Crisis PR 101: The First Hour

Something goes wrong. Badly wrong, the kind of wrong that ends up in a headline, a group text, or a lawyer's inbox. And in that first hour, before the statement is drafted, before legal weighs in, before anyone has decided what actually happened, the Executive Assistant often the first person in the room. Sometimes literally.

This session is about what happens in that window. Not the corporate crisis plan gathering dust in a shared drive, but the real-time, adrenaline-soaked decisions that get made (or don't) while everyone is still figuring out what they're dealing with. Executive misconduct, a PR firestorm, a lawsuit, a data breach, an accident, a layoff gone sideways: the shapes crises take are different, but the first hour rhymes across all of them, and so do the mistakes.

We'll dig into where an EA can be genuinely indispensable in a moment like this, and where staying out of the way is the more valuable move, a distinction that's easy to get backwards under pressure. We'll walk through real situations, including a few where the response made things dramatically worse, and talk about what separates instinct from judgment when the stakes are high and the clock is running. There's also a case to be made that the very impulse to act, to fix it, to respond, to do something, is sometimes the exact wrong move, and we'll get into why crisis communications professionals are trained to resist it.

You'll leave with a sharper sense of what "prepared" actually looks like, long before anything goes wrong, and a better read on the moment when everyone around you is moving fast and you're the one deciding whether to move at all.