Summertime poses a threat to your crisis comms plan

Meghan Tisinger is managing director of Leidar. 

Summer is supposed to be the easy season. Vacations mean calendars thin out, out-of-office messages multiply and teams operate with fewer people in the office. For many organizations, the pace feels slower.

Crisis situations don’t follow seasons. Incidents and issues that create reputational risk can happen any time.

Summertime often exposes one of the most common weaknesses for organizations facing a crisis: slow decision-making due to a breakdown in command and control.

Organizations that have plans in place for crisis response typically have protocols and executive roles predetermined. Summer changes those conditions.

Executives may be on an airplane. Legal counsel may be unavailable. Operational leaders may be attending conferences or taking a vacation. Teams that normally sit together are dispersed across time zones.

Suddenly, decisions that should take minutes take hours. Decisions that should take hours take days. Meanwhile, the crisis continues to evolve and brand reputations continue to erode.

The risk is not the incident. It is the delay.

Cybersecurity incidents pose a particular risk during the summer months. Threat actors are well aware that organizations often operate with reduced staffing levels during holidays, long weekends and peak vacation periods. These windows can create opportunities for hackers to launch attacks when key decision-makers, technical personnel and support teams may be less accessible.

Imagine a cybersecurity incident is detected on the Friday before a holiday weekend. Initial alerts suggest unauthorized activity, but the full scope remains unclear. Technical teams begin investigating while leaders attempt to determine the appropriate response. At the same time, employees start hearing rumors, customers notice disruptions and questions begin arriving from partners, regulators or the media.

If key company leaders are unavailable, approvals take longer, information moves more slowly and alignment becomes harder to achieve. This leads to employees speculating, customers seeking answers elsewhere and social media conversations quickly outpacing official communications.

Stakeholders do not expect organizations to have every answer immediately. They do, however, expect organizations to demonstrate awareness, responsiveness and leadership. When decision-making slows, uncertainty grows and maintaining trust becomes significantly more difficult.

How to reduce decision-making delays

The solution is not a thicker crisis plan.

Most organizations already have plans, playbooks, contact lists and procedures. The problem is that many of those documents assume the right people will be available when they are needed.

Effective crisis preparedness is less about predicting every possible scenario and more about ensuring decisions can be made when conditions are far from ideal.

Good crisis plans lay out command and control protocols in detail, specifying who can approve communications, authorize external support, engage legal counsel, communicate with regulators and make operational decisions. But what if the primary designated decision-makers are unavailable?

If a key executive is traveling internationally, attending a conference or sitting on a remote island beach, the crisis response must proceed without interruption. Decisions must be made on the spot, and delays waiting for approvals from people who cannot immediately participate can accelerate reputational damage.

This requires contingency planning and assignment of alternate decision-making authority. Redundancy in crisis command and control will prevent delays and preserve reputations.

Training exercises must also reflect real-world conditions. Typical tabletop exercises assume full participation, perfect information and unlimited availability. The more useful approach is to simulate the realities organizations are likely to face: incomplete facts, conflicting information, unavailable decision-makers and pressure from employees, customers, regulators or the media. Exercises including these scenarios often reveal bottlenecks and approval challenges that remain hidden during normal operations.

Crisis communications plans must be built for speed. Preapproved holding statements, internal employee communications, customer notifications, media responses and executive talking points can significantly reduce delays. The goal is not to finalize every message in advance, but to create a framework that allows teams to communicate quickly while facts continue to emerge.

Most importantly, organizations should align on response principles before a crisis begins. Teams should understand how the organization approaches transparency, stakeholder communications, regulatory obligations and decision-making under uncertainty. When those principles have already been discussed, leaders spend less time debating process and more time focusing on the situation itself.

Summer may slow business calendars, but it should never slow an organization’s ability to make decisions when they matter most. Operational failures do not wait for executives to return from a conference. Reputational issues do not hold until everyone is back in the office.