By Mike Szudarek, Marx Layne & Company

In crisis communications, we tend to romanticize talent. We talk about message discipline, executive presence, the precision of language, and the elegance of a recovery strategy (as if outcomes are a direct function of capability). And to a point, they are. But that framing leaves out a variable that experienced practitioners quietly understand but rarely name: luck.

As I’ve written before, outcomes are not always a clean reflection of decision quality. In fact, research across industries shows something counterintuitive: while talent distributes neatly across a bell curve, success does not. It follows a power law, where a small number of actors disproportionately capture positive outcomes, often due to the compounding effect of random, external events.

In other words, in a crisis, you are not operating in a controlled environment. You are operating in an uncertain one. Talent defines your ceiling. And luck influences your trajectory. Perhaps a more useful framing is talent is the structure and luck is the environment surrounding it. And these environments are volatile.

The implication for communicators is straightforward but often ignored: you cannot build a strategy that assumes fair conditions. You must build one that performs under asymmetry, randomness, and occasionally, outright bad breaks. That’s what a luck-resistant strategy is designed to do.

Shrinking the Window of Vulnerability

Time is not neutral in a crisis, it is propagative.

Every additional hour a story remains unresolved increases exposure to variables you do not control (a secondary source surfaces, a regulator comments, a parallel news event reframes your narrative, or internal stakeholders create some sort of unforced error). Think of duration as “exposure to randomness.” The longer the timeline, the greater the number of potential negative outcomes.

A disciplined crisis response is not just about being fast for optics, it is about reducing the number of opportunities for adverse randomness to intervene. Speed, when paired with credibility and clarity, compresses the window in which bad luck can compound.

This is why delayed responses are so often misdiagnosed. They are not just slow; they are structurally vulnerable.

Reputation as Shock Absorber

In contingent systems, initial conditions matter.

Entities that begin with higher reserves (financial, relational, or reputational) are more resilient to volatility. In communications, reputation functions as that reserve. It is accumulated long before it is tested. A strong reputation does not prevent a crisis. What it does is change how the crisis is interpreted. It buys ambiguity. It earns hesitation from critics. It creates space for your narrative to be considered rather than dismissed.

Conversely, organizations operating without that reserve experience the opposite dynamic. The same event is processed more harshly, amplified more quickly, and forgiven less frequently. What might be a contained issue for one brand becomes existential for another.

This is why proactive communications is often misunderstood. It is not just about visibility; it is about building surplus credibility that can absorb inevitable volatility.

Avoiding Single-Point Narrative Failure

One of the more common strategic errors in crisis response is overconcentration.

Teams work to identify that “big moment” (the flagship interview, the anchor statement, the definitive release) and place disproportionate weight on its success. The assumption is that if executed well, it will reset the narrative. But high-concentration strategies are inherently fragile. They assume cooperative conditions: no competing news, no technical failure, no misinterpretation, no preemption.

That is rarely how crises unfold.

A more resilient approach distributes narrative risk. It ensures that the core message is not dependent on a single channel, moment, or stakeholder. Instead, it is reinforced across multiple surfaces (media, owned platforms, third-party validators, internal alignment, etc.). The goal is not redundancy for its own sake. It is survivability. If one channel underperforms due to bad timing or external noise, the broader narrative architecture remains intact.

Preparation as Optionality

What often gets labeled as “good luck” in crisis response is, in practice, the byproduct of preparation meeting timing. Opportunities in a crisis environment are fleeting and unevenly distributed. A favorable news cycle opens. A reporter is suddenly receptive. A competitor misstep. These are not controllable, but they are exploitable.

Prepared organizations are structurally positioned to act on these openings. They have pre-aligned messaging, decision-making clarity, and operational readiness. They move while others deliberate. Unprepared organizations experience the same moments, but from the sidelines. By the time alignment is achieved, the window has long closed. Preparation, then, is not just defensive. It is a mechanism for capturing asymmetric upside when conditions briefly tilt in your favor. At its core, crisis communications is not a test conducted in ideal conditions. It is a dynamic system shaped by timing, perception, and forces outside your control.

You cannot eliminate luck from that system. But you can design for it. Think about playing poker. Players who treat poker as a game of being “lucky” or “unlucky” stay reactive. The ones who actually win over time (think Doyle Brunson or Daniel Negreanu) build systems that assume variance is coming and structure their decisions accordingly. That is a big part of crisis communications.

By compressing timelines, investing in reputational capital, avoiding concentration risk, and building operational readiness, you reduce dependence on favorable conditions and increase resilience against unfavorable ones. Talent will always matter as it gets you to the table. But in an environment governed by uncertainty, it is the structure of your strategy, not just the strength of your execution, that determines whether you withstand the storm or become defined by it.