Issues management is about relationships,
not publicity

Why the first question in a crisis is never about communication.

The first question to ask when trouble arises is not how to avoid unfavourable publicity. It is who will experience that they are affected, and how you take care of them.

That distinction – between managing attention and managing relationships – determines how well an organisation gets through a difficult situation. It also determines something more important: whether the organisation emerges with its credibility strengthened or permanently damaged.

Most of what passes for crisis communication starts in the wrong place. It begins with the message, the media, the narrative. It asks what to say, to whom, through which channel, and when. These are legitimate questions. But they are second-order questions. The first-order question is always relational: who is affected, what do they need, and what must we do before we speak?

Action must always come before words.

The relational principle

Public relations, properly understood, is about how an organisation relates to its environment – not about how it appears in the press. When an organisation cares more about relationships than publicity, the attention it receives becomes a consequence of how it behaves. That is how it should be. Good relationship management produces good press relations as a side effect.

The same logic applies in reverse. When trouble arises, unfavourable publicity is usually not the problem. It is a symptom. The problem is what happened, who was affected, and how the organisation responds. An organisation that has good relationships with its stakeholders can handle unfavourable publicity. An organisation that does not, will find that no amount of communication skill can compensate.

This means that issues management is not, at its core, a communications discipline. It is a management discipline with communicative consequences. The quality of the response depends on the quality of the organisation’s relationships, its capacity to listen, and its willingness to act – not on the quality of its messaging.

Two decisive factors

Experience shows that two factors have a decisive effect on how well an organisation gets through a difficult situation.

The first is the ability to recognise that a problem exists. This sounds obvious but is routinely the point of failure. Organisations that do not listen to their environment cannot recognise problems until they have escalated beyond the point where early intervention is possible. The ability to listen is improved by systematic stakeholder engagement. An organisation that practises genuine two-way communication – not as a compliance exercise but as a management discipline – will detect problems earlier, understand them more accurately, and have relationships that can bear the weight of difficult conversations.

The second is the ability to quickly identify those affected and take care of them. The instinctive reflex when trouble arises should be to ask who will experience that they are affected, and then to prioritise their needs – in action first, and in communication second. This is not a soft principle. It is operationally demanding and frequently conflicts with the organisation’s instinct to protect itself. But it is the single most reliable predictor of whether a difficult situation will be contained or will escalate into a crisis that threatens the organisation’s standing.

Both factors are functions of the organisation’s relational infrastructure – the quality of its stakeholder relationships before the trouble begins. This infrastructure cannot be built during a crisis. It must exist beforehand. That is why issues management is, in practice, inseparable from the broader discipline of strategic communication.

See it as it is. Say it as it is.

Two principles govern how an organisation should communicate when trouble arises.

The first is to see the situation as it is – not as the organisation wishes it were, not as the legal department frames it, not as the most optimistic internal assessment suggests. This requires a capacity for honest self-assessment that many organisations lack, particularly under pressure. The temptation to minimise, to interpret ambiguity in one’s own favour, to treat a serious problem as a minor one, is powerful and pervasive. It is also the single most common source of escalation. Problems that are seen clearly can be addressed. Problems that are minimised grow.

The second is to say it as it is. If the organisation understands that an issue will attract public attention, it benefits from providing information on its own initiative. Bad news should be told by the organisation itself, at a time and in a manner of its own choosing. This is not a transparency ideology. It is a practical judgement: an organisation that delivers its own bad news retains a measure of control over framing, timing, and context that it loses entirely if the information emerges through media investigation or third-party disclosure.

Issues should be dealt with fully and quickly. Partial responses prolong exposure. Delayed responses allow the narrative to be defined by others. A timeline that extends the problem – announcing that an issue will be resolved months from now, for instance – does not close the crisis. It sustains it.

The diagnostic question: values or compliance?

Not all crises are the same, and the failure to distinguish between different types is a frequent and costly error.

The critical diagnostic question is whether the public concern is driven by a knowledge gap or by a values conflict. In a knowledge-driven crisis, the public lacks information and the organisation’s task is to provide it – clearly, promptly, and credibly. Compliance framing (“we follow all applicable regulations”) may be adequate because the underlying question is whether the organisation has met a defined standard.

In a values-driven crisis, the situation is fundamentally different. The public is not asking whether the organisation followed the rules. It is asking what the organisation knew, when it knew it, and why it did not act differently. The concern is moral, not procedural. It is about judgement, not compliance.

In this situation, compliance framing is not merely insufficient. It is actively damaging. Repeating “we follow regulations” in response to a values-driven concern communicates two things simultaneously: that the organisation does not understand what people are worried about, and that it is unwilling to engage at the level where the concern actually lives. Every repetition deepens the credibility loss. The audience hears evasion where the organisation intends reassurance.

