Keeping Calm in a Crisis

By Ben Thompson, Senior Editor

When Bruce Poon Tip’s eco-tour company ran into trouble in the Antarctic last November, he faced a race against the clock to save not only the reputation of his business but also the lives of its customers. Ben Thompson finds out how he did it.

It is November 22, 2007, and Bruce Poon Tip – eco-tourism pioneer and Chief Executive of GAP Adventures, the world’s largest adventure travel outfitter – is at home with his family. At a little after midnight, the phone rings. “Bruce? We’ve got something here you should probably take a look at. How soon can you be at the office?” Jeff Russill, Director of Operations at the Canada-based travel firm, isn’t in the habit of calling his boss in the middle of the night; this is clearly something that won’t wait until morning. Poon Tip gets up, kisses his wife goodbye and takes the short drive to the company headquarters in downtown Toronto to meet his team for a further briefing. At this stage, all he knows is that one of his cruise ships, the M/V Explorer – famous worldwide for retracing Ernest Shackleton’s explorations in the south polar seas – has hit ice with 154 passengers and crew on board. It’s the start of what he will later describe as “one of the longest days of my life”.

Disaster can strike at any time. From freak accidents to terrorist attacks, sabotage to acts of God, preparing for the worst-case scenario has become an essential part of business management. But while good planning will help you with the details of a swift recovery – maintaining mission critical operations, mobilizing incident response teams and getting the business back on track – staying calm in the eye of the storm is easier said than done. It’s what separates the true leader from everyone else, and requires mental toughness, clarity of purpose and first-class people management skills. Poon Tip had to call on all of these skills and more in the days following Russill’s initial phonecall – or face losing the business he’d devoted 17 years of his life to building up from scratch. It was a process that started as early as the drive to the office.

“As I drove over, we were still not aware of the severity of the situation,” he recalls. “But I was thinking about what would need to be done given the information we had available to us. While I was concerned and requested to be kept informed of any further developments, it really is my job as a leader to keep calm during these situations. That’s what a leader needs to do: retain clarity of vision.”

When Poon Tip arrived at headquarters, he was greeted by Russill, Frank Schuran (the firm’s VP of Product and Operations) and expeditions coordinator Richard Heller – all part of GAP Adventures’ critical incident management team – to be told that the situation had deteriorated. The ship had a hole torn in its hull, and water was accumulating in the lower deck. Captain Bengt Wiman had given the mayday signal and rescue ships were headed towards the scene. The bilge pumps were working overtime to remove the water and passengers were gathering in the muster room on the top deck. Poon Tip immediately decided to convene the rest of the CIM team and put the company’s well-drilled disaster response plans into action.

Fortunately, with more than 1000 tours worldwide and 70,000 customers a year – not to mention expeditions taking in some of the most far-flung destinations on the planet – the leadership team at GAP Adventures was well-aware of how real the risk of an emergency situation developing was. In the past year, CIM meetings were called to co-ordinate tasks following the Peru earthquake and the outbreak of civil unrest in Kenya. The end result can be as simple as posting a travel advisory on the GAP website, or it can involve a trip cancellation or passenger evacuation. “We’ve been in rehearsal for something like this for the last 17 years,” confirms Poon Tip. “We have manuals for managing crisis situations, and we constantly study and update our critical incident management policies. We’re constantly updating how to deal with everything from sales to marketing to PR to emergency situations and medical evacuation. These are the kind of things you have to be on top of when you’re a company like ours.”

The Explorer incident, however, offered an altogether sterner test. By 2am, the rest of the team (including the firm’s COO, director of finance, VP of marketing, VP of sales, and managers from the PR and media departments) had assembled in what Poon Tip calls the “war room” – the critical incident management office that would become their home for the next three days. Over the long hours that followed, the team opened lines of communication with everyone from the firm’s Swedish office (the operational hub for the Explorer), to media outlets, to sales channel partners, to authorities such as the local search-and-rescue operators and the oil pollution response center in Punta Arenas, Chile.

“Just having everyone accessible to take the decisions needed to safely evacuate all passengers and contact the right authorities was really important for us,” says Poon Tip. “My role was one of taking very big decisions and not getting in the way of the folk who work day-to-day on the operational side of things. Because I don’t deal with day-to-day operations, my main job in a situation like this is to let people do their job and be here to make the tough calls.”

