Reputation Red Teaming: How to Design Immersive Crisis Response Exercises
By Ted Skinner, writing for Risk Management…
On January 5, 2024, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 was flying at 16,000 feet when a door plug blew off the Boeing 737 MAX 9 fuselage. The two seats adjacent to the opening were, by chance, unoccupied. That stroke of luck is the only reason this incident did not become another mass casualty event for Boeing, a company still recovering from two fatal crashes that killed 346 people.
Within hours, the story dominated global news coverage. Boeing’s stock dropped 18.9% in the following weeks, erasing more than $28 billion in market value. The FAA grounded all 737 MAX 9 aircraft with door plugs for three weeks, and Boeing’s already tarnished reputation took another severe blow.
Six months later, CrowdStrike experienced a different kind of crisis when a routine software update crashed approximately 8.5 million devices worldwide that were running Microsoft Windows. Airlines grounded flights. Hospital systems stalled. Banks went offline. Emergency services encountered critical failures. The incident eventually cost insurers an estimated $1.5 billion in payouts and triggered legal action, including a $500 million lawsuit from Delta Airlines.
These two cases are instructive for risk professionals as they reveal an important disconnect in crisis management: Both companies had crisis plans, but neither was prepared for how the story actually unfolded.
Why Traditional Crisis Planning Falls Short
Most crisis management frameworks focus on operational response. Identify the problem. Contain the damage. Restore normal operations. Communicate status updates. These elements matter, but they miss something crucial: The headlines move faster than your operations.
In the first hours of any major incident, your organization does not control what the public sees. Journalists, social media users, employees and competitors are all narrating the story while you are still assembling your crisis team. The narrative gap between what is happening internally and what is being reported externally can determine whether a crisis becomes manageable or catastrophic.
Boeing’s response to the door plug incident illustrates this problem. The company issued technically accurate statements, but those statements arrived after the public had already formed opinions. When CEO David Calhoun later told a Senate subcommittee he was proud of Boeing’s safety record, the comment became its own reputation event, reinforcing existing negative perceptions rather than shifting them.
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