Crisis leadership: Teaching external corporate communications via an experiential learning exercise

Abstract

Crises are inevitable in today’s corporate world. This paper outlines a crisis leadership exercise to help business students understand the complexities of external corporate communications. This exercise is suited to class sizes of approximately 30 students, but variations can be used for larger classes. Students are placed into groups and use a playbook to help them navigate a real-life crisis. Students then use the playbook to deliver a simulated press conference. A mixed-methods study was used to investigate the learning experience, and the findings showed that students not only improved significantly in their ability to lead external corporate communications, but also in their understanding of key crisis leadership concepts.

Keywords:

• Crisis leadership
• external corporate communications
• experiential learning
• teaching and learning

Notes

1 For instance, the following five crises were used for a class with five groups: Domino's disgusting employees (2:31), Tylenol recall (2:10), US oil spill – Deepwater Horizon (2:11), United Airlines overbooking (1:51), and Activision Blizzard Hong Kong (2:01). All video clips were available on YouTube.

2 Most learning management software (e.g., Moodle) allows for videos to be made viewable at a certain day and time. Therefore, instructors can set the video clips to be made available at the start of class.

3 Students’ actual names were replaced by pseudonyms.