And as the situation in Antarctica worsened, one of those big decisions involved whether or not to abandon ship. The CIM team had already taken the decision to offload passengers – meaning crew would divert their energies from saving the ship to executing the evacuation – but after receiving news that the engine rooms had flooded and the ship was listing badly, Poon Tip was left with no other option than to take the advice of Captain Wiman and evacuate those crew members who had stayed aboard to try and salvage the vessel. The Norwegian cruise ship MS Nordnorge was enlisted to assist with the removal of passengers to King George Island, from where Poon Tip had arranged for them to be airlifted to a Chilean Air Force base in Punta Arenas before being flown home. Around 15 hours after Wiman and his skeleton crew abandoned ship – just 20 hours after Poon Tip had received the initial call – the Explorer sank to the bottom of the ocean.

It was a moment loaded with significance. The 2004 purchase of the iconic boat (known as the “little red ship” for its brightly painted hull), the first cruise ship specifically designed to sail the waters off Antarctica, was emblematic of the company’s strong sense of adventure . “The risk involved in acquiring the Explorer was very aggressive, and the innovativeness of the program shows the core of our pioneering spirit,” explains Poon Tip. “It represented who we are as a company, and in turn there was an emotional attachment to such a world-class and innovative program .

“Losing the ship was a very emotional and devastating thing to happen, and people were relying on me for energy at the lowest points,” he continues. Keeping staff focused and morale high was essential, and Poon Tip did this by providing regular email updates and motivational bulletins to keep his employees in the loop. He employed a similar approach to his dealings with the media, recognizing that managing the public perception of a potential crisis situation is critical to winning support and surviving the fallout from the event in the long-term.

In this respect, an open and honest approach is essential. “I think the first reaction with any organization when something like this happens is to shut all their doors and take care of the incident internally,” he offers. “Unfortunately, with the way modern media works today, I just don’t think you can do that. There are just so many examples of that happening where this approach has backfired; fortunately, there are also many examples of companies that have recovered from things like this and received kudos for doing so and for the way they handled the situation. This is the approach we tried to take.”

Dragging his PR team out of bed at 3am to deal with the barrage of calls and enquiries played a vital part in establishing open lines of communication between the firm and the outside world, and if he has a regret it is that they weren’t involved earlier in the process. By this time, the Explorer was already an international news story, headlining morning programs in Europe. Nevertheless, he maintains that this element of GAP Adventure’s response – the way his company was completely transparent about how the situation was developing, from what was happening with the ship, to the situation with the passengers, to the ship’s safety records – was one of the key factors in the team’s success. “The BBC and CNN were doing everything in their power to build this into a story that was going to topple in on us,” he remembers. “But the more transparent we were, the more disarming it was for those groups.”

As far as Poon Tip is concerned, it is all about getting a handle on the way the modern media works. “You have to understand the basic rules of engagement and be prepared to follow them,” he explains. “And sometimes it’s tough. When you’re in the heat of the moment, it’s difficult to take time to make sure that people are informed and the media’s kept abreast of what’s happening – especially in our case, where there were people’s lives at stake. However, you just have to make sure there is information flowing to keep people in the loop because for one day in November, we were on the front page of every newspaper in the world. You have to realize that you’re gonna get a lot of attention, and that attention can turn very negative if you choose to shut down and hide things.”

Many lesser companies – or at least those with less of a grip on the need for critical incident planning – would have buckled under the pressure, but Poon Tip, while not exactly relishing the challenge, believes the incident and his company’s response to it revealed a lot about the strength of the firm’s character. “The great thing for us was that while the world was watching us for that short period of time, we were able to show what we’re capable of,” he explains. “So while in many ways it was a tragic moment for us, it was also, publicly, one of our proudest moments as an organization because of the way we responded. Everything that came out of it has been extremely positive, outside of the actual accident itself, which of course we wish had never happened. But we’ve had no choice but to move on and get as many positives out of it as we can.”

