The first hour belongs to the facts

Most statements issued in the first hour of a crisis are later corrected. The ones that are not were written by someone who waited forty minutes.

We reviewed the first public statements made by the organisations we advised in 2018, and by a good many we did not. Of the statements issued within an hour of an incident becoming known, a little over half were later corrected, qualified or quietly replaced. Of those issued between one and three hours after, about one in six were.

The difference is not skill. It is that the second group had time to find out what had happened.

The pressure to speak

Every organisation in difficulty feels the same pressure in the first hour: to say something, anything, before the silence is filled by somebody else. The pressure is real, and the instinct behind it is sound. But what fills the silence in the first hour is rarely as damaging as a statement that has to be withdrawn in the third. A correction becomes the story; it tells everyone that the organisation did not know what it was talking about, at exactly the moment it most needed to be believed.

Forty minutes

The holding statement we recommend in the first hour is short and almost entirely factual: what the organisation knows to be true, what it is doing, and when it will say more. It contains no reassurance it cannot yet give, no apology for things it has not yet established, and no speculation about cause. It can usually be written in ten minutes. The other thirty are spent finding out whether each sentence is true.

That means asking the people closest to the incident, not the people most senior to it. It means separating what has been seen from what has been reported. And it means asking, of every sentence, whether it will still be true at six o’clock.

Revision

~~There is no risk to the public and the situation is under control.~~ At 14.20 a chemical leak was reported at our Teesside site. The site has been evacuated as a precaution. We will update at 16.00.

A first-hour statement, draft 1 and draft 3. The site was not, in fact, under control until 19.00. Deletions struck through; insertions underlined.

Silence in the first hour is uncomfortable. A statement that is wrong in the first hour is worse, and it lasts.