Ten days ago, as the world’s marketing strategists and communication creatives were converging on La Croisette – Whispering Angel or Grey Goose in hand – a smaller, somewhat quieter gathering was taking place next to azure waters of Lake Bled in Slovenia.
Founded by Professor Dejan Verčič – Head of the Centre for Marketing and Public Relations at the University of Ljubljana – the Bledcom International Public Relations Research Symposium met for the 33rd time, amid a searing, Europe-wide heatwave.
Known to most simply as Bledcom, it is a truly global annual gathering of PR and comms academics and practitioners – though overwhelmingly weighted towards the former – originally created “in response to the need for a global forum for both academics and practitioners to explore the rapidly growing body of international public relations and related applied communication disciplines.”
In a global environment that appears to grow more volatile, complex, fast-moving and tangled almost by the day, this year’s theme being ‘Disaster, Health, and Organizational Crisis Communication’ felt particularly fitting.
Indeed, as the original call for papers noted: “disasters – natural and man-made – continue to ravage communities … global public health threats such as COVID-19 have revealed systemic vulnerabilities and communication breakdowns … [and] organizational crises – from product recalls to reputational scandals – threaten not only economic performance but also trust, legitimacy, and stakeholder relationships.”
There is nowhere else on the planet where you can sit in a single room with the true global giants of crisis and strategic comms academia, including Timothy Coombs, Yan Jin , Winni Johansen, Anne Gregory, Jon White and Prof. Dr. Ansgar Zerfass.
So it was a genuine honour to present, briefly, some of the most relevant findings and recommendations from my 2026 ‘Reputation, Risk and Resilience’ report and to run a livefire, scenario-based interactive exercise, putting attendees through their paces on a crisis scenario with no right answer (as is so often the case!): an exercise which led to a rich, hour-long conversation about the role of culture in crisis decision-making.
Over the two days, I was energised, inspired and candidly a tad frustrated, in part by the enduring walls that continue to exist between crisis academia and practice, but also by an overwhelming focus on crisis communication – as opposed to crisis preparedness, issues management and risk communication.
That almost ‘church and state’ separation of PR academic and practice is a story for another day and is one which my colleague and co-chair of the CIPR Crisis Communications Network, Katherine Sykes, has addressed eloquently in a blog post for the Network. However, there were moments where I felt like I’d found my way through the back of the Narnia wardrobe into a parallel universe populated by brilliant people who largely speak a different language to my own!
What truly stood out was the clear-sighted brilliance of Tim Coombs’s opening keynote and Anne Gregory’s characteristically provocative response. Both critiqued crisis academia’s marked tendency towards retrospectively- focused, ‘salami slicing’ incrementalism – with Anne citing recent research showing that only 20% is ‘revelatory’ and Tim reminding us that crisis communication is “applied at its core” and “inherently interdisciplinary”.
Calling for crisis academia to help tackle the ‘Venus vs. Mars Syndrome’, Anne Gregory’s clarion call was clear: “You can publish all you like by following the rules, but you might not change the world”.
They also shared views on likely ‘new vistas’ in crisis communication research, many of which chimed strongly with the evolution of issues and crisis practice, and (to my relief!) align squarely with my own direction of travel. These included:
- Human-centricity, the crucial role of emotions (particularly morally- and ethically-related emotions) trauma and wellbeing – both among those impacted and practitioners themselves.
- Readiness and preparedness (spoiler: they aren’t the same!) – across issues, crisis and risk – especially in a world of increasingly sticky and non-linear poly-, mega- and permacrises.
- The interactions between the organisation and society – particularly in terms of inside-out vs. outside-in approaches and relating to diversity in all its forms (geographic, linguistic and cultural diversity).
- The enduring impact of polarisation and mis-/dis-/malinformation, in the age of AI.
So many of those points resonated with the focus of my own frontline practice, and with the consistent findings and recommendations from my annual ‘Reputation, Risk and Resilience’ report over the past four years. Those include:
- The crucially important relationship between technical crisis structures, systems and processes, and ‘critical human infrastructure’.
- The importance of shifting the strategic focus of crisis communication from the organisational ‘self’ to the ‘other(s)’ most impacted by an acute issue or crisis event.
- The potential for true issues and crisis preparedness – based on assuming agency and achieving balance – to act as a source of tangible upside value, rather than just being about the mitigation and management of downside risk.
- In an era of ever-increasing risk convergence and intersectionality, the critical role of closing the ‘awareness-preparedness gap’ and addressing ‘human risk blind spot’ that I unearthed in this year’s report.
- The striking role of the ‘embedded psychological pandemic’ of plummeting mental health and employee engagement.
With the wealth of insight sitting just over the academic wall, we practitioners could all-too-easily tell ourselves that the enduring paucity of interaction between crisis academics and practitioners is a ‘them issue’, that we have little or no role in helping resolve.
The multi-disciplinary Crisis Communication Think Tank at the University of Georgia – which brings together academics and practitioners – has produced thought-provoking work like the recent READINESS Model and, in the process exemplifies what a more collaborative approach might look like.
Having been immersed in the fascinating ‘world of Bledcom’ for two days, my sincere hope is that practitioners play their part in considering how we might help build an all-important bridge between two, currently, rather parallel universes, so that the new vistas in crisis communication are something that can be developed together, rather than from two sides of the lake.
Author: Rod Cartwright, Special Advisor of the CIPR Crisis Communications Network
Images by author