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If you are responsible for crisis management, you have a challenging role. It is your job to ensure that the crisis response team is well prepared so that everyone knows what to do when a crisis strikes.
When preparing, you have to take many different factors into account. That makes crisis management quite complex. Especially if this is a new field for you, it can be quite a challenge to fulfill your role. Where should you start?
You want to avoid finding out during a crisis that your preparations are inadequate. Ideally, you should use a checklist or a step-by-step plan as a guide to structure your preparations. This will allow you to accurately assess where you stand and what your next step should be. This helps prevent unpleasant surprises during a crisis.
To support you as a crisis professional, we have developed this guide. The Merlin Crisis Management Maturity Model (MCV) helps both new and experienced crisis professionals gain insight into the current level of maturity of their crisis management organization.
The Merlin Crisis Management Maturity Model outlines all the components of crisis management and suggests the order in which you should implement them.
As a starting point, we used the core elements common to every crisis management methodology and theory. We supplemented these core elements with practical components drawn from guidelines, ISO standards, and our own experience in advising more than 150 crisis management organizations.
We have arranged the building blocks in order based on their interdependencies. Logically, some blocks can only be carried out one after the other. For example, it is impossible to alert the right people if the roles within your crisis management team are not properly defined.
We have ranked the remaining building blocks based on our own experience.
We have observed more than 150 crisis response organizations and, in doing so, have identified what works. Of course, there are many ways to achieve the same goal, but we have incorporated the best practices into the model.
To make the model practical, we have limited our focus to crisis management. Crisis communication and business continuity have been left out of the scope (for now).
This model is not set in stone. Nor is its purpose to render every other model obsolete. It represents our best effort to create a standard that any crisis professional can use as a guide to take their crisis management organization to the next level.
You can think of the MCV as a roadmap with logical steps for getting from A to B. First, you determine which areas you’ve already got under control. That’s where you are now. Next, you set your level of ambition. Where would you like to be? You can now easily fill in the next steps in the model one by one.
In our next article, we’ll explain how to apply the model in practice.
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