When Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed six minutes after departure from Addis Ababa on 10 March 2019, the airline's crisis management centre was activated within the hour, family assistance teams were mobilised across multiple countries, and a structured response was running before most of the world's media had confirmed the loss of all 157 people on board. Across the industry, the response was recognised as disciplined and compassionate in circumstances where neither quality is easy to sustain. That outcome was not a product of good fortune or individual heroism on the day; it was the result of an organisational structure that had been designed, staffed, trained, and tested long before anyone needed it.
Most organisations that acknowledge the possibility of a major crisis have a crisis management plan stored somewhere, often in a binder or a shared drive folder that has not been opened since the last scheduled review. The plan may describe what should happen in general terms. What it rarely does is answer the question that matters most when the phone rings at 3:00 AM: who exactly is responsible for doing what, where will they do it, what tools and authority do they have, and how do all of those individuals and functions connect to each other under conditions of extreme stress and uncertainty? Those are organisational questions, and they require an organisational answer that exists before the crisis does.
Why Standard Management Structures Fail in a Crisis
The management structure that runs an airline, a shipping company, or an energy operator on a normal Tuesday is almost entirely wrong for running a crisis response. Normal operations are hierarchical, departmental, and sequential, with decisions flowing upward for approval and instructions flowing downward for execution through well-established chains of command. Crises demand something fundamentally different. They require horizontal coordination across functions that may never interact during routine business, decisions made at speed by people who are empowered to act without waiting for approval from three levels above them, and communication flowing simultaneously in every direction to stakeholders whose needs are urgent and whose patience is extremely limited.
An organisation that tries to run a crisis through its normal management structure will experience exactly the bottlenecks, delays, and communication breakdowns that have characterised some of the most widely criticised crisis responses in aviation history. The problem is never that individual leaders lack intelligence or commitment. The problem is that the structure they are working within was designed for a fundamentally different operating environment, and no amount of personal capability can compensate for an organisational architecture that is wrong for the task.
Five Steps to Building the Organisation Before You Need It
Kenyon's approach to crisis management organisation, developed through more than 120 years and 700 incidents in 170 countries, rests on five preparatory steps that together create a response capability which can activate at any hour, scale to any size of incident, and function effectively even when the people within it are exhausted, under-informed, and operating far outside their daily comfort zone.
Step One - Start with Consequences, Not Scenarios
The foundation of an effective crisis management organisation is a clear-eyed understanding of what the organisation will actually need to do when a crisis occurs, and that understanding comes from studying consequences rather than predicting events. An earthquake, a mid-air collision, a terrorist attack, and a chemical spill all produce different headlines, yet they generate a remarkably similar set of operational demands on the responding organisation, from families who need information and phones that need answering through to media that need managing, government agencies that need coordinating, and leadership that needs to be visible and decisive.
Designing an organisational structure around those predictable consequences rather than around speculative scenarios means the structure works regardless of what triggered the crisis, because the functional demands it was built to meet are the same in every case. This principle is explored in depth in Kenyon's consequence management framework, and it is the single most important design decision that separates crisis management organisations which perform under pressure from those which collapse under it.
Step Two - Design the Organisational Structure
A crisis management organisation should be built as a set of functional teams, each responsible for a defined area of the response, connected horizontally through clear communication channels and vertically through a crisis management team that provides strategic direction and resource allocation without micromanaging operational decisions.
The core functional elements that most organisations will need include a crisis management team operating from a dedicated crisis management centre and responsible for strategic oversight, resource allocation, and external liaison at the most senior level. Alongside it, one or more incident management units handle the operational detail of the response at or near the scene, managing logistics, coordinating with local authorities, and feeding information back to the crisis management team.
Family assistance groups represent one of the most critical and most commonly under-resourced elements, responsible for contacting, supporting, and maintaining ongoing relationships with the families of those affected. Hospital liaison teams coordinate with medical facilities receiving casualties, tracking patient status and connecting that information to the family assistance operation. Mental health and wellbeing teams provide psychological support to affected families, survivors, and to the responders themselves, whose own mental health can deteriorate rapidly under the sustained pressure of a major response. Communications specialists manage media relations, internal communications, social media monitoring, and the development of holding statements and press materials. Investigation liaison personnel coordinate with accident investigation authorities and regulators, ensuring the organisation cooperates fully without compromising its own legal position. And fatality management teams oversee the recovery, documentation, identification, and repatriation of the deceased, working within the strict forensic and legal frameworks that govern disaster victim identification.
Each of these functions must have a designated lead with a named deputy, and both individuals must understand their role well enough to perform it under pressure without referring to a manual.