And in a bizarre way, the incident may even have been good for business. In February, just three months after the sinking, GAP’s business was bullish, with bookings up 41% year-over-year in all areas. Today, more passengers than ever are on its waiting lists. And last month, the company reinvested in a replacement vessel for the Explorer. “There’s no question it’s had a positive effect,” he says. “The awareness of the company is obviously way up, and our business overall is way up, and anything that’s written about the incident is always along the lines of a how-to case study in critical incident management – of how we handled it and how we were able to navigate a difficult situation.”

The incident certainly hasn’t dampened the spirit of adventure for which the company is famous; if anything, it has stiffened Poon Tip’s determination to continue to offer such trips. “That’s what our company does. That’s what we started doing 18 years ago – pioneering new routes, and taking people to the most unique corners of the world – and we will definitely continue to do it,” he asserts. “In fact, people are coming to us more, looking to us to give them those unique experiences. And it’s also important to note that just two weeks after the incident we were able to charter a Russian vessel to salvage our season, and that was really important for the mental, emotional health of the organization because it showed our tenacity and commitment to what we do. And even just for us internally as an organization, getting back there immediately afterwards was important.

“A lot of the organizational toll of an incident like this is the emotional impact it has on your employees and how it affects your company culture,” he concludes. “Us having a ship on its way to recover half the season, even though it was a dust for us in terms of financial loss, was really important in order to re-establish some sense of normality and show what we’re made of as a company. I’m really proud of the way we reacted.”

Great ideas

Bruce Poon Tip’s recommendations for managing in a crisis.
People are really important. “Make sure you have the right people actively involved. Usually it’s not the top management that work day-to-day with the people and the issues involved; get your operations people in the war room, those staff members best equipped to get you through the situation. Identify who those people are and make sure you have them in the room.”
Transparency is essential. “You have to be as transparent as possible to disarm people because unfortunately in this day and age, the first reaction of modern media is to punch a hole in the story or to find a flaw. And even if there is a flaw, if you’re transparent and put that information out, you’re able to defend it. So transparency is critical.”
Identify who the leader is. “Managing a crisis situation is about keeping everyone together on a mental level. Everyone’s nerves are on edge, and at that time any kind of weakness in an organization can come out under stress. You have to be able to focus on the task at hand, understand what the goal is and be able to make some really tough decisions under enormous pressure. That’s about leadership.”

11/23/07: Key Events

0030 hrs(ET). M/V Explorer makes an international distress call, picked up by an Argentine Rescue and Command Center, amid reports the ship is taking on water
0300 hrs. Listing noticeably and drifting towards more ice, the decision is taken to offload passengers from the Explorer
0500 hrs. Recognizing that the vessel cannot be saved, the CIM team, on the advice of Captain Wimar, decide to abandon ship
0600 hrs. Passengers are welcomed aboard the the Norwegian cruise ship MS Nordnorge, where there are medical services, plenty of food – and a well-stocked bar
2000 hrs. The M/V Explorer sinks beneath the waves

The GAP Adventure story

Bruce Poon Tip had much to lose last November – not least the reputation of the business he started from scratch some 17 years previously.
GAP Adventures started in 1990 when Bruce Poon Tip spotted a gap in the market between what he calls “mainstream” travel (such as cruises, coach tours and resorts) and backpacking. “It seemed like you either had to go on a coach tour, or you had to do it yourself,” he says. “There was no way to have authentic, grassroots-type experiences without having to do an awful lot of work yourself. Not everyone has the amount of free time needed to go backpacking, or wants to spend a month planning their trip themselves. I just felt there were lots of other people that would want that kind of authentic experience, but there wasn’t a company that could fulfill that need for them.”

In the early days, just getting the financing to put his idea into practice proved challenging. “I approached almost every bank, and there was no interest,” he says with a wry smile. “In 1990 we were in the middle of the first Gulf War, and it was difficult to generate any real interest.” As a result, explains Poon Tip, the financial institutions had no real interest in taking on such a unique and unusual proposition with no real assets. “The funding that I needed had to come from friends, family, credit cards – whatever it took to get stuff done.”

