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Key Takeaways
- The environment leaders are operating in has changed so dramatically that familiar crisis instincts are creating new risks instead of protection.
- A different set of assumptions is now quietly separating organizations that recover from disruption from those that become cautionary tales.
Three years ago, I was writing a column called “The Age of Impact” and teaching crisis communications classes at Northwestern, shaped by the same ideas. Companies were competing to prove they cared — about employees, about justice, about the world. It felt like a new era of corporate responsibility was taking hold.
Then the ground shifted.
Anti-DEI campaigns turned inclusion initiatives into political targets. Generative AI leapt from industry conversation to mainstream consciousness almost overnight, transforming how we work. Polarization widened from a crack to a canyon.
My students started putting forward no-win scenarios: What if your CEO gets deepfaked the night before earnings? What if half your workforce wants you to speak out and the other half will quit if you do? The situations kept getting wilder — and then I noticed something alarming.
Corporate executives I counsel, chief communications officers, board members, CEOs running Fortune 500 companies, were asking almost the exact same questions.
When professionals across the entire spectrum of experience are terrified by the same problems, it’s not just a communications challenge — it’s an enterprise risk. Wells Fargo lost $80 billion in market cap after employees opened millions of fake accounts to meet sales targets — a scandal that festered internally for years before it exploded publicly. Target shed $15 billion in months after DEI backlash. These weren’t messaging failures. They were leadership failures with balance-sheet consequences.
Related: Your Business Isn’t Ready For the Next Crisis — Here’s How to Fix That Fast
The old playbook isn’t just obsolete — it’s actively dangerous
For all of us in crisis communications, it feels like the world shifted beneath our feet while we weren’t looking. The strategies that served us for decades — the careful statements, the measured responses, the wait-and-see approaches — aren’t just ineffective anymore. They’re making things worse.
The speed problem: When I started in this field, you had hours or even days to craft the perfect response. Today, silence for thirty minutes gets interpreted as guilt, indifference or incompetence.
The trust problem: Traditional media gatekeepers who once separated signal from noise are gone. We’re operating in a landscape where half-truths travel faster than facts, and your corporate statement competes directly with conspiracy theories for audience attention, if it reaches your audience at all.
The personalization problem: CEOs once spoke to “stakeholders” and “the public.” Now they’re speaking to micro-audiences who filter every message through the lens of “my people, my party, and me.” Broad-appeal communications strategies can’t navigate this new hierarchy of relevance.
The polarization problem: The old playbook assumed you could craft a message that would satisfy most reasonable people. That middle ground has been obliterated. Corporate positions on everything from DEI to trade policy are now filtered through political tribes and the employees whose identities are implicated in those debates bear the weight of every equivocation. Neutrality isn’t just impossible — it’s seen as cowardice by all sides. Watch what happened to Target. To Cracker Barrel. Companies that tried to thread the needle got shredded from both directions.
The weaponization problem: Perhaps most dangerous is that the old playbook’s emphasis on defensive posturing and liability protection has made companies sitting ducks for bad actors who understand how to exploit corporate communication patterns. They know you’ll be slow, cautious, and desperate to appear reasonable.
There is no longer any such thing as a clean win
The uncomfortable truth that many organizations clinging to the old playbook refuse to accept is that the era of tidy resolutions is over. Every major decision now comes with trade-offs, critics and constituencies who will be unhappy no matter what you do.
The companies that are winning understand this. They’ve stopped trying to please everyone and started focusing on the twelve to fifteen people whose trust actually determines their outcomes. They’ve accepted that engagement in this era will look messier and move faster than what traditional approaches allowed.
This isn’t surrender. It’s strategic clarity.
What this means for corporate leaders
First, take a position and own it. The lesson from Nike’s Kaepernick campaign is clear. Conviction pays, and waffling costs everything. But Nike went beyond taking a stand to mapping which stakeholders would leave, which would stay, and which would become more loyal. The backlash was priced in. People can accept disagreeing with you. What they will never accept is hypocrisy. Determine your core values, communicate them clearly and defend that ground fiercely when tested.
Second, stop trying to please everyone. Identify the specific people and groups whose trust actually determines your success, and design your communications strategy around them. For most organizations, that’s twelve to fifteen stakeholders, not thousands. Precision beats breadth.
Third, operate at campaign speed. The traditional 24-hour response window is now closer to 24 minutes. Structure your organization accordingly. Include proactive threat detection, pre-approved messaging frameworks, and real-time stakeholder monitoring. AI can help here. The same technology disrupting your environment can help you monitor threats, draft rapid responses, and adapt messaging across formats faster than any team could manually. Political campaigns have operated this way for decades. It’s time corporate communications caught up.
Fourth, truth is important, but trust matters more. In a crisis, what people believe about you matters more than your truth. Disinformation succeeds because they don’t trust the source delivering them the facts. The time to build credibility with your key stakeholders is not the day you get targeted. It’s now.
Related: Why Letting Go of Full Control of My Business Was the Hardest — and Smartest — Move I Ever Made
An inflection point
We are at an inflection point. Anyone who built their career on the old playbook needs to adapt or become the next cautionary tale. That includes boards: reputation failures trigger regulatory scrutiny, litigation exposure and disclosure obligations. This is a governance conversation, not just a communications one.
These are the questions I’ve spent the past three years wrestling with — first in the classroom, then on the front lines of some of the most complex communications challenges of our time and now advising leaders.
The companies that thrive are the ones that understand that speed, messiness and toughness aren’t liabilities. They’re survival skills.
Key Takeaways
- The environment leaders are operating in has changed so dramatically that familiar crisis instincts are creating new risks instead of protection.
- A different set of assumptions is now quietly separating organizations that recover from disruption from those that become cautionary tales.
Three years ago, I was writing a column called “The Age of Impact” and teaching crisis communications classes at Northwestern, shaped by the same ideas. Companies were competing to prove they cared — about employees, about justice, about the world. It felt like a new era of corporate responsibility was taking hold.
Then the ground shifted.