Former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, not usually known for his wisdom, once said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Similarly, every CEO thinks they have a crisis plan, complete with legal sign-offs and consultant-drawn flow charts. Then the actual crisis hits.
The board wants certainty. Staff want reassurance. Lawyers want caution. Customers want answers. Social media wants blood. And by lunchtime, someone who has never worked in the company, or indeed the industry, has produced a confident 11-post thread explaining exactly what happened, who is to blame and why the CEO must resign.
Welcome to crisis management in 2026. It’s faster, louder and less forgiving than the version most leaders trained for. Can business schools train executives to act with judgment, clarity and credibility when the story is moving faster than the facts?
Crises are not the exception; they are part of the operating environment.
And public trust is a thin cushion. The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2025 found that business remains relatively trusted in South Africa, at 68%, but media sits far lower, at 46%. Globally, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 put overall trust in news at 40%. That leaves companies trying to communicate in an environment where people may distrust journalists, institutions and AI summaries and yet believe a screenshot from a stranger on Instagram.
This is why the idea of “controlling the narrative” now sounds outdated. The narrative has a phone, a ring light and a group chat. It does not wait for the CEO’s statement.
For Chris van der Hoven, senior director at Stellenbosch Business School, executive programmes emphasise “clear, consistent communication and the importance of building trusted stakeholder relationships long before a crisis emerges”.
That “long before” matters. If a company first tries to become trustworthy at the point when everyone is furious, it is already behind. In an environment where AI-generated summaries and misinformation can shape perception within minutes, Van der Hoven says organisations need credible channels through which they can communicate “quickly, accurately and transparently”.
Leaders cannot control every conversation about their organisation, he says, but they can make sure stakeholders have access to reliable information from a source they trust. This allows them to “anchor the narrative early, rather than reacting to it after it has already taken shape”.
This is also why crisis leadership is not just about communication. It is a leadership test. A crisis exposes whether an organisation knows how decisions are made, who has authority, what values matter when there is a trade-off, and whether the people at the top can resist the pressure to freeze or the urge to bluster.
Milpark Business School’s André van der Walt says: “Crisis leadership is no longer a function of technical expertise alone.” It requires “resilience, ethical clarity and the ability to act decisively while communicating authentically”.
That is the line between crisis management and crisis theatre. The former is grounded in judgment, and the latter is what happens when everyone starts performing without changing anything material.
Van der Hoven says Stellenbosch uses scenario-based learning, real-world case studies and facilitated discussions that place leaders in situations where “information is incomplete, stakeholders have competing interests and decisions need to be made under pressure”. The objective is not to create false drama but to help executives develop confidence when there is no obvious answer.
MacDonald Kanyangale, acting director of the University of the Free State (UFS) Business School, says addressing decision paralysis is embedded in the curriculum as a leadership capability focused on “acting decisively under uncertainty”. Crises, he says, have behavioural dimensions. Leaders must navigate ambiguity, incomplete information and competing priorities while maintaining accountability.
UFS trains leaders in practical techniques: structuring decisions into clear priorities, applying disciplined judgment frameworks, setting decision thresholds and sequencing actions under time pressure. The goal is to make decisions “confidently without waiting for perfect information”. Perfect information usually arrives after the damage is done.
Nuhraan Sambo, director of business development at Mancosa School of Business, makes a similar point. Its executive programmes are designed for an increasingly “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous” environment where timely, well-informed decisions are essential. Through simulation-based learning, participants are challenged to “navigate complex crises, make decisions with incomplete information, engage multiple stakeholders and communicate effectively under pressure”.
Interventions are designed to give executives a safe environment to practise, receive feedback and refine their responses before facing similar challenges in the workplace.
Safety, however, does not exist in the real world, where even the slightest hesitation can have a cost — as can overconfidence. And mixed messaging can become its own crisis.
Crisis management is not about having the perfect statement ready. It is about building leaders who can think under pressure, speak without hiding, and act before certainty arrives
One textbook example of getting it right is Johnson & Johnson’s response to the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. Seven people died in the Chicago area after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. It was discovered that unknown individuals purchased the capsules, injected them with deadly cyanide, and returned them to store shelves.
Because the tampering happened at the retail level rather than during manufacturing, the culprits were never caught. The company did not wait for a perfect legal picture before acting. It issued warnings, halted advertising and recalled more than 31-million bottles from the market. The response was costly, but it became a benchmark because it made the priority visible: public safety before short-term financial damage.