Step Three - Plan the Facilities
Every functional element of the crisis management organisation needs a physical or virtual space from which to operate, and those spaces need to be identified, equipped, and tested before a crisis makes them necessary.
The crisis management centre is the nerve centre of the strategic response, and it needs secure communications, display screens for situational awareness, reliable connectivity, and enough space for the crisis management team to work effectively without being on top of each other. The shift toward remote and hybrid working since 2020 has added a new dimension to this requirement, as many organisations now need to plan for a virtual crisis management centre capability that can activate when key personnel are geographically dispersed, with secure video conferencing, shared digital workspaces, and communication tools that replicate the situational awareness of a physical room. Hybrid models, where some team members are co-located and others are connected remotely, have become the practical reality for many international organisations, and the technology infrastructure to support them needs to be tested under realistic conditions rather than assumed to work.
Call centres must be capable of handling volumes that will far exceed normal operations, staffed by people who have been trained to handle calls from people in acute distress. Family assistance centres require careful site selection, because the location needs to be accessible, private, and large enough to accommodate the number of families involved while remaining separate from media and general public access. The NTSB's 2023 Federal Family Assistance Plan for Aviation Disasters provides a detailed framework for family assistance centre operations that reflects current best practice in how these facilities should be structured, staffed, and managed, and any organisation developing its own family assistance capability should treat that document as essential reference material. Media management facilities need to be physically separate from family assistance areas, with appropriate technology for press briefings and a location that gives the organisation control over the media environment rather than ceding it to whoever arrives first with a camera.
For organisations with operations spanning multiple countries, cross-border coordination presents particular challenges for facility planning. A crisis affecting passengers or employees from dozens of nationalities may require family assistance presence in multiple countries simultaneously, and the organisational structure needs to account for how those distributed operations will be coordinated, how information will flow between them, and how local legal and cultural requirements will be met while maintaining a consistent standard of care.
Step Four - Develop Position Checklists
Every role within the crisis management organisation should have a detailed position checklist that describes, in plain operational language, what the person filling that role needs to do in the first hour, the first six hours, the first 24 hours, and in the days and weeks that follow. These checklists should specify the resources required, the access credentials and contact details that will be needed, the reporting relationships in effect during a crisis, and the decision-making authority attached to the role.
Position checklists serve two purposes. The first is operational, ensuring that critical actions are not forgotten or duplicated when multiple teams are working simultaneously under pressure. The second is organisational, providing a clear basis for training so that individuals can rehearse their specific responsibilities rather than sitting through generic awareness sessions that bear little resemblance to what they will actually be expected to do.
A well-constructed position checklist is specific enough to be useful at 3:00 AM when the person reading it has been woken from sleep and is operating on adrenaline rather than clarity. It should not require interpretation, should not depend on institutional knowledge that only one person holds, and should not assume that the reader has access to systems or contacts that may be unavailable during a crisis.
Step Five - Assign Personnel and Train Relentlessly
An organisational structure without trained people assigned to it is an architectural drawing of a building that has never been constructed. The structure only becomes real when specific individuals are assigned to specific roles, understand what those roles require, and have demonstrated their ability to perform them under conditions that approximate the stress and confusion of an actual crisis.
Personnel assignment should extend well beyond the organisation's own employees. The crisis management organisation for any complex, international operation will need to integrate external partners from the outset, including insurers who understand the claims process that will activate immediately, legal counsel who can advise on regulatory obligations and liability exposure in real time, family assistance specialists who bring experience the organisation's own staff cannot be expected to have, communications advisors who have managed media in crisis conditions before, and crisis response providers like Kenyon whose 2,500 specialist responders can deploy globally within hours and bring operational experience from hundreds of previous incidents.
Training should be layered, beginning with role-specific familiarisation, progressing through tabletop exercises where the crisis management team walks through a scenario and identifies decision points, and culminating in full activation exercises that test the entire organisation under realistic conditions. A full activation run outside business hours with minimal advance warning will expose weaknesses in call-out procedures, technology readiness, facility access, and decision-making under fatigue that no scheduled daytime exercise can replicate. Every exercise should produce documented findings, and those findings should drive specific, tracked changes to the plan and the organisation before the next exercise takes place.
The Remote and Hybrid Challenge
The widespread shift toward distributed working has fundamentally changed the assumptions underpinning many crisis management organisations that were designed around the expectation that key personnel would be physically co-located and able to reach a crisis management centre within a defined time. Organisations whose crisis management teams are now spread across multiple time zones, or whose call-out procedures assume that people are sleeping within an hour's drive of the office, need to revisit both their structure and their technology.
