International
Five crisis management lessons from flight MH370 Incidents and events surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have been complex and varied. How the crisis has been managed provides some very clear lessons for crisis leadership and crisis management development for other businesses and executive managers. By Tony Ridley
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ntelligent Travel has been monitoring the incident and its impact from the beginning, along with providing updated analysis and advice. Here are the five top crisis management lessons from flight MH370 based on the data collected and input from Intelligent Travel’s expert crisis team. Remember, we qualify a crisis as ‘an unplanned incident or several simultaneous incidents that significantly affect a business’. Ordinarily, this event would have been coordinated by ‘incident management’ or ‘priority management’ teams as there would have been effective teams, plans and preparations for this scenario as a plausible outcome of operating an international airline. As we see this as lacking or ineffective, we qualify this event as a crisis. 1. Ownership and authority Malaysia Airlines and the Malaysian Government are not one in the same. One is the commercial provider of services and the operator of flight MH370, the other is the country’s Government and point of departure for this national/flag
carrier. One should be the focal point for all communications and engagement with stakeholders, while the other is a stakeholder. This delineation has not been maintained, clear or preserved throughout the incident with each entity communicating over the top of each other or their views and comments causing issue for the other. The net result is that both entities have suffered due to a lack of clear ownership of the issue and defined authority on who does what and when. This issue of ownership or authority should have been quickly identified and managed throughout the course of the incident. While it may not have resolved the overwhelming negative or neutral sentiment around the handling of the incident, modifiers and better crisis leadership measures could have been implemented. It should be clear to all stakeholders, including the media, who is responsible and in charge of a crisis or significant incident such as this and that status should be maintained throughout, unless there is very good reason to alter this status and that too much be clearly and consistently communicated.
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