Xenophon Strategies

Crisis Management Best Practices: "Miracle on the Hudson"

Jay Silverberg

The story of US Airways Flight 1549, while certainly one of extraordinary performance under pressure, contains the same threads of leadership, training, planning and preparation required for corporations to be sufficiently able to respond when crisis befalls their people and their operations.

Consider the response steps necessary for any company in crisis and compare them to the manner in which the “Miracle on the Hudson” unfolded:

Someone Taking Charge

Crisis response demands swift, decisive leadership. A company whose product has caused harm, a public agency whose constituents are in harm’s way, the passengers and crew on Flight 1549 – the situations are similar. Without someone in charge, events will rapidly unfold leaving those involved largely without direction or worse, without hope.

Here’s the captain, Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger, talking to Katie Couric on 60 Minutes:

“Yes, I knew it was a very challenging situation … the airplane stopping climbing and going forward, and began to rapidly slow down. That’s when I knew I had to take control of the airplane. I put my hand on the side stick and I said, the protocol for the transfer of control, ‘my aircraft’.”

Capt. Sullenberger was not flying the airplane on take-off, not an unusual circumstance, anymore than a corporate CEO may not be on-hand when his or her company becomes embroiled in crisis.

From an organizational point of view, it needs to be, “My company” expressed just as confidently by someone with the knowledge, training and credibility to manage the immediacy of the crisis and prepare for the aftermath.

A Response Plan in Place

Capt. Sullenberger had been a pilot in the Air Force, had trained pilots to handle in-flight emergencies, and investigated air crashes during his career. He knew how to respond because he’d trained for that moment, as had his First Officer and the flight attendants.

He told Katie Couric: “The way I describe it is, for 42 years, I had made small, regular deposits of education, training and experience. And the experience balance was sufficient that, on Jan. 15, I could make a sudden, large withdrawal.”

Once he announced, “Brace for impact,” the flight attendants began preparing the passengers, as they had been trained. Sullenberger told 60 Minutes, “ ‘Heads down. Stay down.’ I could hear them clearly. They were chanting it in unison over and over again to the passengers, to warn them and instruct them … I knew immediately that they were on the same page. That if I could land the airplane, that they could get them out safely.”

How many CEO’s can say definitively that their company is prepared at all levels for crisis response? When normal operations are disrupted without a moment’s notice?
A food product sickens hundreds? A toy injures dozens? A top employee is accused of misdeeds imperiling the financial future of a firm?

Crisis response seldom requires people to look at a plan; they need to know the elements of the plan and react based on their knowledge and training like Capt. Sullenberger, or know from a plan how to take appropriate direction from those in charge like First Officer Jeff Skiles and the flight attendants, and by extension, the passengers.

A viable crisis response process needs to be extended throughout the network of those who may be touched by an incident, and thus the next parallel between Flight 1549 and corporate crisis planning.

People Prepared to Respond

Capt. Sullenberger landed near ferry terminals as he’d been trained, confident that the emergency response from the ferries and others would be sufficient to assist after landing the river.

Post-crash news coverage told of a passenger named “Josh” sitting near an exit who re-read the instructions to open the exit door and then did so after the plane came to a stop. The parallel – an employee trained to properly notify a superior of a pending emergency rather than waiting or worse, taking no action because of the lack of previous direction.

Nonetheless, as with any crisis response, the unexpected always occurs. But training when confronting chaos can return a sense of control to the situation, as it did with the captain and others.

“I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level. I need to touch down with the nose slightly up. I needed to touch down at a descent rate that was survivable. And I needed to touch down just above our minimum flying speed but not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously,” Sullenberger told Couric.

Companies in crisis have to respond in a similar fashion. They need people who know what to do, without hesitation. And even then, situations will unfold in ways no one can anticipate.

In the front of the airplane, the doors opened, the chutes deployed and passengers got out quickly, without pushing or shoving – people responding to direction under difficult circumstances. A parallel – a company’s recall process gets under way as soon as questions arise about a product’s efficacy.

In the back of the airplane, the situation was quite different. A passenger managed to slightly push open a rear exit, letting in water. One of the flight attendants remembers the terror of the moment, with water coming in and being unable to close the door. A corporate parallel – the media arrive at a facility where senior staff are unprepared to respond to multiple interview requests.

The lessons that can be taken from the remarkable story of Flight 1549 are many, and from a corporate management standpoint, a question to be asked might be, “If my company, my management team, my employees were put into a situation that difficult, can we respond?”

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