Somewhere in your organisation, probably in a shared drive nobody has opened since it was approved, sits a crisis communications plan. It likely describes a single, well-behaved crisis that follows a tidy linear path, along the lines of: something goes wrong, the team assembles, holding statements go out, the story runs its course, everyone conducts a wash-up meeting. It assumes the crisis will arrive alone, stay in its lane and wait politely while you respond.
However, the modern business, media, consumer and social media landscape means that your stakeholders are everywhere, all the time, and that reputational risks abound.
Given this context, we believe that the profession needs a new term for what preparedness now has to be, and we’re proposing one: polyfunctional crisis preparedness. Readiness that works across many crisis types, many organisational functions and many channels at once, because that is how crises now arrive.
Key takeaways
- Crises no longer arrive one at a time: PwC’s Global Crisis and Resilience Survey found 91% of organisations had experienced at least one serious disruption beyond the pandemic in the previous two years.
- Confidence and readiness are two very different things: Deloitte found nearly 90% of executives were confident in their organisation’s ability to handle a scandal, while just 17% had actually tested that assumption in an exercise.
- Plans fail on human factors: The Business Continuity Institute’s 2025 research found crisis plans break down over people not responding, outdated contact lists and poor cross-team coordination.
- Real crises jump categories and functions at once: The 2025 M&S cyberattack became an IT incident, an operational crisis, a customer-data story, a City story and a matter of parliamentary scrutiny within days.
- The AI blindspot: NewsGuard found leading chatbots repeated false claims on news topics 35% of the time in 2025, nearly double the year before. Monitoring what AI assistants say about a brand, during a crisis and in peacetime, is now part of the job.
- Peacetime investment is what determines the outcome: Pentland Analytics and Aon found companies that recovered well from major reputation crises gained up to 20% in shareholder value the following year, while poor responders lost up to 30%. The difference came down to preparation done before the crisis hit.
The permacrisis is the operating environment
The vocabulary has been catching up with reality for a few years, and even Collins Dictionary made “permacrisis” its word of the year in 2022, defining it as an extended period of instability resulting from a series of catastrophic events. Around the same time the economic historian Adam Tooze popularised “polycrisis”, the idea, picked up by the World Economic Forum, of disparate crises interacting so that their combined impact far exceeds the sum of the parts.
Both terms describe the modern world as we know it today, yet neither describes what organisations should do about it, which is where polyfunctional preparedness comes in. If crises are now continuous and compounding, preparedness has to be a standing organisational capability rather than a document, and one founded in readiness and reactivity.
The data backs the gloomy outlook, incidentally. PwC’s Global Crisis and Resilience Survey found 91% of organisations had experienced at least one serious disruption beyond the pandemic in the previous two years, averaging three and a half each.
The preparedness gap
Against that backdrop, the state of actual readiness is uncomfortable reading. Capterra’s survey of US business leaders found only 49% had a formal, documented crisis communications plan. Forrester’s 2025 research found that even among large companies, where 77% have a documented plan, only 39% run an annual crisis simulation.
The most telling figure remains Deloitte’s: nearly 90% of executives were confident in their organisation’s ability to handle a scandal, while just 17% had tested that assumption in an exercise. That 73-point gap between confidence, assumption and blind faith – and evidence – is where reputations are lost and shareholder value diminishes. A plan that has never been rehearsed is a hypothesis, and a crisis is a bad time to run your first experiment.
There’s a reason the testing matters more than the document gathering dust on your team’s shared drive. The Business Continuity Institute’s 2025 research on crisis communications found that when plans fail, they fail on human factors: people not responding, contact lists that are out of date, poor coordination between teams. None of those weaknesses is visible on paper; all of them are visible within twenty minutes of a simulation starting.
Why the single-scenario plan is dead
The deeper problem isn’t the absence of plans, it’s the assumptions on which too many plans are built. Most are built scenario by scenario, for example one for a product recall, one for a data breach, one for an executive departure. Tidy, and increasingly fictional, because the defining feature of the modern crisis is that it refuses to stay in its category. Your customers, investors, regulators, commentators increasingly shape and define the standards against which you are measured, and the instigators of a crisis are, more often than not, unexpected.
In the past two years alone in the UK, there have been some profound and highly prominent examples of business crises. The cyberattack on Marks & Spencer in 2025 started as an IT incident and became, within days, an operational crisis of empty shelves, a customer-data story, a City story about a £300 million profit hit, and eventually a matter of parliamentary scrutiny.
The Jaguar Land Rover attack went further: a five-week production shutdown, around 5,000 supply-chain businesses affected, a government-backed loan, and an estimated £1.9 billion cost to the UK economy, the most damaging cyber event in British history. And the CrowdStrike outage of 2024 demonstrated that you don’t even need to be the source of the failure; a routine software update from a supplier grounded aircraft and crashed 8.5 million machines belonging to other people.
