Why your crisis communication plan won’t save you

Communication leaders must stop reacting to risk and help management reshape it according to Rod Cartwright’s latest report.

The 2025 edition of Reputation, Risk, and Resilience distils insights from 11 major risk reports, from Edelman to the WEF, into ten themes, ten questions, and one central provocation: public relations must reimagine its role as a strategic partner in risk leadership.

The report is split across two documents. The first section provides an overview of each of the reports that Cartwright reviewed. The second section asks “what next” and sets out a plan and recommendations.

The diagnosis is brutal, but the opportunity for leadership in public relations and strategic communications is very real.

We’re not facing unfamiliar risks. We’re facing more intense, interconnected, and systemic versions of the same forces that have been building for years.

Geopolitics, climate breakdown, cyber threats, polarisation, disinformation, and disengaged workforces are no longer future concerns. They are the modern operating environment.

What communicators need to know

Cartwright identifies three dynamics that he says define today’s risk landscape:

1. Steady-state table stakes
   Geopolitical tension, cyber insecurity, climate volatility and economic instability are constants. They must be treated as strategic, not peripheral.

2. Sleeping giant blind spots
   Mental health, demographic shifts, inequality and AI disruption are underestimated and dangerously underprepared for.

3. Risk accelerants
   Polarisation, intersectionality and cultural fragility amplify every risk they touch.

Organisations are not managing crises. They are navigating a polycrisis.

Your crisis communication plan won’t save you because it’s built to manage symptoms, not the root causes of modern crises. In today’s environment of intersecting risks and relentless scrutiny, resilience comes from readiness, not the contents of a document.

Five things communications leaders should do next

Cartwright isn’t just diagnosing the problem. He offers a strategic reset for the function. Here are five priorities.

1. Reframe crisis as an inflexion point, not a failure
   Crises demand action, not avoidance. Communicators must help leaders see them as moments to demonstrate values, not just avoid damage. Rehearse this shift in mindset now, before the headlines hit.

2. Make ‘sensemaking’ a core competency
   Pattern recognition, horizon scanning and insight-led interpretation are now foundational skills. Invest in your team’s ability to distinguish noise from signal and make meaning from it.

3. Prioritise relationship continuity over business continuity
   Keeping operations running is only half the story. Trust is built through how you treat people when it matters most. Ensure your response plans reflect this.

4. Put culture on the risk register
   Reputation failure often stems from behaviour, not process. Communications leaders must help management confront internal culture risks.

5. Build ethical and emotional readiness
   AI, bias, misinformation and societal fault lines are no longer theoretical. Equip your team with the emotional intelligence, ethical frameworks and digital fluency to engage with confidence and care.

The bottom line

Communicators often default to managing symptoms such as media fallout, social backlash and a drop in sentiment. This report demands more. It reframes reputation as the product of leadership, culture and values, not comms output. And it makes clear that public relations has a critical, frontline role in building organisational resilience.

Those who take up that role will lead. Those who don’t will be left to manage the fallout.

Reference

Reference: Cartwright, R. (2025). Reputation, Risk and Resilience: 2025 Edition. Rod Cartwright Consulting.