The September reset every crisis team skips.

Dear {{ first_name | reader }},

You've been back at your desk for a week or two now. The out-of-office is off, the inbox is somewhere near empty, and the September calendar is filling in fast. Before it fills in completely, there's a window worth using — not for planning what's ahead, but for checking what got missed while everyone was away.

Summer is quiet for a consultant like me. It always has been. But quiet doesn't mean idle, I spend a good part of it preparing, because I know exactly what happens once September arrives: the phone starts ringing again.

This year that's already turned into a new crisis comms simulation taking shape in the Middle East, a potential guest lecturing series with a government academy, and a run of risk comms workshops in the Balkans. It's nearly the same cycle every year: a quiet summer, then a Q4 that fills in fast.

September isn't the start of the crisis comms year. It's the audit before the year properly starts — and most teams skip it because nothing on the calendar forces them to do it.

Here's what belongs on that audit and the downloadable checklist to run it against.

Enjoy!

Most organisations don't slow down in August so much as thin out. Fewer people are watching the same channels. Approval chains that normally move in hours stretch into days, because the person who'd normally sign off is on a beach somewhere with patchy signal. None of this looks like a crisis while it's happening. It looks like an ordinary quiet month.

The risk isn't that something dramatic happens in August. It's that something small does, and the usual mechanisms for catching it are running at half capacity.

A complaint that would normally get escalated within a day sits in an inbox for a week. A social post that would normally trigger a monitoring alert gets noticed three days late by someone covering for someone else.

By the time September's full team is back at their desks, the thing has either resolved itself quietly or grown into something that now needs explaining.

Most post-mortems look backwards from the crisis itself — rarely from September into August, asking what was already visible three weeks earlier to anyone who'd had the capacity to look.

A crisis plan is a snapshot. It captures who holds which role, what the activation chain looks like, and which statements are pre-approved for which scenarios — all true on the day it was written. Three months later, some of that is still true. Some of it isn't, and the plan has no way of telling you which is which.

People change roles over summer. Spokespeople leave, get promoted, or simply become unavailable for reasons that have nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with normal organisational churn. Regulators shift positions. Products launch.

None of these changes trigger an automatic plan update — they just sit there, quietly making the document less reliable, until someone tries to use it and discovers the gap in the worst possible moment.

The fix isn't dramatic. It's a line-by-line read-through: every name checked, every phone number dialled, every assumption tested against what's actually true today rather than what was true in May.

Ask most crisis comms teams when their last tabletop exercise was, and a surprising number will say "earlier this year" in a tone that suggests they know exactly how long ago that was. Exercises get scheduled with good intentions and then bumped — by a launch, a reorg, a quieter priority that happened to land first. "Next quarter" becomes a permanent state.

September breaks that pattern, briefly. Calendars are emptier now than they'll be again until after the December shutdown. Q4 hasn't started concentrating its usual pressure yet.

If a simulation has been "next quarter" for two quarters running, this is the quarter it stops being deferrable — because the next genuinely open window isn't January, it's whatever's left after Q4 has already happened to you.

A proper audit isn't free. Plan, team, rehearsal, materials, calendar — that's real hours, and September is also when a lot of deferred summer work lands back on people's desks at once. The audit competes for time against everything else that piled up in August, and it rarely wins that fight on its own merits, because nothing forces it the way a live incident does.

The practical answer is to make it small and scheduled rather than large and aspirational. Block two hours, not two days. Run it against the checklist below rather than trying to rebuild the plan from scratch. A partial audit done in September beats a comprehensive one that keeps getting pushed to "when things calm down" — because things rarely calm down before Q4 arrives.

Run it against five areas: the plan, the team, the rehearsal, the materials and the calendar. Check every name and number in the plan against current reality. Find out what happened over summer that never got properly escalated.

Book the tabletop exercise you keep deferring. Re-read the dark-site copy and holding statements against today's context — including, this year, whether any AI-generated material in them needs the disclosure the EU AI Act now requires. Map Q4's risk points and assign coverage before the week they land, not during it.

The full working version — thirty checks across all five areas, with space to assign an owner and a target date against each one — is available as a free download below.

None of this is glamorous work. It's maintenance — the unremarkable, easy-to-defer kind that nobody notices until the day it saves you.

Teams that run this audit in September aren't doing anything the rest of the year makes impossible. They're just doing it while the calendar is still cooperating, instead of finding out in November what August left behind.

The September Readiness Checklist, free PDF: thirty checks across the plan, the team, the rehearsal, the materials and the calendar, with space for an owner and a target date against each one.

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_{AI Transparency: In alignment with EU AI Act requirements, please note that AI technology was used in the research, drafting, and/or image generation for this edition. All strategic analysis, professional opinions, and final editorial oversight are conducted exclusively by the author. Affiliate Disclosure: Some links in this briefing may be affiliate links. I only recommend tools and services I use personally or have vetted for professional efficacy. Professional Advice: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or professional crisis management advice. © 2026 RiskComms FZCO. All rights reserved.}