Scare Tactics: Reacting to a Crisis Without Panic

How will employees at your company react if a real crisis hits? Here's what to do to keep panic at bay.

By Daintry Duffy

March 01, 2004 — CSO — In the pressurized cabin of a commercial jet, 30,000 feet in the air, 125 people are clamoring to get out.

Five minutes earlier, they looked just like any other group of passengers sitting back in their seats, some resting with eyes closed, others quietly reading, still others making small talk with the person next to them. The plane had a sudden drop in altitude during a turbulent ride, and panic ensued. That's all it tookone anxious passenger to stand up and announce he couldn't take it any more. He wants off the plane now. Before the crew can respond, everyone is out of their seats.

When rational thought is gone, all we have to fall back on is emotion. Whether it's on a flight to Chicago or in an elevator in your office building, emotion can be a dangerous thing in a high-stakes security emergency.

Panic. It's what causes us to run instead of evacuating in a calm, orderly manner. And you can't imagine the speed with which it spreads. You probably like to think that your employees would be calm during a crisis. But unless you've trained them to work through the stress of a security emergency, you might be surprised at that too.

You're not alone. Many security executives put extensive time and effort into developing contingency plans, but they fail to take the stepstraining and practicethat enable employees to calmly follow those procedures during a crisis. In fact, most CSOs are far less prepared to handle crises than they would like to thinkor have led their bosses to believe.

Panic is a manifestation of the body's basic fight-or-flight responsethe same involuntary response that prepared early man to defend himself against a saber-toothed tiger or gather up his animal skins and head for the hills. The physiology of this process is about preparing the body for either decision. When a person perceives danger, a flood of adrenaline speeds up the heart and respiration rates so that more oxygen is circulated throughout the body. Blood rushes to the thighs and biceps and away from extremities to prevent the body from bleeding to death if seriously injured. Fight or flight also causes the body to produce more sweat to prevent overheating and cause the skin to become slippery and harder to grab hold of.

All that is a very healthy response to danger, notes psychiatrist and author Dr. Stuart Shipko. "A little bit of fear can be helpful. It makes you more alert and gives you greater strength. But you don't want that fear to reach a point where it becomes dysfunctional," he says. "Panicking is allowing your fear to get so out of control that your mental and physical functioning is less effective." He notes that people experiencing an elevated state of anxiety are easy to pick out because their voices get loud and their actions are less purposeful.