Two bad mornings: Two things go wrong at Lena's Bakery in one week. For one there is a plan; for the other there is not.
Tuesday, 2:30 a.m.
- The oven at the Mill Lane bakehouse stops.
- Priti does not panic. She takes a folder off the wall, turns to the page headed 'If the oven fails', and does what it says.
Saturday, 9:40 a.m.
- A customer who bought a loaf at the Market Square shop is taken to hospital with an allergic reaction.
- There is no page in the folder for that.
The folder is a contingency plan. Deciding in advance what the business will do if something goes wrong is contingency planning.
Lena and Priti wrote the oven page months ago, on a quiet afternoon, by asking two questions: what could stop tonight's bake, and what would we do then?
The page headed 'If the oven fails'
Ring the engineer
The bakery pays for a 24-hour call-out contract. The number is on the page, so nobody hunts for it at half past two in the morning.
Tell the shops by 4 a.m.
Priti texts every shop manager, so they can put a sign in the window and order extra rolls before customers arrive.
Bake the best-sellers first
Once the oven is fixed, the loaves that sell most go in first, so every shop opens with something on its shelves.
Know who decides
Priti is in charge until Lena arrives. Nobody stops to ask whose call it is.
Saturday is different. A crisis is an unexpected event that threatens a business's people, its good name or its ability to keep trading, and needs action now.
Dealing with a crisis as it happens, to limit the harm and get back to normal, is crisis management.
| Contingency planning | Crisis management | |
|---|---|---|
| When | Before anything goes wrong | While it is going wrong, and just after |
| What it is | A plan for what might happen | The response to what is happening |
| What sets it off | A risk the business can foresee | An event, often one nobody foresaw |
| The aim | Be ready, so the business keeps going | Limit the harm to people, trust and trade, then recover |
| The attitude | Planning ahead (proactive) | Responding (reactive) |
| At Lena's Bakery | The oven page, written months ago | The Saturday of the allergic reaction |
The trap: two names for one thing: Contingency planning happens before a problem and may never be used. Crisis management happens when the problem is here, whether or not there was a plan.
They work together. A plan makes the response faster and calmer, but no folder covers everything, so managers must still be able to handle the crisis nobody wrote a page for.
That Saturday, Lena had no page to follow. How well she handled the day came down to four things: how honest she was, how well she told people, how fast she moved, and whether she stayed in charge.
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Saturday, 11:15 a.m.: The customer is recovering in hospital. Now the bakery has a second problem: the story is spreading online.
How it happened
Friday night
A tray of 24 walnut loaves went into sourdough bags at Mill Lane.
Saturday morning
A customer bought one in a bag labelled plain sourdough. It was a walnut loaf, and she is allergic to nuts.
11:15 a.m.
Her daughter posts a photo of the bag online.
1 p.m.
The photo has been shared 2,000 times, and people are asking what else in Lena's bags is not what the label says.
Lena's first choice is what to say. Being open and honest about what happened, what is known and what is not yet known, and owning a mistake that is yours, is transparency.
Open (transparent)
- 'On Friday night a tray of walnut loaves was put in sourdough bags at our bakehouse. That was our mistake.'
- 'We do not yet know how it happened. We will tell you as soon as we do.'
- Every angry comment stays up, and each one gets an answer.
Closed
- 'Lena's Bakery follows every food safety rule.'
- 'We cannot comment while we look into the matter.'
- Angry comments are deleted within minutes.
Why hiding backfires: The facts come out anyway: the family has the bag, the bakers know, and the council will inspect. A business caught hiding them loses trust twice, once for the mistake and once for the cover-up.
Deleting angry comments is the classic version. People notice, and the anger grows.
Being honest decides what Lena says. Getting it to everyone who needs it, clearly, quickly, through channels they will actually see, and keeping them updated, is communication.
Different groups affected by the bakery (stakeholders) need different messages.
Who needs to hear, and what
The customer and her family
At 11:00 Lena rings the hospital herself, apologises and asks what they need. They hear it from her before they read it online.
Customers
At noon, a post on the bakery's page and a sign in every shop window: which loaves, which day, bring them back for a full refund, walnut loaves off sale until the checks are done.
Staff
Priti's bakers and every shop manager get the same facts and the same words to use at the till, so nobody has to guess.
The council's food safety officer
Lena reports what happened herself, before the officer hears it from somebody else.
The local radio station
When it calls at one o'clock, Lena gives the same facts as the post. The story on air matches the sign in the window.
Transparency and communication are different: Transparency is about the truth of the message: nothing hidden. Communication is about getting it to people: who, how, when and how often.
A business can be honest and still fail to communicate, by telling nobody. It can communicate a lot and still not be transparent, by saying a great deal and admitting nothing.
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The first fifty minutes: At 10:05 Kofi rings Lena from Market Square: the customer's son has brought in the bag, and there are walnuts in the loaf.
Nobody knows yet how many mislabelled loaves have been sold. So at 10:30, fifty minutes after the reaction, every sourdough loaf from Friday night's bake is off the shelves in every shop.
