You have a crisis communications plan.

It may be 40 pages. It may be 80. It may be a beautifully formatted document that took weeks to write, review, and approve. It might even cover almost every scenario you can imagine.

And yet, when a real crisis happens, your team probably won't use most of it.

Not because the plan is bad. Because the first 90 minutes of a crisis are a terrible time to read a manual.

The problem isn't the plan. It's the format.

When something goes wrong, people don't suddenly become better at processing information. They become worse. (20-40% worse according to sources cited by HHS.gov)

Someone is asking what happened. Someone else is calling the CEO. Legal wants to know what can be said. IT is still investigating. Employees are posting questions in Slack. Customers are emailing support.

And somebody says: "Do we have a plan?"

You open the PDF.

Page 1: Purpose and scope. Page 2: Definitions. Page 3: Roles and responsibilities. Page 4: Crisis classification. Page 5: Approval procedures. Page 6: Stakeholder considerations.

You haven't even reached the part that tells you what to do next.

A crisis plan can be comprehensive and still be unusable when you need it most.

The first 90 minutes are different

A crisis isn't a normal business process. You don't have unlimited time to gather information, schedule meetings, and work through a document. The situation is moving while you're trying to understand it, and early decisions can have consequences.

Should you communicate internally? Should you notify customers? Who needs to approve the message? Do you know what actually happened, or are you still investigating? What can you safely say right now, and what shouldn't you say yet? Who owns the next decision?

Your team needs answers to those questions before it needs a 40-page explanation of your crisis philosophy.

Information overload becomes a liability

Long crisis plans often try to solve every possible scenario: cyberattack, workplace accident, executive departure, natural disaster, product recall, employee misconduct, social media backlash, facility closure, and dozens of variations in between.

The result is a document that's excellent at containing information and terrible at helping someone make a decision quickly. The person managing the crisis has to figure out: "Which 12 pages actually matter to me right now?"

That's cognitive work you shouldn't be asking someone to do during an emergency. The best crisis plan isn't necessarily the one with the most information, it's the one that gets the right information in front of the right person at the right moment.

Checklists beat paragraphs when time matters

Imagine two instructions.

Version A:

"Upon identification of an incident that may materially affect organizational reputation, relevant stakeholders should evaluate the nature, scope, severity, and potential impact of the event before determining whether activation of the crisis communications protocol is warranted."

Technically useful. But in a crisis, it's a lot to process.

Version B:

Is this a crisis?

Is someone injured or at risk?
Is operations significantly disrupted?
Is the incident likely to become public?
Are customers, employees, regulators, or the media asking questions?

If yes → do this.

That's something a stressed person can actually use.

Your plan shouldn't make people think harder

A crisis communications plan should reduce decision-making friction. Instead of asking your team to answer "What should we do?" from scratch, it should walk them through a sequence: Which situation are we in? What happens next? Who needs to be involved? What can we communicate right now? What decision needs to happen next?

This is why decision trees, checklists, role assignments, and ready-to-use messages can be more valuable than another 20 pages of guidance. The goal isn't to eliminate judgment, it's to save judgment for the decisions that actually need it.

Your crisis plan probably has another problem: nobody remembers it

Ask yourself: when was the last time your team actually used the crisis communications plan, not updated it, not reviewed it, but opened it during an incident?

If the answer is "our annual review," that's a bad sign. Crisis plans often become documents that are maintained rather than tools that teams use. They sit in a shared drive, get updated once a year (hopefully), get reviewed by legal, and then everyone forgets about them, until something happens, and the person who needs to use the plan is seeing it for the first time.

The first 90 minutes need a different kind of plan

You don't need to throw away your 80-page PDF. It may contain valuable information - policies, background, contact information, scenario guidance all matter.

But your team also needs a crisis-mode layer that turns that information into action:

0–15 minutes: What happened?

Confirm the basic facts.
Identify immediate safety or operational concerns.
Assign a crisis lead.
Determine who needs to be involved.
Start documenting what is known and unknown.

15–30 minutes: How serious is this?

Determine the likely audiences.
Identify immediate communications risks.
Bring in legal/security/HR as appropriate.
Decide whether internal or external communication is necessary.

30–60 minutes: What do we say?

Establish confirmed facts.
Separate facts from assumptions.
Draft initial messaging.
Identify what cannot be confirmed yet.
Establish an approval path.

60–90 minutes: What happens next?

Distribute approved messaging.
Prepare for likely questions.
Monitor employee/customer/media response.
Establish the next update time.
Keep a record of decisions and communications.

The exact sequence will vary by organization and incident. The principle doesn't: make the first steps obvious.

A crisis plan should work when nobody has time to study it

That's the real test. Not "Is our crisis plan comprehensive?" but "Could a competent employee open it during a chaotic situation and immediately understand what to do?"

If the answer is no, you don't necessarily need a longer plan. You need a more usable one. Your 80-page PDF can remain the reference document, but when the phone starts ringing, Slack starts exploding, and leadership wants an answer, your team needs something much closer to an operating system for the first 90 minutes.

That's the difference between having a crisis communications plan and being able to actually use one.

Turn your crisis plan into something your team can use

CrisisComms.io helps organizations turn crisis communications knowledge into practical, actionable playbooks - with decision trees, step-by-step actions, and ready-to-use messaging.

Instead of searching through a giant PDF when something goes wrong, your team can quickly identify the situation and see what to do next.

Don't wait until the crisis to find out whether your plan is actually usable.