The first three hours

This article occupies the slot reserved for guest authors. The blog accepts contributions from professionals in the sector, from public administration and from academia.

Organisations that deliver a public service every day share an uncomfortable characteristic: their reputation is built slowly, through thousands of journeys that go well, and put at stake all at once, in an episode lasting a few hours.

Nobody remembers the bus that arrived on time. Everybody remembers the day something happened.

Why three hours

It is not a magic number. It is roughly how long a local episode takes to escalate: somebody films a video, shares it in a group chat, a local outlet picks it up, and from that point the organisation no longer decides when it speaks. It can only decide what it says.

Within that window four things must be resolved at once:

• Caring for the people affected.
• Establishing the facts with reasonable reliability.
• Coordinating with the competent authority.
• Saying something publicly that is true, useful and does not commit you on what is not yet known.

That is a lot to improvise. And yet most organisations improvise it.

What is decided beforehand

When we support a committee through a real episode, the difference between those that come through well and those that do not is almost never the spokesperson's skill. It lies in decisions taken months earlier:

Who activates. If there is no written threshold defining what level of incident activates the committee, somebody will have to make that call under pressure, and will probably make it late.

Who speaks. Not always the most senior person. It is whoever knows the operational detail and can hold a technical question without inventing.

What is not said. Committing to a cause before knowing it is the most expensive and most frequent mistake. What can and cannot be stated in the first hour must be written down in advance.

What happens with families. Care for people comes before public communication. If that fails, no press release fixes it.

A crisis manual that has not been rehearsed is a document. A crisis manual that has been rehearsed is a capability.

The value of the drill

Drills are uncomfortable. They take a whole morning of the leadership team and usually expose things nobody wanted to see: that nobody answers the duty phone at eleven at night, that two departments give different versions of the same fact, or that the protocol contains a step that is impossible in practice.

That discomfort is precisely the product. Finding those failures on a Tuesday morning, with an invented scenario, costs a morning. Finding them on a Sunday, with a real incident, costs considerably more.

Afterwards

The least attractive part of the work is the one that most determines recovery: the post-incident analysis, verifiable corrective measures and communicating what has actually changed. Trust is not rebuilt with a campaign. It is rebuilt by demonstrating, with checkable facts, that this will not happen again for the same reason.