Compare that with South Africa’s 2017-2018 listeriosis outbreak. The National Institute for Communicable Diseases reported 1,060 laboratory-confirmed cases and 216 deaths by July 2018. Health authorities traced the outbreak strain to ready-to-eat processed meat products from Enterprise Foods’ Polokwane facility, then owned by Tiger Brands.
Tiger Brands did recall products. But at a media briefing in March 2018, then CEO Lawrence MacDougall said there was “no direct link” between the deaths and the company’s products. Legally, one can understand why a company facing possible liability would be careful. However, it landed badly. When families are grieving and consumers are frightened, a response that sounds like evidentiary distancing can feel like moral distancing.
Years later, the story is still not over. In 2025, Tiger Brands and its insurers presented a settlement offer in the long-running class action. The legal process matters, of course. But, reputationally, the company had already become a case study in why technical compliance and human accountability are not the same thing.
Sambo says effective crisis communication is built on “authenticity, transparency, accountability and timely communication”. The objective is not to protect the organisation’s image at all costs but to preserve stakeholder trust by communicating honestly about what has happened, what is being done to address it and what the path forward looks like.
Capitec’s 2018 clash with Viceroy Research offers another South African lesson, but of a different sort. In January that year, Viceroy released a report attacking Capitec and calling for the bank to be placed under curatorship. Capitec’s shares fell as much as 25% before recovering most of the loss.
Here, the issue was not a public-health tragedy but a trust shock: a short-seller report, a market reaction and the risk that fear could outrun facts. Capitec’s response was fast and direct. It rejected the allegations, engaged the market and media, and benefited from a critical external anchor — the Reserve Bank said Capitec was “solvent, well-capitalised and has adequate liquidity”. The National Treasury later criticised Viceroy’s report as reckless.
Capitec managed to provide a credible counterweight to panic. It did not merely say “trust us”. It pointed to facts, regulators and a clear position.
Kanyangale says establishing a credible, organisational “source of truth” is developed as a disciplined leadership capability. Leaders at UFS are taught to validate information through multiple channels, align internal and external communication, structure clear information flows and maintain consistency across hybrid and digital environments.
In Kanyangale’s words, graduates should become “custodians of organisational truth”.
Rhodes Business School director Owen Skae approaches the issue through governance and scepticism. “Risk is everybody’s business,” he says. Leaders need scenario planning but also what he calls, borrowing from Carl Sagan, the “baloney detection test”.
When it comes to media training specifically, Skae is candid. His school has been challenged on the need to do more in this space, particularly by people with direct media experience. He says: “We’re not well equipped to deal with these issues sometimes,” especially in a world where people can make up their own reality.
When a deepfake is circulating, the whistleblower e-mail is leaked, the cyber team is still investigating and the CEO is being tagged on LinkedIn every 11 seconds, someone has to ask: What do we actually know? Who verified it? What can we safely say? What must we correct?
Of course, the legal dimension is real. Executives do not communicate in a vacuum. There are liability concerns, regulators, insurers, investors and sometimes police investigations. But the tension cannot be solved by pretending nothing happened.
“There is rarely a perfect response when things go wrong,” says Van der Hoven. The key is knowing how to communicate “early and transparently while legal clarity is still evolving”.
That is a hard balance. Say too little and the silence looks evasive. Say too much, and the company may create legal exposure or later contradict itself. But saying nothing while others define the story is also a decision — usually a poor one.
Van der Walt says storytelling should be embedded as a strategic leadership capability grounded in stakeholder-centred communication. Learners should be trained to align messaging with organisational values, stakeholder expectations and broader societal responsibilities. The goal is to avoid superficial PR spin in favour of authentic leadership.
Leaders must help stakeholders understand what is happening, says Van der Hoven. In a crisis, uncertainty and speculation are inevitable, so providing context, explaining decisions and communicating clearly become critical.
Crisis management, then, is not really about having the perfect statement ready. It is about building leaders who can think under pressure, speak without hiding, and act before certainty arrives.
“The crisis plan still matters,” says Van der Walt. “But it is only useful if the people using it have good judgment. The companies that recover best are not always those with the fewest mistakes. They are the ones who make the next right move in public.”
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