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Emergency - The meeting no-one wants to hold

When any crisis or emergency occurs it soon leads to the meeting no-one wants to hold: an emergency gathering of your crisis response team.

While holding a meeting is often the last thing on your mind in a crisis, it is usually the best way to coordinate action when time is scarce. As such a good crisis team meeting can have a valuable impact on your capacity to respond well and recover effectively.

Restrict the size of your crisis team to a manageable size for your organisation and the situation, but always ensure that you include key individuals with both operational and communication responsibilities.

The purpose of the meeting will be to ensure your key people share a common understanding of the situation and its implications, to establish priorities and to allocate tasks.

In order to keep the meeting short and effective, you must be well prepared. Ensure you already have as much information as is available and adopt an urgent but confident tone of authority.

Base your meeting on the following agenda for maximum effectiveness:

1. Situation brief
Summarize the situation and its implications. Check that all key people have the same information and that they understand any background and why this is a crisis situation.

2. Set priorities
Agree on exactly what the problem is, what the consequences will be and what your priorities will be.

3. Options
Identify and explore all your options and decide which to pursue. Your preferred option will be dictated by your organisation's values, purpose and community obligations in the context of the current situation.

4. Action
Allocate responsibility for specific tasks to members of the crisis team to either undertake or delegate, as appropriate.

5. Review
Even though you want to keep the meeting as short as possible, resist the temptation to rush everyone into action immediately. You must check that everyone fully understands the situation, your priorities, all decisions taken and who will do what. It is vital that any misunderstandings are caught and corrected at this point to prevent any escalation of the situation.

6. Next meeting
Set a time for your next meeting of the crisis team.

Keep this agenda as a template for your next Emergency - when you have to call the meeting no-one wants to hold.

Quote of Note

"It is not who is right, but what is right, that is important."

Thomas Huxley

© Kerrie Mullins-Gunst
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