The first sixty minutes

A crisis rarely announces itself, and the trigger almost never repeats. An industrial incident, a product defect, an inspection finding, a post that spreads faster than any internal procedure. In all these situations, a company does not lose because something went wrong. It loses because in the first hour nobody knows who decides and who speaks.

The opening hour of a crisis is unlike any other business hour. Information is incomplete, pressure is high and every minute of silence is filled by someone else’s version of events. Decisions made in that hour, or not made, shape everything that follows. Yet most organisations enter that hour improvising, deciding in real time what should have been decided long before.

The companies that come through the first hour well are not the ones that react fastest. They are the ones that don’t have to think about structure, because the structure already exists: who leads, who speaks, what is said first, and what is deliberately not said. When those questions are answered in advance, the first hour is about judgement, not about panic.