Today’s playbook for crisis communications looks very different from when I started in this industry a few decades ago. The old model gave companies hours, sometimes days, to respond to a crisis. But in an era shaped by social media and AI, we have to move faster than ever before.
At a recent ALI Conference on crisis communications, I took attendees inside Kite Hill’s PEAC Method, which is a repeatable framework Kite Hill created to help communicators effectively manage crises alongside client partners.
Here’s the full truth behind why this method exists: when something major happens at your company, the story is being written whether you participate or not. An employee takes a screenshot. Someone posts a Slack message. A customer tweets a complaint that gets picked up by an algorithm before your comms team has even opened a shared doc. By the time your team finishes its first draft of a statement, the narrative may already be set, and it might not be the one you wanted.
The Timeline Isn’t Shrinking. It’s Gone.
According to The Department of Energy, what used to be a two-hour window before a story can get picked up has narrowed to roughly 20 minutes. By 72 hours, that same story is old news, already replaced by the next thing.
The way people find out about that story has changed too. Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that 54% of people now get their news from social media and video platforms, more than television or news websites. This not only expedites the timeline, but opens companies up to a larger swath of public commentary.
These shifts are reshaping how teams should be advising every client who walks through the door. A crisis that once took a day or two to reach national media can now go global in under an hour.
Introducing Kite Hill’s PEAC Method™ – Pause, Evaluate, Announce, Connect
Most crisis comms failures I’ve seen didn’t happen because someone lacked good instincts. They happened because good instincts got overridden by pressure. Someone felt the need to respond immediately, over-explain stemming from anxiety, or comment before the facts were even confirmed.
The PEAC Method exists to slow down the internal process just enough so that what goes out externally is accurate, consistent, and transparent.
Pause: Confirm the Facts Before You Say Anything
The pause isn’t about stalling. It’s a mandatory window where everyone gets on the same page about the facts before a single word goes external.
First, get legal, HR, leadership, and comms aligned, separating what’s verified from what’s still rumored. Once the facts are clear, draft a holding statement without releasing it, and map who’s affected across every stakeholder group. Consider how those stakeholders will be impacted by the news and personalize from there. Name a single point of contact for inbound inquiries and set a deadline to reconvene, so the pause doesn’t turn into paralysis.
Evaluate: Understand Who’s Affected and How
Say an AI-driven restructuring is changing headcount and roles across the company. Before anyone drafts a message, the team needs to agree on what’s still true about the company’s culture and its commitments to people.
This is also where closed AI systems can be used as a genuine thought partner. Not to write the statement, but to synthesize sentiment data and pressure-test how different audiences might react. It makes the evaluation phase faster and more evidence-based instead of relying purely on gut feel. While an AI system can support here, human analysis and nuance is crucial in this phase.
Announce: Say It Once, Say It Right, Say it in the Right Order
This is where alignment matters most. Your team all needs to be saying the same thing, in the same sequence: employees hear it first, then customers, investors, and media.
Sequencing isn’t a formality, it’s a trust issue. When employees learn about their own company’s news from a press release or a news alert instead of their leadership, it sends a message that they matter less than the outside world’s perception of the company. That feeling spreads fast, often faster than the crisis itself. A leaked draft or a premature social post can undercut the entire sequence, so this phase is as much about internal discipline and timing as it is about the words themselves.
Connect: Don’t Go Silent After the Statement
This is the phase people often forget. Real recovery happens in the weeks after a crisis, through town halls, manager toolkits that help leaders answer employee questions consistently, ongoing customer updates, and continued media engagement where it makes sense.
Credibility isn’t restored by getting the announcement right; it’s restored by proving, over weeks and sometimes months, that the values behind that announcement were real.
Reputation Is Built in Hindsight
The companies that come out of a crisis stronger aren’t the ones who avoided one. They’re the ones who used a real process, proactively and consistently, instead of scrambling in the moment. The PEAC Method isn’t a document you read once and file away. It’s a practice, and it’s one the Kite Hill team lives by every day.
If your organization doesn’t have a crisis communications plan in place, or if your current plan hasn’t been stress-tested against how fast news moves today, that’s exactly the kind of work we do at Kite Hill.
Reach out to our team to talk through what a plan tailored to your business could look like, before you need it.
– Tiffany Guarnaccia, CEO & Founder