Few England footballers are more acutely aware than Stuart Pearce that sooner or later, a penalty shoot out will come up - and how the team deals with it will influence their reputation for years to come.
For years, there has been a debate as to whether or not England should practise taking penalties to help deal with this possibility - especially as England have a knack of losing at shoot-outs.
The argument against is fairly simple - you cannot simulate the pressure, the circumstances, the tiredness of being involved in a winner-takes-all shoot out after 120 minutes of intense, knock-out football. Therefore, there's no point practising.
Stuart Pearce took a different view with, I would argue, a pretty good result.
Bear in mind that this was the same man who, as a player, the nation had admired for stepping up to take a penalty in a shoot out against Spain in 1996, having failed from 12 yards six years earlier.
By 2007, Pearce was the head of England's Under 21s. As the European Championships drew closer, he chose to end a friendly his young players had against Slovakia with a penalty shoot out. The game had already been won (5-0 as it happens). The pressure wasn't there. But the tiredness and the crowd were, and it was as close as the manager could get to making his players experience the real thing.
Weeks later, the team's run in the championship depended on a shoot out at the end of a semi-final against the host country, the Netherlands. Pearce's England lost, but not before they had gone through a virtually unprecedented 16 spot kicks. They had come far closer than many senior England teams had to winning a shoot out.
Did any of the team decide in advance where to put the ball, then stick to it? I dare say they didn't. Ultimately, did it help them win? No. Do either of those things make the exercise a waste of time?
I hear echoes of a lot of these arguments around crisis comms plans. Last week, Sarah Dean Forrester said in an FIR interview that crisis comms plans were a huge waste of time.
I think Sarah knows her stuff. I worked with her from time to time during six years reporting in the North West, while she was head of press office at Greater Manchester Police and I have tremendous respect for the job she did there.
However, I'd take issue with her point about plans.
Of course, a plan which does not fit the culture of the company, department or team it's written for will never work. Whatever efforts can be made to make the plan as close to reality as possible should be.
When the crisis then happens, the crisis team - the penalty takers in the earlier analogy - have then to realise that the circumstances are unique, and may not fit the plan.
After all, crises never pan out as you would expect them to in real life, but is that a reason not to bother, or a reason to pay even more attention to being honest about how the individual team members and the team as a whole would react under pressure when writing and drilling the plans in the first place.
And that is really my main point; that what is written in the plan is not necessarily the most important aspect of the exercise - though I still think a well-written plan can be exceptionally useful. The crucial element which can create the platform for success (or otherwise) is not the plan on the shelf, it's the experience of preparing it.
Pearce's young charges weren't planning where to put their shots for future shoot outs - they were practising, going through a drill.
By simulating a shoot-out situation, they are going through the decision making process that is required, and doing so under pressure. When they do find themselves in a shoot out, thanks to this and other rehearsals, the instinctive decision is the right one.
This is the point of a crisis communications plan - not to dust it off from the shelf where it has stood for months just because you've identified that particularly crisis beginning to unfold. Rather, that the process of preparing it is a form of rehearsal which will enable you to operate by instinct under pressure, and ultimately look back on the situation knowing the decisions you made under pressure were the same as you would have with time and planning.
If part of that is because you had correctly forecast elements of the crisis and were ready for them, or prepared a thorough checklist that you followed, or delivered your messages through pre-identified channels, then all the better.
Does it matter if the rest of the plan didn't apply in that particular real life scenario? Not one bit. Does that make it a waste of time? No again. When it comes to protecting, and if possible enhancing, your reputation in emergency or crisis scenarios, is any advantage you can give yourself worth having? Absolutely.
[Credit: Images of Stuart Pearce from bbc.co.uk]
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