In each case, ask a simple question: whose crisis plan was this? The CISO’s? Operations’? Comms’? Investor relations’? The honest answer is all of them simultaneously, which is precisely the scenario the single-scenario plan cannot see.
A crisis that presents on four fronts at once will find every seam between your functions, and it will do so at speed: the classic Freshfields study found over two-thirds of crises go international within 24 hours, while the average company takes 21 hours to say anything meaningful. Consumer expectations have tightened since; more recent research puts the expected response time at under an hour.
The AI front
To the traditional fronts, add a new one that your current crisis communications plan almost certainly ignores: the information environment itself is no longer reliable, and machines are now part of your audience.
AI misinformation has moved from theoretical risk to routine tactic. NewsGuard’s monitoring found leading chatbots repeated false claims on news topics 35% of the time in 2025, nearly double the year before, and its researchers track thousands of AI-generated sites that publish with no human oversight. The MIT finding that falsehood travels roughly six times faster than truth on social platforms predates all of this; generative tools have simply industrialised the supply.
The deepfake threat is no longer hypothetical either, whether the charge is led by a malicious state actor, industrial competitor or bored teenager in their childhood bedroom. The engineering firm Arup lost $25 million when an employee joined a video call on which every other participant, including the chief financial officer, was synthetic. Any plan that treats “verify before acting” as a given now needs to specify how.
And there is a subtler exposure: when your crisis breaks, people will ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini about it, and the answer they get depends on what the model finds. Monitoring what AI systems are saying about your brand, during a crisis and in peacetime, has quietly become part of the job.
What polyfunctional preparedness looks like in practice
None of this argues for despair, or for a 400-page plan, rather it argues for building preparedness the way crises now behave. In practice, the organisations doing this well share five habits.
They build a genuinely cross-functional crisis capability, with communications, legal, IT, HR, operations and investor relations around the same table before anything is on fire, with clear authority to act.
They plan by capability rather than scenario, running multi-scenario playbooks that assume any incident can jump categories, so escalation routes and decision rights hold whatever shape the crisis takes. They maintain channel-specific protocols, because the statement that works on a results call fails on TikTok, and pre-agreed formats for each channel buy you the speed audiences now expect.
They also monitor with AI in mind, tracking not just coverage and social sentiment but what AI assistants are saying about them, and they’ve decided in advance how to counter synthetic content. And they exercise all of it, at least annually and ideally more, on the understanding that the simulation is where the plan actually gets written.
The peacetime investment
One more habit belongs on the list, and it’s the least procedural: the work you do on your reputation when nothing is wrong.
The evidence here is striking. Pentland Analytics and Aon studied a decade of major reputation crises and found the companies that recovered well gained up to 20% in shareholder value over the following year, while the poor responders lost up to 30%. What separated the winners wasn’t blind luck, it was prior investment: preparation done in peacetime, visible leadership, fast and accurate communication, and a stock of goodwill built before it was needed. A solid bank of evidence of good deeds and clear purpose.
Reputation resilience behaves like insurance, with the premiums paid in advance, through consistent communication, genuine stakeholder relationships and a leadership team the public already knows and has some reason to trust.
That, ultimately, is the case for treating crisis management PR as a continuous discipline rather than an emergency purchase. The single-scenario plan assumed crises were rare, singular and polite. They are now frequent, compound and fast, and they will test every function you have at the same time.
Preparedness has to be built the same way: cross-functional, multi-scenario, channel-aware, AI-literate and rehearsed until responding well is a reflex rather than a scramble.
The brands that come through the permacrisis strongest won’t be the ones that avoided every crisis, they’ll be the ones that were match-fit when their number came up.
FAQs
- What is polyfunctional crisis preparedness? It’s a readiness model built to work across many crisis types, organisational functions and communication channels at once, rather than a single, scenario-specific plan.
- Why do most crisis communications plans fail? Not because they’re absent, but because they’re built by scenario and rarely tested. The Business Continuity Institute’s 2025 research found plans typically fail on human factors – people not responding, outdated contact lists, poor coordination, weaknesses that only surface once a simulation is actually run.
- How does AI misinformation change crisis communications planning? It adds a new front that most existing plans don’t cover. NewsGuard found leading chatbots repeated false claims on news topics 35% of the time in 2025, and AI-generated sites with no human oversight are proliferating. Crisis plans now need to account for verifying synthetic content and monitoring what AI assistants are saying about a brand, not just traditional media and social sentiment.
- Does investing in reputation before a crisis actually pay off? Yes, measurably. Pentland Analytics and Aon’s decade-long study of major reputation crises found companies that recovered well gained up to 20% in shareholder value the following year, while poor responders lost up to 30%. The difference consistently traced back to preparation and goodwill built in peacetime, not the response itself.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