Virtual crisis management centres are now a practical necessity for most international organisations, yet they introduce coordination challenges that physical proximity resolves naturally. The informal situational awareness that comes from overhearing a colleague's phone conversation, reading body language across a room, or pulling someone aside for a quick decision is lost in a virtual environment, and it needs to be replaced with deliberate communication protocols that ensure information flows consistently without overwhelming people who are already managing high-pressure tasks. Organisations that treated video conferencing as a temporary pandemic measure and have not invested in making their virtual crisis management capability robust, tested, and second nature to the people who will use it are carrying a vulnerability they may not recognise until the next crisis forces them to activate it.
Corporate Leadership as the Non-Negotiable Foundation
None of this works without sustained commitment from the most senior level of the organisation. A crisis management organisation requires ongoing investment in personnel, training, facilities, and technology, and it competes for resources against operational priorities whose return on investment is immediate and visible rather than contingent on an event that may never happen. The leadership team that allows crisis preparedness to atrophy because there has not been an incident recently is making exactly the same error as the leadership team that never invested in it at all, because the gap between what the organisation needs and what it can actually deliver when the crisis arrives will be just as wide in both cases.
Kenyon's experience across more than a century of crisis response has consistently demonstrated that the organisations which perform well under the worst possible conditions share a common characteristic. Their boards and executive teams treat crisis preparedness as a standing operational capability rather than a contingency exercise, and they fund it, staff it, test it, and hold people accountable for maintaining it with the same rigour they apply to any other function the business depends on for survival.
A well-trained leadership team, acting from a crisis management centre with clear lines of communication to every functional area, can activate a coordinated response across family assistance, media management, government liaison, fatality management, and business continuity simultaneously, not because any of those functions are simple, but because the organisational structure connecting them was built and rehearsed before anyone needed it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a crisis management organisation?
A crisis management organisation is the dedicated structure of teams, roles, facilities, and communication channels that an organisation establishes and maintains specifically for responding to major incidents, distinct from the management structure used during normal operations. It is designed to coordinate multiple functional areas simultaneously under conditions of extreme time pressure and uncertainty, connecting crisis leadership with specialist teams responsible for family assistance, communications, government liaison, fatality management, and operational recovery. The structure exists in a state of readiness during normal operations and activates fully when a crisis occurs.
How does a crisis management organisation differ from a crisis management plan?
A crisis management plan is a document that describes what should happen during a crisis. A crisis management organisation is the living structure of people, roles, facilities, and relationships that makes the plan executable. Many organisations have detailed plans that have never been tested by the people who would need to carry them out, and the gap between the written plan and the organisation's actual ability to perform under pressure is where most crisis responses fail. The organisation is what turns the plan from a document into a capability.
What functional teams should a crisis management organisation include?
Most organisations will need, at minimum, a crisis management team for strategic oversight, incident management units for operational coordination, family assistance groups, hospital liaison teams, mental health and wellbeing support, communications specialists, investigation liaison personnel, and fatality management teams. The specific configuration will vary depending on the organisation's size, industry, and risk profile, and each functional team needs a designated lead, a deputy, a position checklist, and a defined facility from which to operate.
How has remote working changed crisis management organisation design?
The shift toward distributed and hybrid working has required organisations to develop virtual crisis management centre capabilities, with secure video conferencing, shared digital workspaces, and communication protocols that compensate for the loss of physical co-location. Call-out procedures that assumed personnel would be within driving distance of a physical centre need updating, and the technology infrastructure supporting virtual activation needs to be tested under realistic conditions rather than assumed to function. Many organisations now plan for hybrid models where some team members are co-located and others participate remotely, which creates coordination challenges that require deliberate design and regular practice to manage effectively.
How often should a crisis management organisation be exercised?
Regular exercising is essential, and the frequency should reflect the organisation's risk profile and the complexity of its response structure. At minimum, tabletop exercises should occur quarterly and full activation exercises should occur annually, with at least one exercise per year conducted outside business hours and with minimal advance notice to test the organisation's real-world readiness rather than its ability to perform under ideal conditions. Every exercise should produce documented findings and specific corrective actions that are tracked to completion before the next exercise cycle.
What role does Kenyon play in building crisis management organisations?
Kenyon is TrustFlight's crisis management and response capability, with more than 120 years of operational experience across 700+ incidents in 170 countries. Kenyon works with organisations to design crisis management structures that reflect the reality of how crises unfold, trains personnel through realistic exercises at every level from tabletop through full activation, and integrates into the organisation's crisis management framework as an embedded response partner with 2,500 specialist responders available for global deployment. Kenyon's involvement means that the organisation's crisis management structure extends beyond its own employees to include experienced crisis professionals who have managed the same consequences the organisation is preparing for, across hundreds of previous incidents.