Summon Your Inner Churchill: A Guide To Exceptional Crisis Communications

Even in a crisis—or perhaps especially in a crisis—most organizations’ messages tend to sound similar: “Our highest priority remains your health and safety. We will seek to offer transparency as we navigate these difficult times. We are confident that, together, we will emerge from this unprecedented situation stronger than before.”

It’s understandable, really. Your organization isn’t all that different from competing organizations, so its communiques will by necessity cover the same bases. Executives and communications teams will reflexively veer into the same grooves and ruts that have served others. And so the word “unprecedented” quickly becomes overused and in need of a moratorium.

The audiences for these messages may skim them and feel they’ve heard it all before. Because they have. Let Nate Silver tell you:

How can you say something that leaves a deeper impression on the audience and that cultivates more trust and resolve on their part? This requires speaking in both global and local terms—addressing larger realities shared by peers and the larger world during a worldwide coronavirus pandemic, but also ones that are unique to your organization, your people and your moment.

It’s never a bad idea to look at the wartime speeches of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for crisis communication inspiration. As ancient as human warfare is, Churchill’s relatively recent words from World War II have stood out. “In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone—and most men save Englishmen despaired of England’s life—he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle,” John F. Kennedy would say in 1963.

Why do Churchill’s words and phrases remain seared on the public consciousness?

As a leader, he truly owned his messages and put more effort than others into their craftsmanship. “Churchill wrote every word of his many speeches — he said he spent an hour working on every minute of a speech he made,” NPR reporter Tom Vitale wrote in 2012.

Churchill delivered his fabled “finest hour” speech to the British House of Commons on June 18, 1940, just as Britain’s key ally France was in the final stage of collapse. This was mere days after a failed Hail Mary effort to broker a merger of France and Britain into one Hitler-fighting Franco-British Union. Yet France’s ministers chose capitulation to Hitler over such a union, which World War I hero Marshal Pétain dismissed as “fusion with a corpse.” Churchill would have to go it alone.

Against this dismal backdrop, he offered a sober assessment of the moment. He took careful stock of Britain’s resources for the fight ahead, offering plausible reasons to continue on.

He then summoned his citizens’ spirit of heroism: “I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world.”

Churchill moved toward his soaring conclusion by creating a sense of cosmic stakes, and aroused among Britons a grand resolve to do what others could not or would not do.

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over,” Churchill said. “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Churchill is a complex figure. He was no saint, and it’s fair to say, even by the standards of an earlier age, he was a bigoted imperialist. He also wasn not an unimpeachably effective leader; he failed often before his wartime role, and went on to fail after.

But this moment, when the air was redolent with defeatism, was Churchill’s moment. His words lifted spirits and strengthened spines. And he pointed his people in a direction in which only their better selves were willing to tread. That makes his words worth studying now.