14 signs a communications crisis is brewing

Insights from industry professionals.

How do you know a crisis is coming?

“When they finally bring in the Communications team,” Jennifer Purdue, communications director of Patient Care Solutions at GE HealthCare, wrote wryly.

Purdue and other comms professionals shared their perspectives on LinkedIn about how to detect a crisis early – and how to begin righting the ship again.

Their answers have been lightly edited for style and brevity.

Internal misalignment and silence

Jacqueline Keidel Martine is president and chief communications officer at Digital HQ.

Employees are an often overlooked goldmine for this information. As the boots on the ground and the experts in their respective disciplines, they’re usually the company’s eyes and ears on the front lines, particularly in industries like retail. When they flag a recurring complaint, call out unusual chatter among customers or partners, or provide feedback that something isn’t being received well, the ears of comms folks better perk up. Their activity and insight can signal the tipping point from issue to crisis.

Alysha Light is founder & principal advisor at Flight PR.

The first sign something is about to snowball is rarely external: it’s internal misalignment.

Sarah Sutton is a strategic consultant.

Internally, it’s when people have having side conversations about something big that’s happening but afraid to name it to leadership. Whispering in the hallway or near the coffee machine or over Teams and text message. Basically, people are filling the gaps with gossip and assumptions because no one has named the problem or provided a good explanation. Externally, it’s when the leadership is more concerned with optics than the issue itself. Or — that awful sense of stomach-dropping dread when a reporter reaches out to ask you to comment on an issue that leadership was hoping wouldn’t leak outside the CEO’s office.

Lindsay Scheidell is founder and lead communications advisor at Hadley PR.

Your intuition flags it, you ask basic clarifying questions, and you still can’t answer: What happened, who’s affected, what’s being done, and who’s deciding next steps.

Michael Weist is a strategic communications consultant.

When management says “we don’t need to survey our customers (or fill in the audience) about this issue; we know what they think.” Assumption of omniscience is a risky state of mind.

Phil Gomes is head of marketing & communications at Fedi.

It’s usually when the executive suite or an otherwise politically popular person in an organization sees a small issue, exaggerates its importance, misjudges its potential impact and demands — against the advice of experienced counsel — that the communications department “do something.”

Stakeholder chatter and external signals

Hinda Mitchell is president and founder at Inspire PR Group.

When the client/company begins getting off-the-cuff inquiries from critical stakeholders. Think: key customers, shareholders, Board members and even competitors, reaching out to their contacts within the organization indicating they are picking up chatter about it, getting questions or forwarding screenshots of online posts.

Tiffany Fox is a communications consultant.

I’m always on the lookout for when the audience begins to expand suddenly and unexpectedly. If people outside your niche start to take notice of you for reasons that seem unclear, it could be because there is “talk” that has begun leaking to wider circles, unbeknownst to you.

Akeem Anderson is senior vice president and head of digital at H/Advisors Abernathy.

The moment an issue spills from the point of origination to other channels, alarm bells should ring. Media silos can often contain a crisis, but when a TikTok video becomes a shared link on Reddit or a news story lands atop search or LLM results, risks are heightened.

Kalie Moore is CEO of High Vibe PR.

We’ve worked in gaming for over a decade. The telltale sign we are about to have a full-blown comms crisis on our hands is the level of comments/chatter on Reddit. Once there is a critical mass — it spreads like wildfire. Once we’ve hit a certain threshold of upvotes and comments (the exact number depends on the community), we know it’s time to get ahead of the negative sentiment, usually by rallying the community to come to a client’s defense.

When the narrative slips

Karen Freberg is professor of strategic communication at the University of Louisville.

I think there are some universal signs that a small issue is about to become a big one: 1) People are talking about it, but key decision makers are not listening or they “brush it off,” 2) People and/or brand are not curious, but they are defensive instead (which brings up the question — why are they doing that?!) and 3) influencers/media/employees start asking questions — but there is misalignment in messaging and confusion, which sparks the spiral effect in losing the narrative of the story and situation.

Ralu Gijbels is co-founder of Brands Untamed.

When your audience stops asking questions and starts making statements. Questions mean there is still space to clarify and correct. Statements like “they messed this up” spread very fast and you aren’t the main source of the story anymore.

Alejandro Ramos is director of strategic communications at Hirsch Leatherwood.

Alarm bells start going off when the conversation is more focused on optics than actual facts. If folks are more concerned about how something looks than what something actually is, the narrative has already slipped.

David Weissmann is vice president of media strategy at Gova10.

When the focus moves from resolution of the issue to management of the situation.

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