While 76% of board members believe their companies would respond effectively to a crisis, only 49% say their companies have playbooks for likely crisis scenarios, according to a survey from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.
This vulnerability gap is especially evident when examining the most important potential risks facing organizations. For example, 73% of board members believed that their organization was vulnerable to corporate reputation crises but only 39% had a formal crisis plan to address the risk. In some cases, the gap between crisis awareness and actual crisis preparedness was as high as 40%.
To boost crisis readiness, Deloitte recommends that board members build crisis capabilities into the board’s structure, make crisis awareness part of everyone’s job, define crisis teams, insist on detailed plans, promote effective crisis communication, and embrace their role as guardians of corporate reputation.