I’m supposed to be flying to Copenhagen today to visit some of our Danish CEC members.  But in fact as I write this I’m still sitting in my home in Ashburn, Virginia.  Ironic. I’m one of the kajillion travelers whose itineraries have been totally ash-burned by the megacloud from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull.

(Fun Fact: If you spell-check that name, a black cloud actually spews out of your laptop.)

While waiting patiently for “the worst travel crisis in history” to come to an end, I’ve been spending my idle hours thinking about volcanoes—and crisis planning.

In my opinion, BOTH can burn you very badly.

I come from a background as a communicator in the airline business, and as you can imagine, I have spent a lot of time doing disaster drills, scenario planning, tabletop exercises, and all manner of predictive activities designed to make companies better prepared for a crisis. And I mean a LOT of time.

Over the years, I worked with many very smart, experienced people who wanted to believe that diligent crisis planning would make them (and the entire company) ready for any crisis we would ever face in the future. The conventional wisdom was that if we worked hard enough, we could ensure absolute preparedness. Whenever some crisis would some day erupt, all we’d have to do is follow the step-by-step manuals and procedures we had painstakingly committed to muscle-memory, and everything would work out fine.

That was certainly my belief, too…as I drifted off to sleep on the night of September 10, 2001.

What I discovered the day after—a lesson that has been reinforced every day since—is that while careful preparation is good, the false confidence that comes from thinking you’re prepared is bad.

‘Cause you’re not.  Can’t be.

The smartest advice I ever got about scenario planning (for corporate crises, and for life in general) is to follow a simple two-step process:

• Step ONE: Think of every bad thing that could ever happen. Make sure you have a prepared response, a back-up plan, and a work-around for each situation and scenario—then practice and drill them regularly so that you’re fully ready to put your crisis plan into immediate action at a moment’s notice, even if you’re fast asleep or half-in-the-bag when the phone rings.
• Step TWO: Be honest enough to admit that no one can think of every bad thing that could ever happen.  This way, you won’t be paralyzed in the moment, trying to remember “how we did this during the drill.”  Because the way it worked then isn’t gonna cut it for what you have to do now.

By following these two steps, you really will be as ready as you can possibly be when whatever happens, happens. When some stupid volcano in Iceland cancels your European itinerary. When planes crash into buildings. Or when something goes amiss at your company that somehow wasn’t covered within that 5-inch-thick crisis planning binder you worked so hard to write and memorize.

There are two kinds of communicators—those who have prepared for a crisis, and those who have actually been through one.

Turns out their experiences could not be more different.

How about YOU?  How did the actual crises you’ve lived through compare to the training exercises you did beforehand?