As leaders, crisis management comes with the territory. Many of us have learned through bitter experience that a crisis is never more than a phone call, an email or even a tweet away. You can fall asleep in peace and wake to chaos.

In the impulsive and occasionally reckless tech and crypto spaces, a crisis plan is absolutely critical for survival. We’ve seen two very relevant demonstrations in the last few weeks involving sudden layoffs at Meta and Twitter. Two businesses, comparable in purpose, that handled bad news very differently.

While predicting when bad events will occur is nearly impossible, there are some actions companies can do to prepare for crisis communications.

You want to be prepared for every question so that you’re not caught off guard and can stay in control of the narrative. Know what you will say and what you won’t say, as well as how much detail you will go into. Speak with your PR professionals and have them ask difficult questions so that if those questions eventually come from a journalist, you won’t be caught unprepared. To have some control of the narrative, you need to determine what it should be in advance, and you need to practice.

Prepare a bulletproof blog post detailing the decisions you’ve made and explaining them robustly. It’s about being in control of the conversation and speaking your truth. Defend your position, but do so with humility. So tell your story, but do so in a way that shows you are human, and that even if you had to make difficult decisions, you did so with empathy.

Whatever the crisis involves (layoffs, negative press, insolvency, whatever), make sure you are expressing sympathy for anyone affected by it. Staff and customers are humans with complex, individual lives. Make