economie

CrowdStrike’s crisis management strategy holds lessons for all companies

The blue screen signaling a system error appeared on Microsoft devices around the world on Friday. Here seen on an information screen at Madrid-Barajas airport.

Motti Peer, co-CEO of technology PR firm ReBlonde, which specializes in crisis management, told Business Insider that CrowdStrike’s leadership team’s response highlighted the good and bad ways to react to an event of this scale.

Kurtz’s first response on Friday was critiqued online for being too impersonal and lacking candor, while his colleague — CrowdStrike CSO Shawn Henry — was praised for being forthright and empathetic to the impact in a LinkedIn post, he said. But this didn’t come until three days after the outage hit.

“The difference between the two statements is vast and shows how subtle differences in approaching crisis responses can drastically alter how effective they are,” Peer told BI.

Sean Griffin, CEO and cofounder of Disaster Tech, agreed that expressing empathy and showing respect were basic crisis communication principles that all leaders should deploy.

He believed Kurtz deserves credit for quickly engaging the media on Friday, apologizing, and promising solutions — even if social media users say the apology didn’t come fast enough.

However, the CrowdStrike CEO could have provided more solutions for what those affected could do on their end as the situation was unfolding, Griffin said.

The steps to take in a crisis

Good crisis management can be boiled down to a few simple yet crucial steps, the two experts told BI.

Peer said the first step is to investigate what happened and understand the scale of the crisis. The next step is to apologize and take responsibility for the misstep.

“From there, companies should take every possible step to resolve the crisis quickly and effectively with consistent updates,” he added.

“The company’s leadership team must explain to their customers and community what proactive measures will be taken to prevent this crisis from repeating,” he said.

Griffin said it is crucial to recognize the importance of having a resilient risk management framework and ensuring you have an experienced team to carry it out.

“Crises are part of human life, and it’s not an ‘if’ yet ‘when,'” Griffin said. “There is no way to avoid it, but there is an opportunity to prepare for it.”

Look for a silver lining

A major crisis doesn’t have to be the end of a company either, Peer said.

“While CrowdStrike’s positioning took a major hit in both public sentiment and financial standing, it managed to mostly avoid the more outwardly negative response that some of its clients received for mishandling the outage,” the ReBlonde co-CEO said.

“Delta, for example, shouldered a good amount of public frustration due to the outage affecting countless flights and millions of travelers,” Peer added.

Griffin agreed that there could be a silver lining to the situation.

“For the companies that prepare and survive crises, the data shows that you generate revenue by gaining market share from competitors or seizing the unfortunate media attention as an opportunity to shine through adversity,” he said.

But as disruption from the CrowdStrike outage slowly lessens, many are still concerned by the in-built potential of technology-reliant systems crashing, bringing down all operations with them.

How can that crisis be avoided?

“Companies of any size should be operating with clear and robust contingency plans in case of such events,” Peer said.

Griffin said his company, which provides crisis management software, is now reviewing its plans and policies to prevent the kind of tech failure CrowdStrike experienced. He recommended that others do the same.

“The bottom line is that crisis management is not a check the box; it is an evolution and requires continuous training, exercising, and learning to improve, especially as the nature of threats and types of incidents evolve.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/crowdstrike-it-outage-key-lessons-on-crisis-management-pr-disasters-2024-7