In partnership with
Dear {{ first_name | reader }},
Back in the late nineties, when I set up my first crisis room at IBM, we used flipcharts. One for decisions taken, one for actions in progress, one for what was done. Analogue, unglamorous, and completely effective. Everyone walking into that room — regardless of when they arrived or what they'd missed — could read the situation in thirty seconds without asking a single question.
I've pushed the same principle in every workshop since. You don't know who will be there when a crisis breaks. You don't know how long it will run. The person who starts the response is rarely the person who finishes it. Shift changes happen. People get pulled away. And the next person through the door needs to read the room, not get a briefing.
We moved to Kanban on a shared screen eventually. Different technology, same logic.
So when I read Kosuke Nakazawa's piece on what the City of Yokohama has built — 27 action cards on a wall, red to yellow to green — my first thought was: what a simple, practical solution. I sent him a DM saying so.
Then I sat with it a little longer and started feeling something closer to embarrassment. Because Yokohama had taken a principle I'd been improvising with for twenty-five years and turned it into a system. With institutional backing. And 27 actual cards.
Crisis communication still doesn't have that.
Here's what Kosuke documented — and what I've been trying to build in response.
WAG THE DOG NEWSLETTER | ISSUE WEEK 24, 2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The manual nobody reads in a crisis is not a plan problem — it is a design problem. Crisis communication plans fail at the moment of activation not because they lack content but because they were designed to be read rather than used. The Yokohama action card system solves this by making the activation process visual, sequential, and status-trackable without any briefing required.
Emergency management figured out structured activation under uncertainty decades ago. Crisis communication hasn't. ICS and its derivatives assume the right people won't always be available and build systems that function anyway. Crisis communication has borrowed the vocabulary – activation protocols and escalation tiers – without producing tools that actually work at three in the morning with whoever happens to be on duty.
Most crisis communication drills test the wrong thing. Organisations rehearse press conferences and spokesperson interviews. Yokohama's blind drill revealed that staff had never once practised standing up the EOC itself — only operating it once someone else had set it up. Crisis communication has exactly the same blind spot.
A decision gate at the start of any activation system cuts off the most dangerous form of crisis paralysis. "Is this serious enough to escalate?" should not be left to individual judgement under stress. A forced binary — external response or internal management — gives the cognitive anchor that lets everything else proceed.
Activation tools that aren't maintained become liabilities. The plan that was excellent three years ago is now a confidence trap: it exists, it looks credible, and it will fail when used. Regular drills that update the cards are not optional maintenance. They are the system.
Table of Contents
This week's signal
I read a lot of emergency management literature. It keeps the practitioner side honest — and has the reliable side effect of reminding you how far crisis communication planning still lags behind crisis operations planning.
Kosuke Nakazawa's May 29 article on LinkedIn documented something the City of Yokohama has been doing quietly, without fuss: replacing its 100-page Emergency Operations Centre manual with 27 large A4 action cards, posted across an entire wall, tracked through a red-yellow-green colour system. Red: not started. Yellow: in progress. Green: done.
Anyone who arrived — experienced or not — could immediately see what needed doing and who was doing it. No briefings required. No waiting for the senior official who might be stuck in traffic on a Sunday morning.
And it made me ask an uncomfortable question: why hasn't crisis communication built the same thing?
Why it matters
Most organisations have crisis communication plans. Thick ones, often. Comprehensive, carefully written, regularly updated by someone who never has to use them under fire.
And most of those plans share the same fundamental flaw: they were written to be read, not to be used.
When a crisis breaks — really breaks — at 11 p.m. on a public holiday, when the comms director is on a plane and the deputy has the flu, what the first person in the room actually needs is not a plan. They need to know, in the next sixty seconds, what to do first.
The Yokohama model answers that question for EOC stand-up. What's the equivalent for crisis communication activation? For most organisations, the honest answer is 'nothing this good'.
That gap has consequences. Communication delays in the first hour are not neutral. They allow narratives to form without you. They signal institutional paralysis. They make everything that follows harder. The operational side of emergency management has understood this for decades. The communication side still hasn't fully caught up.