The 10-Minute Crisis Test

Why Most Municipalities Fail Before the Crisis Begins

A crisis isn’t going to wait patiently for you to get ready. It's going to come when you least expect it, with speed enhanced by social media, and emotional responses wrapped in confusion. The only thing certain in a crisis is that everyone will look to the elected officials to lead. They want immediate action, often before anyone has had time to gather all the facts. And amid the chaos and confusion, the public expects and demands clarity, empathy, and competence. In our work with municipalities across the country, we’ve found a hard truth: most local governments don’t fail during the crisis. They fail in the first ten minutes.

This is what we call the 10-Minute Crisis Test.

If you want to know if you will pass or fail this test, there is a simple metric: Can your town or city communicate effectively, credibly, and with both trust and humanity in the first ten minutes of a crisis? Not once you have all the information, not once everyone has signed off on messaging, not once legal has approved the message for public release. Can you do it in the first ten minutes? If the answer is no, or “we need to wait till we have all the facts,” or “we’d need to check with legal,” then the harsh, unforgiving reality is that you will fail.

Why the First Ten Minutes Matter

The first ten minutes are not about providing all the answers. That would be an unrealistic expectation for anyone. The first ten minutes are about establishing trust and credibility. A response that is timely, transparent, effective, and empathetic tells the public one essential thing: you care. If you can do that, you earn trust. Miss any one of those points, and doubt will settle in. The misinformation and disinformation that will proliferate on social media at breakneck speed will only add to their doubt, mistrust, and outright rejection of your message. The first ten minutes will decide everything, no matter how long the crisis lasts.

The Myth of “Waiting Until We Know More”

Caution has its place and is necessary in specific elements of a crisis. As a default plan of action, it becomes corrosive. We no longer live in a world where we have the luxury of time in a crisis. Social media has firmly ended that fallacy.

While the urge to gather all the information to speak with certainty is understandable, the public will interpret the delay as silence. And silence in those moments becomes incompetence, obfuscation, and an unacceptable delay in the public consciousness. They don’t care that you want to dot the i’s and cross the t’s; all they see is avoidance, indifference, or incompetence. Once that perception takes hold, every message that follows is nothing more than an effort to claw back trust that was lost. This means you spend precious time trying to reclaim ground instead of moving your community forward.

You can say something meaningful without speculating, assigning blame, or jeopardizing an investigation. The problem is that many municipalities haven’t practiced how to do that. So when the moment comes, we see a circling of the wagons, the vague hope that it will blow over, and the all too often failed assumption that the public trust in leaders is unflappable.

Here is the harsh secret about the crisis that no one likes to talk about: the blame rarely falls on those responsible. Instead, it's the leaders who, in the mind of the public, “should have known better,”  or “could have done something differently.” The blame shifts to those in power, and the public will remember how they felt when it all began.

What the 10-Minute Test Actually Measures

This test is not about speed for speed’s sake. It measures four fundamentals that will determine long-term success:

Clarity of Values

Can your leaders say what you truly stand for without a script? If values only exist in strategic plans or mission statements, they’re not doing anyone any good.

Does the talk match the walk? If the values exist only under framed glass and are not reflective of the lived experience of your community, they will fall on deaf ears.

Decision Authority

Does someone have clear authority to speak? Many cities lose precious time negotiating who is allowed to say what, rather than focusing on how to respond responsibly. In the midst of a crisis is not the time to be making these decisions. They should have been planned, practiced, and ingrained well in advance.

Message Muscle Memory

Speaking of practice, how trained are your leaders in effective communication? Not the day-to-day stuff, this question is about how leaders perform under the stress of 30 microphones on the podium, the glare of dozens of cameras, and anxious reporters waiting to exact their pound of flesh. How will they do? The public expects leaders to rise to the moment. Are they ready?

Emotional Intelligence Under Stress

Crises are emotional before they are factual. Cities and towns that respond only with process and policy sound tone-deaf, even when the facts are on their side. Facts never break through emotion, and any attempt to bludgeon facts through feelings will always fail. Can those in leadership roles speak not only with credibility, but with empathy?

The Cost of Failing the Test

Failing the 10-Minute Crisis Test doesn’t equate to a bad headline or a bad news cycle. Failing the test ultimately erodes long-term trust and legitimacy. We’ve seen municipalities lose community trust only because of how they communicated in those first critical moments.

Once that trust is fractured, even the most competent and heartfelt actions are viewed through a lens of suspicion. Leaders end up managing outrage instead of delivering solutions. And the long-term consequences are real. In the first few months, internal morale tanks and productivity slows. An already distrustful public feels this and grows more distrustful of their leaders.

Like an avalanche of worse on top of bad, this breach of trust can have devastating economic consequences. Home sales drop as people searching for a new place to live encounter an internet search history full of bad headlines. Businesses begin to suffer, struggle to retain people, and start to close. An angry electorate votes down the next bond issue, refusing to trust city leaders with more of their tax dollars. It can take decades to repair the damage. None of this is hyperbole. Cities like Newark, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit have all had to contend with the economic downturn following a crisis.

Passing the Test Is a Leadership Choice

The municipalities that pass this test do three things differently:

• They prepare for the communication needs of a crisis, not just the coordinated intergovernmental response.

• They prepare leaders and communicators together, so values, decision-making authority, and messaging align before they are ever needed.

• They understand that transparency is not about telling everything; it’s about saying the right thing at the right time, in the right way, so that the community can do the right thing.

If a crisis hit your community right now, before the next meeting, before the next memo, before the next legal review, could you speak to your residents within ten minutes?

Not perfectly. Not defensively. But honestly, compassionately, and with confidence.

If not, the most important crisis work you can do isn’t waiting for the next incident. It’s preparing for the first ten minutes. Start today.