mayor of London, Ontario. Then came a $1,700 accounting discrepancy, and the RCMP came knocking.

His lawyer gave him textbook advice: say nothing, admit nothing, give prosecutors nothing to work with. In a courtroom, that’s defensible. As a strategy for a sitting mayor of 300,000 people, it was catastrophic.

Fontana said nothing. City councillors demanded his resignation publicly. Media showed up at his door. He hid. For two years, the court of public opinion held its session while he waited for the legal one. By the time the verdict came down, it barely registered. People had convicted him over breakfast months earlier.

Here’s what his lawyers didn’t account for: there is more than one courtroom. The legal system operates on evidence, procedure, and the presumption of innocence. The public operates on what they see, what they hear, and what they’re left to imagine when nobody speaks.

Silence isn’t neutral. It’s an invitation for other people to write your story, and they are not feeling generous.

Could better communications have saved him? Maybe not. He fudged receipts. He did the thing. But silence guaranteed the outcome. The public never heard accountability. They never saw leadership. They saw a guy hiding behind a lawyer over seventeen hundred dollars.

Your lawyer’s job is to keep you out of jail. A crisis communicator’s job is to make sure you still have a career, a reputation, and a life on the other side. Those two jobs are sometimes in direct conflict. Smart leaders plan for both courtrooms.

Most crisis plans have one fatal flaw: they assume you’ll have time to open the binder.

I’ve watched executives dig through 200-page documents while reporters were already in the parking lot. It never ends well. Nobody reads the plan during the crisis. Nobody. The binder looks great on a shelf. It makes the board feel better. It checks the compliance box. But when your phone rings at midnight and someone says ‘we have a situation,’ you’re not reaching for a binder. You’re reaching for a person.

What actually saves organizations in a crisis has almost nothing to do with documentation. It’s three things: one phone number that gets answered at 2am, smart key messages that are already drafted so you have something credible to say while the details are still unclear, and at least one rehearsal of the hard conversation before you’re in it for real.

The binder isn’t useless — it can serve as a reference document once the immediate fire is out. But it cannot replace the muscle memory that comes from having practiced, the trust that comes from knowing who to call, and the clarity that comes from messages built before your brain is flooded with adrenaline.

Ask yourself this: does your crisis plan have a pulse? Not a table of contents, not a list of stakeholders, not a flowchart with seventeen escalation steps. A pulse. Someone who answers. Something to say. A plan that breathes.

If the answer is no, you’re not prepared. You’re insured on paper.

Tom Peters once asked what would happen if we called it ‘Customer Helping’ instead of ‘Customer Service.’ He was onto something.

Service, as a word, implies something done to you. An oil change. A shoe shine. Noble enough, but transactional. The language shapes the behavior. When the goal is to service a customer, the metrics that follow are efficiency metrics — call handling time, cases closed per hour, cost per interaction. Nobody measures whether the person on the other end felt helped.

The difference shows up most clearly under pressure. A customer who has been genuinely helped by a company is sticky. They’re willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong because they have a track record to draw on. A customer who has been ‘serviced’ — processed, moved along, checked off a list — is ready to shop for alternatives. The crisis is just the excuse they needed.

I saw this in an airport in Aliso Viejo, California, navigating a cascade of delayed flights and security disruptions. The companies that were already building real relationships with their customers — airlines, hotels, travel brands — weren’t scrambling to manage reputation damage. They were collecting goodwill from customers who were rooting for them.

The companies that had merely serviced their customers were watching those same people post their frustrations online.

You’ve heard the expression ‘your customers know the difference.’ That’s true. What’s also true is that your org chart usually doesn’t. The companies winning customer loyalty right now aren’t the ones with the most efficient call centers. They’re the ones where real humans pick up, listen, and stay until the problem is solved.

Are you servicing your customers, or are you helping them?

Toronto proposed four non-profit grocery stores. New York was already building them. Two cities, two countries, sending the same message to the grocery industry: you’re not solving this, so we will.

When a government or community publicly challenges your business model, most corporate instincts are terrible. Option one: ignore it, hope it goes away, bet on public attention spans. Option two: defend your pricing with spreadsheets. Option three: get indignant and point out that government has no business being in the grocery business. All three are wrong.

The move — the one that actually works — is to lean in. Welcome it publicly. Three sentences: we think anyone working to improve food access in underserved communities is doing important work. We’ve operated in these areas for decades. We know the challenges. If the city wants to pilot this, we’d be glad to share what we’ve learned.

That’s it. That’s the whole playbook.

Here’s what it accomplishes. You signal confidence without arrogance. You position alongside the community instead of across from it. You let the world quietly notice how brutally complex the grocery business actually is without ever having to say ‘good luck with that.’ The city will discover the staffing problems, the supply chain problems, the land use problems. You don’t have to point them out. Your calm, collaborative posture says everything.

The instinct to get defensive when someone publicly challenges your business model is natural. It’s almost always the wrong move. Defensiveness signals threat. Collaboration signals confidence. In any industry where the public already has questions about you, the difference between those two signals is the difference between a news cycle and a narrative.

European bookings to the United States are down 14 percent year over year. The World Travel and Tourism Council projects $12.5 billion in lost international visitor spending for 2026. That number is real, it’s arriving now, and waiting for it to self-correct is not a strategy.

Think about who pays the price when international travelers quietly choose somewhere else. Not the big brands — they can absorb this. It’s the locally-owned restaurant where the Frankfurt family would have had dinner. The independent tour operator. The family inn where they would have stayed. That’s where the damage lands.

So what’s within your control? Quite a bit, actually.

Redirect your marketing dollars to domestic travelers now — not in Q4. Domestic leisure demand is holding. Disney already made this pivot. If you haven’t, you’re behind.

Know your international mix. Latin American bookings aren’t seeing the same drop as European ones. Do you actually know where your remaining pockets of international growth are? If not, find out this week.

Call your overseas trade partners. Tour operators and booking agents know before you do when demand is softening. Those relationships need active maintenance right now, not reactive outreach when your numbers crater.

Lead with experience, not discounts. The temptation in a soft market is to cut price. It’s the wrong instinct. The operators who come through 2026 strongest will be the ones who sharpened their story — what makes their corner of the world irreplaceable. Winning doesn’t mean eroding margins to fill rooms.

You can’t control Washington. You can control your welcome. Start there.

At 11:40 pm last night, a plane hit a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia. At 2:45 am, Air Canada posted on X. Three hours and five minutes. In a crisis, that’s a lifetime.

I want to be fair. It was the middle of the night. People were scrambling. Nobody wants to say the wrong thing. I understand all of that. What I also understand is what was happening while Air Canada was quiet: every mainstream media outlet had the story. Social media had video. Families watching the news had no idea if their person was on that plane.

Silence in a crisis is not neutral. Someone else fills it.

When Jazz Aviation’s President finally spoke that morning, the words were right: ‘Today is an incredibly difficult day for our airline, our employees, and most importantly, the families and loved ones of those affected.’ That’s the right human instinct. Delivered too late. There was also the matter of Air Canada describing the two pilots killed as ‘two Jazz employees.’ I understand the corporate structure. Their passengers don’t care.

Here’s the script I give every executive who asks what to say when they don’t yet have all the facts: ‘We know there’s been an incident. We’re on site. We’re gathering information. We’ll update you the moment we know more. If you have a loved one on this flight, call this number.’

That’s it. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Air Canada did eventually set up a hotline and issue a full statement. Both were the right moves. Both were late.

The first hour of a crisis is the most consequential hour a leader will ever have. Don’t spend it being careful. Spend it being present.