The first thing a senior leader tends to learn in a major crisis is that they are not in command of it. The instinct built over a career, to take charge, set direction and drive a decision through the organisation, meets a situation that answers to no single authority. Within hours the response is shared with investigators, regulators, police and government, all of whom arrive with their own powers and their own timelines, while a watching public forms its judgement in real time. Inside the organisation, the functions that normally run on their own schedules, government and public affairs, communications, legal, operations and family assistance, are pulled into the same room and forced to decide together.
The leaders who come through this well have understood something in advance: the task in front of them is coordination across many stakeholders rather than command of a single chain. That is the real discipline behind government and community affairs in a crisis, and although aviation has shaped it more than any other sector, the lesson now reaches well beyond it. This article sets out why these capabilities have to operate as one during a response, how the relationship with external authorities actually works, why the affected community is the stakeholder that endures longest, and what a leader can do before an incident to make coordination possible when it counts.
A function already being rebuilt
Even on an ordinary day, the parts of an organisation that manage its external environment are being drawn together. Deloitte's 2026 Corporate Affairs Report, based on interviews with corporate affairs leaders largely across FTSE 100 companies, found that 83 percent of these functions are undergoing significant change and 66 percent are restructuring their operating models, a response to geopolitical volatility, rapid advances in AI and a long decline in institutional trust. Government affairs, public affairs, communications, legal and community engagement may still sit in different boxes on the organisation chart and answer to different leaders, yet the risks they exist to manage, political, regulatory, operational and reputational, have stopped respecting those boundaries.
A crisis is where that convergence becomes total. The gradual integration that many organisations are pursuing in slow motion happens, in an incident, in a matter of hours, and it happens whether or not the organisation is ready for it. The question for a senior leader is not whether these functions will have to operate as one during a crisis. It is whether they will do so by design, because the organisation prepared for it, or by accident, under the worst possible conditions.
In a crisis, the stakeholder functions share one room
When a major incident happens, the organisation chart stops mattering. The people who manage government relationships, the people who speak publicly, the lawyers protecting the organisation's position, the operators running the response on the ground and the teams caring for affected families are all making decisions inside the same compressed window, and every decision constrains the others. A statement to the media commits the organisation in front of the regulator. A position taken with a government department shapes what can be said to families. Legal caution and the human need to say something true and compassionate meet in the same conversation and have to be reconciled there.
It is tempting to imagine a sequence: operations establishes the facts, government affairs manages the authorities, and communications announces the result at the end. Real incidents never run in that order. Communications belongs in the same real-time decision-making environment as legal, operations, government and public affairs and family assistance, shaping and being shaped by every other function from the first hour. Treating it as the final step, the announcement once the work is done, is precisely how organisations end up saying things the investigator has not cleared, that the regulator resents, or that grieving families should have heard first and privately. The organisations that hold together under pressure are the ones whose functions were already used to working as a single decision-making body, rather than meeting each other properly for the first time on the day.
Coordination, not command: the external authorities in a multi-agency response
The same principle governs the relationship with the world outside the organisation. A serious incident draws in a set of external authorities that each hold a piece of the response and none of which the organisation controls. In aviation the safety investigation is led by the relevant national investigator under the international framework of ICAO Annex 13, and that body is distinct from the safety regulator; where a crime is suspected, the police may take primacy over the scene and the evidence. The pattern repeats across every regulated sector. A serious product-safety failure, an industrial accident, an environmental release or a major cyber incident will each convene its own crowd of regulators, investigators and law-enforcement agencies, every one of them arriving with its own authority and its own clock.
The organisation at the centre does not direct any of these bodies. Its task is to understand precisely what each of them owns, to coordinate with them honestly, and to resist the powerful temptation to behave as though it were in charge of a situation it plainly is not. This is also why disciplined language matters from the very first hour. Casualty numbers and identities are confirmed by the authorities who carry that legal responsibility, not by the organisation, and continuing to refer to those affected until facts are verified and families have been formally told is at once a matter of basic humanity and a recognition of where authority actually sits. An organisation that oversteps that line, that confirms what is not yet its to confirm, does not look decisive. It looks like a body operating outside its remit, and it forfeits the trust of the very authorities it depends on.
The community that remains after everyone leaves
Among all the stakeholders a crisis creates, one remains long after the investigators have filed their reports and the media has moved on: the community where it happened. When Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie in December 1988, the town lost eleven of its own residents on the ground alongside the 259 people aboard the aircraft, and it found itself bound into an event that belonged, in every other respect, to the wider world. Nearly four decades on, the relationship between Lockerbie and Syracuse University, which lost 35 students on that flight, endures through an annual act of remembrance and a scholarship programme that has sent generations of students between the two.
