From first notification to recovery
Most crises are survivable. Poor coordination isn’t.
Physical incidents rarely give you clean information. You get partial reports, conflicting observations, and pressure from every direction—staff, media, leadership, and sometimes regulators or law enforcement.
Archer Knox builds and runs crisis management frameworks for organizations that can’t afford improvisation. We establish roles, decision rights, and communications lanes before something happens, then stand up a structured response when it does—so you can stabilize the moment, protect people, and preserve evidence.
Our role is to turn confusion into a clear operational picture: what’s happening, what we’re doing, what we’ll say, and what gets documented for the record.
Typical scenarios
- Security incidents and physical breaches on-site
- Threats involving staff, executives, or visitors
- Violence, medical emergencies, or missing persons
- Protests, demonstrations, and disruptive activity
- Severe weather or utility failures impacting operations
What we bring
- Experienced incident command and war-room leadership
- Playbooks that connect security, HR, legal, and comms
- Documentation practices that stand up to review
Capabilities & outcomes
Structure for your worst day, not just your best.
We design crisis management so it works with the people you already have: security, facilities, HR, legal, communications, and leadership. No jargon, no theory—just clear roles, actions, and decision points.
Core Capabilities
- Incident command & war-room coordination (on-site or remote)
- Crisis communications planning & stakeholder management
- Evidence preservation, chain-of-custody & investigation support
- Continuity, recovery, and return-to-normal operations playbooks
- Multi-agency coordination with law enforcement and regulators
- After-action reviews, lessons learned, and program uplift
Operational Outcomes
- Faster containment and controlled escalation of critical events
- Regulatory- and litigation-ready documentation of decisions
- Reduced downtime, confusion, and reputational damage
- Clear leadership optics: who is in charge and what is happening
- Actionable improvements fed back into security and operations
Engagement model
Prepare in calm, perform under pressure.
We support both pre-incident preparedness and live incident response. In both cases, the objective is the same: reduce uncertainty, shorten time to decision, and capture a defensible record.
01. Readiness & planning
Assess your current crisis posture, roles, and gaps. Develop practical crisis plans, contact trees, and decision matrices that align with how your organization truly operates.
02. Activation & first hour
Define triggers for activation, who convenes the team, and what the first 30–60 minutes look like. Establish immediate objectives: life safety, stabilization, and information control.
03. Ongoing incident management
Run structured briefings, status tracks, and workstreams (operations, intel, communications, logistics, legal) so the response stays synchronized as new facts emerge.
04. Recovery & after-action
Plan the return to normal operations, manage internal and external narratives, and capture lessons learned into updated playbooks, training, and governance.
Where this fits
For teams accountable when something goes wrong.
Our crisis work is designed for organizations where security, legal, HR, and communications all have a stake in the outcome—and where “we improvised” is not an acceptable post-incident explanation.
- Corporate security and facilities leaders
- Executive protection and risk teams
- HR and employee relations handling high-risk situations
- General counsel and compliance
- Communications and brand/reputation teams
Engagements can be structured as readiness projects with exercises, retained response support, or a hybrid model for organizations with elevated risk profiles.
You leave with
- Crisis management framework tailored to your organization
- Incident-specific playbooks and checklists
- Clear role definitions and decision rights
- Templates for logs, briefings, and stakeholder updates
- A roadmap for ongoing training and exercises
Connected Security Disciplines
Crisis response is stronger when it’s wired into operations, intelligence, and hardening.
