GSA Global provides corporate crisis response and incident management support for organisations dealing with serious and complex incidents requiring additional senior coordination and investigative capability.
A significant incident may create several demands at the same time: immediate operational decisions, incomplete or conflicting information, legal and regulatory considerations, technical issues, personnel concerns and communication requirements. The organisation may already have lawyers, insurers, communications advisers and other specialists involved, while the leadership team remains responsible for maintaining control of the wider situation.
Subject to confirmation of GSA’s active crisis-response operating model, we support senior decision-makers by helping establish the factual position, structure and coordinate relevant workstreams and integrate investigation activity where required. The objective is to provide a clearer operating picture, support informed decision-making and help the organisation move in a controlled way from immediate response into investigation and recovery.
When Crisis Response Support May Be Required
Organisations typically seek support during or immediately after: discovery of a serious fraud with ongoing exposure; serious corporate misconduct with legal, regulatory and reputational dimensions; safeguarding incidents; threats against the organisation or its people; security events affecting sites, staff or operations; reputational incidents where the underlying facts are contested; incidents spanning several jurisdictions; and situations where the coordination burden, lawyers, insurers, regulators, communications advisers, police, exceeds what the leadership team can carry alongside running the business. We are candid about scope: GSA is not a substitute for every specialist discipline, and part of our value is knowing which specialists an incident needs.
Immediate Situation Assessment
The first task is an honest baseline, worked through with the leadership team: what is actually known, and on what evidence; what is unknown, assumed or rumoured; the immediate risks to people, funds, data, operations and reputation; the decisions that genuinely must be taken immediately, separated from those that only feel urgent; the evidence that must be preserved; and the information controls needed. The output is a working picture the leadership team can act on and defend.
Crisis Leadership and Coordination
Accountability in a crisis stays where it belongs: with the organisation’s own leaders and, where relevant, statutory authorities. GSA does not assume legal or statutory command. What we provide to accountable decision-makers is structure and senior capacity: an experienced person beside the incident owner; a rhythm of briefings, decisions and reviews; challenge and a second view when judgement is under pressure; and coordination across the internal team and external advisers so efforts align.
Investigation-Led Crisis Response
Many corporate crises contain an unanswered question at their centre, what happened, who was involved, how far does it go and the response cannot be sound until that question is being answered properly. Our position is to hold both threads: supporting the immediate response while conducting a disciplined investigation, with each informing the other and neither compromising the other’s evidence or options. The investigative element follows our corporate investigation services and, where the incident involves suspected fraud, our corporate fraud investigation services including the evidence-preservation discipline that crisis pressure most often puts at risk.
Cyber Incident and Technical Support
Where the incident is a cyber incident, or has a technical dimension, crisis support integrates with GSA’s cyber practice. Mark Raeburn, Director of Cyber Security and Resilience, whose experience includes leading Accenture’s global Incident Response team, provides strategic cyber-incident direction within the crisis structure; Anthony Dickinson, Technical Director for Cyber, oversees the technical work and coordinates appropriately appointed digital-forensic specialists where formal forensic acquisition is required. Technical findings are fed into crisis governance in decision-ready form. GSA’s full cyber capability, including incident-response and resilience services, is described in our Cyber Security and Resilience practice.
Multi-Disciplinary Coordination
Serious incidents are team events, and the team is rarely all in-house. We support the working relationship between the organisation and its lawyers, communications advisers, HR, security, insurers and their appointed experts, regulators, within the disclosure strategy set by the organisation’s legal advisers and law enforcement where matters are or may be reported. Coordination means a common picture, agreed priorities and a single record of who is doing what, not GSA inserting itself between the organisation and its advisers.
Crisis Information Management
Sound decisions depend on disciplined information handling. We establish and run the practices that keep leadership decisions well-founded and defensible afterwards: regular situation reports in consistent form; a decision log recording what was decided, when, by whom and on what basis; action tracking with owners and deadlines; validation of incoming information before it drives decisions; and a coherent record of the response, which subsequent legal, regulatory and insurance processes will ask for.
Transition to Recovery
Crisis response should end deliberately. As the incident stabilises we work with the organisation on residual risks and their owners; formal transfer of responsibilities back to business-as-usual; lessons identified while memories are fresh; any further investigation required; and support for regulatory or insurer follow-up as the organisation’s advisers direct. Where the incident revealed gaps in preparedness, GSA can support crisis-management planning and exercising.
Our Crisis Leadership
David Wood provides strategic leadership, particularly for incidents touching government or regulated environments, drawing on senior leadership of national policing and government organisations. Depending on the incident, Bob Quick QPM former Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations with national counterterrorism coordination responsibility or Howard Nichol, with counterintelligence and operational-risk leadership from multiple operational theatres, provides senior support for security-related incidents. Mark Raeburn and Anthony Dickinson lead the strategic and technical cyber contribution as described above. Dr Brian Moore QPM can be linked in where governance and organisational-risk dimensions are material.
Our Crisis Management Response & Incident Management Capabilities