A host community absorbs the first shock of an incident through its own responders, its hospitals and its residents, and it remembers, in detail and for a very long time, how it was treated by the organisation at the centre of the event. The same holds for any place that becomes the site of a corporate crisis, whether a town beside a plant, a neighbourhood along a rail line, or a workforce and the families who depend on it. An organisation that treats the community as a backdrop and departs once the immediate response is over is remembered for that indifference as clearly as for the incident itself. One that engages honestly, supports the local response and returns for the anniversaries builds something that protects it for years. This is not a public relations exercise appended to the end of a response. It is a recognition that the organisation carries a lasting obligation to the place where its worst day unfolded, and that this obligation sits within the same stakeholder environment as every other relationship the crisis creates.
Prepare for coordination before you need it
None of this can be assembled on the day. The organisations that coordinate well in a crisis are the ones that did the work in the quiet period before it, and that work comes down to three things.
Know who holds authority. Map the investigators, regulators, government bodies and other authorities that would have a role in the incidents your organisation could credibly face, across every place you operate and every population you serve, and understand where their authority begins and yours ends.
Build the relationships. The first conversation with a regulator, a government department or a local authority should never take place in the first hour of a crisis, when there is neither time nor goodwill to spare on introductions. Relationships built in calm are the ones that hold under strain.
Practise coordinating. Bring the internal functions, government and public affairs, communications, legal, operations and family assistance, into the same exercises as the external responders, so that the first time they take a joint decision under real pressure is a rehearsal and not the event itself.
Kenyon is the crisis management and response capability of TrustFlight, with more than 120 years of experience across 700 or more incidents in 170 countries and a global network of over 2,500 trained responders. A great deal of that experience is exactly this work: helping organisations understand the map of authority, integrate the functions a crisis forces together, and rehearse the coordination that no organisation can improvise on its worst day.
Assessing your own readiness
A senior leader can test their organisation's readiness with a handful of direct questions. If a major incident happened tomorrow, do you know which external authorities would have a role, and where their authority would override your own? Would your government affairs, communications, legal, operations and family assistance teams be able to decide together in real time, or would they still be working in sequence, each waiting for the one before it? Have the people who would have to coordinate under pressure ever actually done so together, in a realistic exercise, before the day itself? And have you thought about the community your crisis might land in, and what you would owe it long after the response is over? Wherever the honest answer is no, that gap is the one the organisation falls into in front of the authorities, the stakeholders and the public all at once.
Where to take this next
Coordination in a crisis rests on the plan, the people and the relationships an organisation builds in advance. Read our guide on how to build a crisis management plan to see how stakeholder coordination fits within the plan that governs your whole response, and our guide on building a crisis communication plan for how communications operates inside that integrated environment rather than at the end of it. Then book a readiness review with Kenyon to pressure-test how your organisation would coordinate, internally and externally, in a real incident, drawing on 120 years of being there when it matters most. The coordination that protects an organisation on the day is built on every quiet day before it.
Frequently asked questions
What does government and community affairs mean in a crisis?
In a crisis it describes the work of coordinating an organisation's relationships with the external authorities who converge on a major incident, such as investigators, regulators, police and government, and with the community where the incident happened, while integrating the internal functions, government and public affairs, communications, legal, operations and family assistance, that a response forces to operate as one. The central task is coordination across many stakeholders rather than command of a single chain, because no organisation controls all the parties a serious incident brings together.
Who is in command during a major incident?
No single organisation is in command of everything. External authorities each hold their own piece of the response, the safety investigator, the regulator, the police and government among them, and the organisation at the centre coordinates with them rather than directing them. For a senior leader, the shift from a command mindset to a coordination mindset is one of the hardest and most important adjustments a crisis demands.
Why do communications, legal and government affairs need to work together in a crisis?
Because in an incident their decisions are inseparable. A statement to the media commits the organisation in front of the regulator, a position taken with government shapes what can be said to families, and legal caution has to be reconciled with the need to communicate honestly and quickly. Communications is not a downstream step that announces the result at the end; it operates in the same real-time decision-making environment as legal, operations, government and public affairs and family assistance, and treating it otherwise is how organisations make costly public mistakes.
How can an organisation prepare to coordinate before a crisis?
Through three things done in advance. Know who holds authority, by mapping the investigators, regulators and government bodies that would have a role in your credible incident scenarios. Build the relationships with those authorities and with local stakeholders before you need them. And practise coordinating, by bringing the internal functions into realistic exercises alongside the external responders, so that the first joint decision under pressure is a rehearsal rather than the real event. Kenyon, TrustFlight's crisis management and response capability, helps organisations do exactly this, drawing on more than 120 years and 700 or more incidents in 170 countries.