Acting quickly, to stop the harm and to be the first to explain, is speed. In a crisis, every hour of silence gets filled by someone else: a rumour, an angry post, a reporter's guess.
| Saturday | What Lena's Bakery did | Which factor |
|---|---|---|
| 9:40 | A customer is taken to hospital after eating a Market Square loaf | The crisis begins |
| 10:05 | Kofi rings Lena straight away, so one person is deciding | Control |
| 10:30 | Every sourdough loaf from Friday night's bake is off sale | Speed |
| 11:00 | Lena rings the family at the hospital | Communication |
| 12:00 | The statement goes up online and in every window: what happened, and that it was the bakery's mistake | Transparency |
| Monday | Walnut loaves are baked last and bagged at a separate table | Control |
Fast is not the same as hasty: Speed means acting on what you know, quickly. It does not mean announcing what you have not checked.
Hasty
- Posting at 10:15 that 'the loaf must have come from somewhere else'
- First and wrong, so every later word would be doubted
Fast
- Pulling the loaves at once was right
- The statement waited until noon, for the facts
The fourth factor is control: someone clearly in charge, taking the decisions, deciding who says what, and fixing the cause, so the business steers events instead of being pushed around by them.
One person in charge
- Lena leads, with Marco and Priti as a small crisis team
- Every decision goes through them, so no shop acts on its own
One voice
- Only Lena posts online and speaks to the radio
- Shop staff use the agreed words and pass any other question to her
The cause fixed
- Walnut loaves are now baked last and bagged at a separate table
- Priti checks every label before the vans leave at 5 a.m.
Without control, the other three fall apart: Picture it: one shop manager tells customers the walnut loaves are safe, a baker posts his own version online, and nobody changes how the bags are filled.
The honest statement is drowned out, the speed is wasted, and next Friday the same tray goes into the same bags.
A month later, Lena and Marco ask whether they handled it well. Crisis management is judged by what happened next.
Four questions to judge it by
- Were people kept safe?
- Was the harm kept small?
- Do customers still trust the bakery?
- How soon was it back to normal?
| Market Square | Before | The week after | A month after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loaves sold a day | 400 | 330 | 390 |
| Share of normal sales | 100% | 82.5% | 97.5% |
The four factors pull against each other: The four factors come in two pairs, and each pair pulls in opposite directions. A good response balances them.
Speed against transparency
- Speak fast and you may not have the facts; wait for every fact and rumours fill the gap.
- Lena acted on the loaves at once and spoke at noon, saying what she did not yet know.
Control against communication
- One voice keeps the message clear, but if every question waits for Lena, the shops stall.
- So she gave the shop managers agreed words they could use at the till.
What Lena's Bakery did
- Transparency. Said it was the bakery's mistake, and what was not yet known.
- Communication. The family, customers, staff, the council and the radio all heard the same facts.
- Speed. Loaves off the shelves fifty minutes after the reaction.
- Control. One small team, one voice, and the bagging changed by Monday.
What would have made it worse
- Transparency. Blaming the flour supplier, or deleting the comments.
- Communication. Customers learning about it from the photo, not from the bakery.
- Speed. Leaving the loaves on sale until Monday to check first.
- Control. Every shop making up its own answer.
The trap: describing instead of judging: A list of what the business did is not a judgement. For each factor, say how well it was done and what that achieved: 'Lena pulled the loaves fifty minutes after the reaction, so no more mislabelled loaves were sold.'
Then weigh them. One weak factor can undo three strong ones, and the figures show whether the response worked.
Lena also adds a page to Priti's folder: 'If a customer is harmed by our food'. The lessons of one crisis become part of the plan, so the next response starts from a page instead of a blank.
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How this comes up: Crisis management comes up in short questions, in case questions and in a longer discussion.
The questions you may meet
- Short questions, two marks each: define crisis management, describe one factor in effective crisis management, or explain one difference between crisis management and contingency planning.
- With a case, four marks: explain two factors that would help a named business manage its crisis.
- With a longer stimulus, ten marks: discuss how effectively a business handled a crisis, weighing each factor and reaching a judgement.
The four-mark pattern
- Name the first factor. Speed: acting quickly to stop the harm spreading.
- Show it in the case. Nobody knows how many mislabelled loaves were sold, so every sourdough loaf from Friday night comes off the shelves at once.
- Name the second factor. Transparency: saying honestly what happened and whose fault it was.
- Show it in the case. The photo has 2,000 shares; admitting the walnut loaves went into the wrong bags stops people wondering what else is mislabelled.
Trap one: the factor without the case: 'Communication is important in a crisis' is true of every business, so it names the factor and no more. Say who at this business needs to hear what.
Trap two: the plan instead of the response: Asked how a business should manage its crisis, do not describe the contingency plan it should have written last year. The crisis is happening now.
Explain two factors that would help Lena's Bakery Ltd manage this crisis effectively.
Model answer plan
See the answer broken into clear points, with guidance on how each point earns marks.