So armed only with his flexible friend, he put together a few tours using local operators that involved “going on local transport, staying in bed and breakfast accommodation, farms, home stays, all these kinds of things”. He then went out on the road and sold them himself. “You have to remember what the technology was like back then – there was no internet, and even fax machines weren’t exactly widespread. It was a totally different environment to today, and it’s hard to remember how people used to plan their travel back then without the aid of Google. And so I got out in front of as many people as I could to talk about this new style of travel, and it just took off from there.”

Today, GAP Adventures is an international concern with offices in 27 countries, and the idea of exporting tourism – which Poon Tip and his team started in 1993 – is now a multi-billion dollar industry. However, it wasn’t always like this. “At the time it was considered an outrageous concept: that someone in Germany would book an African safari with a Canadian-based company,” laughs Poon Tip. “But because of the success we and some other companies have had, it’s now considered a really good business model. Between that and the fact that the world has changed in our favor over the last 18 years with the advent of ecotourism in the mid-1990s and now the concept of sustainable tourism, we’ve been able to carve out a new industry, really.”

Indeed, the principles of ecotourism and sustainability have been very much part of the fabric of the company since the very beginning. “The way we run our tours – with small groups paying in hand for services to local people, businesses and communities – is a very sustainable way of doing things,” says Poon Tip. Over the intervening years, his company has developed partnerships with NGOs such as Conservation International to further build local relationships, and later developed the Planeterra Foundation to implement its own community projects. “The idea of giving something back to the local communities has really embodied and defined this whole industry.”

And, unlike many startups that have difficulty retaining such altruistic values as they scale up, Poon Tip believes the opposite has been true for his firm. “As we get bigger, we have the ability to do much bigger things, do much more community work and have more people to manage all of those projects,” he enthuses. “I found it was actually very difficult in the early stages, when we were first building the company, to find money to give to some of these community projects. But as you get bigger, it becomes easier to fund exciting projects and take on new ideas and maybe even take a few risks in the things that you do. We are also able to attract much better people to manage these kinds of initiatives, and so I actually think that it’s a lot easier for us now.”

Poon Tip is also resolved to moving on from the Explorer incident. The tour operator’s new ship, Expedition, is being bought from a family-owned company in Finland and will be given a complete refit before its first sailing to Antarctica on January 4th next year. “What happened last time was an accident and was just bad luck,” he concludes. “We have to move on and think positively, and there is very high interest in these trips. We are investing heavily in health and safety for all aspects of the new vessel.”

Three lessons in crisis management

The good
During the Summer of 2007, amongst problems with exports from China, Mattel Inc. faced two product recalls in two weeks. The company did everything it could to get its message out, earning high marks from consumers and retailers. Just after the 7am recall announcement by federal officials, a public relations team of 16 was tasked with calling reporters at the 40 biggest media outlets. They told each to check their e-mail for a news release outlining the recalls, invited them to a teleconference call with executives and scheduled TV appearances or phone conversations with Mattel’s chief executive. The Mattel CEO Robert Eckert did 14 TV interviews on a Tuesday in August and about 20 calls with individual reporters. By the week’s end, Mattel had responded to more than 300 media inquiries in the US alone.

The bad
In March 1989, the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in the Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the water, polluting hundreds of miles of coastline and killing thousands of fish, fowl and sea otters. Exxon’s response was less than impressive. First, the CEO, Lawrence Rawl, distanced himself from the public relations effort and actually shunned public involvement. The company had neither a communication plan nor a communication team in place to handle the event, and established its media center in Valdez, a location too small and too remote to handle the onslaught of media attention. And finally, the company acted defensively in its response to the public, even laying blame, at times, on other groups such as the Coast Guard. All in all, a public relations disaster.

The ugly
In August 2000, claims that the firm’s 15-inch Wilderness AT, radial ATX and ATX II tire treads were separating from the tire core led the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to recall 6.5 million tires used mostly on the Ford Explorer, the world’s top-selling sport utility vehicle – but not before both Ford and Firestone bungled their respective responses to the incident. According to the experts, the two companies committed three major crisis management blunders early on. First, they blamed consumers for not inflating their tires properly. Then they blamed each other for faulty tires and faulty vehicle design. Then they said very little about what they were doing to solve a problem that had caused more than 100 deaths – until they got called to Washington to testify before Congress.