The distinction matters because the correct response to a values-driven crisis is the opposite of the compliance reflex. It requires the organisation to engage with the moral dimension directly – to acknowledge what happened, to explain what it knew and when, and to demonstrate through action that it takes the concern seriously. This is uncomfortable. It frequently conflicts with legal advice. But it is the only response that addresses the actual source of public anxiety.

It’s emotional

The content of corporate communication is rational, fact-based, and logical. The people receiving it are not.

Whether we are conveying or receiving information, emotion dominates. Tone of voice, pacing, pauses, posture, facial expression – these routinely override the substance of what is being said. In written and digital formats, design, imagery, and context do the same. We know this from advertising. We forget it in corporate communication.

This is particularly consequential in difficult situations. A company facing public anxiety about environmental harm, food safety, data privacy, or human rights is facing an emotional challenge. The temptation to respond with data, process descriptions, and regulatory compliance is understandable – it is what the organisation knows and controls. But it misses the point. You never win an emotional debate with rational arguments. Never.

The strategic implication is clear. If the public’s concern is emotional, the organisation’s fundamental response must be emotional – which in practice means demonstrating that it cares about what people care about. Not claiming to care. Demonstrating it, through action and conduct that are visible, concrete, and sustained. A communication strategy built on showing that you care requires that you actually do. If you do not, no amount of messaging will compensate, and the gap between what you say and what people perceive will widen with every public statement.

The foundation determines the response

The quality of an organisation’s crisis response is largely determined before the crisis begins. An organisation that has established a clear foundational approach – a long-term strategic posture derived from its structural exposure, consistently demonstrated through action – enters a crisis with credibility it can draw upon. An organisation that has not is starting from zero at the worst possible moment.

Consider two organisations facing the same type of crisis. One has spent years consistently demonstrating care for the issue at stake – publishing data, engaging with stakeholders, investing in the area where its exposure is greatest. The other has treated the issue as a compliance matter, doing what was required and no more. When the crisis arrives, the first organisation’s prior conduct speaks for it. The second must build credibility from scratch while under attack. The difference is structural, not communicative. No crisis response, however well-crafted, can substitute for a foundation that does not exist.

This is why issues management cannot be separated from the broader strategic framework described in The structural turn in public affairs. The chain from defining characteristic to structural exposure to foundational approach is not only a framework for public affairs strategy. It is also, and perhaps primarily, a framework for crisis preparedness. The foundational approach is what makes a crisis response credible. Without it, every statement is a claim. With it, every statement is a reminder.

What happens to arenas in a crisis

In normal conditions, issues compete for attention within arenas that have finite carrying capacity. Not every issue can be salient at the same time. Selection principles – drama, novelty, cultural resonance, political alignment – determine which issues gain and hold attention. An organisation can, to some extent, manage how its issues are framed in different arenas, and engage with them sequentially. The competitive dynamics of issue attention work in the organisation’s favour: other issues crowd in, salience shifts, and carrying capacity is shared.

A crisis reverses this dynamic. The issue saturates carrying capacity across multiple arenas simultaneously. The selection principles that normally regulate attention now amplify the crisis issue – it has drama, novelty, and cultural resonance in abundance. Feedback loops between arenas accelerate: coverage in one arena raises salience in others. The organisation loses the ability to manage how the issue is framed in each arena separately, because the arena boundaries become porous. A statement designed for one context is received and interpreted in all of them.

This has a practical consequence that organisations routinely underestimate. In normal conditions, an organisation can express its foundational approach differently depending on the arena – different emphasis, different evidence, different register. In a crisis, those differences are read as inconsistencies, and inconsistencies are read as dishonesty. The organisation must be able to say essentially the same thing in every arena and have it be credible in each one. This is only possible if the response is grounded in a foundational position that is true regardless of context – which brings us back to the foundation.

What this means in practice

Issues management, understood in this way, is not a set of procedures to be activated when trouble arises. It is a way of running an organisation that makes crises less likely, less severe when they occur, and less damaging to long-term credibility.

It requires that the organisation listens to its environment systematically, not as a communications exercise but as a management discipline. It requires that leadership has established a foundational approach that is consistently demonstrated through action. It requires that the organisation can see a situation as it is and say it as it is, even when that is uncomfortable. It requires that those affected by trouble are prioritised in action and in communication – ahead of the organisation’s instinct to protect itself. And it requires the understanding that corporate communication is fundamentally emotional, even when its content is rational.

None of this can be improvised under pressure. It must be built before it is needed.

The first question when trouble arises is not what to say. It is what to do, and for whom. Everything else follows.

My thinking on corporate communications is laid out here: www.jorgenchristiansen.no/how