151: From Crisis Plans to Operational Resilience, with Suzanne Bernier

News travels faster than your approval chain—so who speaks for you when it matters most? 

We sit down with crisis management consultant Suzanne Bernier to unpack what effective leadership looks like under pressure. The conversation quickly turns practical: why a team-led model outperforms lone-wolf leadership, how to select a spokesperson who naturally projects trust, and when to move the CEO out of the spotlight and into a strategic command seat.

We discuss the move from traditional business continuity to operational resilience. Suzanne lays out the cadence of preparedness—annual exercises, quarterly scenario walk-throughs, and clear incident management roles that prevent overload and duplication. The goal is a living system where strategy, operations, and communications work in sync.

Communication is the decisive edge. The first message out shapes public understanding, so waiting for perfect certainty invites misinformation to fill the gap. Suzanne shows how to build legal-safe messages in advance, define what can be said without risking the investigation, and empower a spokesperson trained to connect with empathy and clarity. Real stories from survivors and responders bring the lessons home, making risk tangible and action urgent. 

We close with big news: the Disaster Heroes podcast is coming back—this time co-hosted—bringing frontline voices from around the world to the mic.

If this conversation helps sharpen your crisis playbook, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a review with the one change you’ll make to your plan this week.

Suzanne Bernier has been making resilience relevant since 1997. 

A former journalist and government press secretary, Suzanne is now an international, multi-certified, award-winning crisis management trainer, speaker, and author. She is currently the Vice President of the Resilience Information Exchange (RIE) - Toronto Chapter and a faculty member of both DRI International and DRI Canada.

She is the author of Disaster Heroes, a book that highlights the stories of ordinary individuals who have made extraordinary contributions during disasters. 

You can learn more about Suzanne on her website or LinkedIn.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And White House Story
• 2:04 Redefining Leadership As A Team Sport
• 5:44 Choosing The Right Crisis Spokesperson
• 9:21 Guardrails For Decision-Makers Under Stress
• 13:03 Strategic Vs Spokesperson: Reassigning The CEO
• 17:17 Training, Exercises, And Scenario Testing
• 21:10 From Business Continuity To Operational Resilience
• 24:46 Lessons Learned And Real-World Stories
• 27:57 Communicate First To Counter Misinformation

Transcript

Suzanne Bernier: 0:01

The last thing people want is to see in the news a story about their own organization that's being affected by something, and they never heard from their organization first.

Manya Chylinski: 0:16

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. My guest today is Suzanne Bernier. She's a crisis management consultant and trainer. She's a speaker and author and the host of the podcast Disaster Heroes. She and I talked about crisis management, business continuity, operational resiliency. It was a really fun conversation, and I think you're going to enjoy it. Suzanne, I'm so excited that I've gotten you on the podcast and we're going to be talking today.

Suzanne Bernier: 0:51

I know, me too, Manya. It's been a minute, but we've gotten to know each other, and I think uh it's a great time to get to know each other even better through this format and others. Exactly.

Manya Chylinski: 1:03

And one way I can get to know you is by asking you the first question I ask all my guests, which is what is one thing you have done in any area of your life that you never thought you would do.

Suzanne Bernier: 1:17

You know, there's several of them, but I'm going to give you the most obvious one, I think, in my brain. Specifically having come from a small Canadian community, I never ever would I have thought that one day as a professional, I'd be invited to speak at the White House. And so in 2016, I spoke at the White House. That has never been a bucket list. That has never even been a dream. I would have never expected that in a million years. But it's all as a result of writing a book called Disaster Heroes. FEMA liked the concept of it. They had a big award ceremony that happened to be at the White House, and they wanted me to give my signed books to the winners and be the guest speaker. And it was the first time it was held at the White House. And so that was the first time I spoke at the White House. I've all I've been there twice, but one time to speak and one time to visit. That is amazing. Yeah, it was incredible. And like I said, being a little Canadian from way up north, that would never have even been in my imagination as a possibility.

Manya Chylinski: 2:27

So that it's not really in the imagination of the possibility of a lot of people, even here in the United States. It's so significant to get an invitation like that. Well, congratulations. Thank you. All right. Well, disaster heroes, that's something we're going to talk about a little later on in the podcast, you and I. Right now we're going to talk about crisis management and crisis response. How do you define strong leadership in a time of crisis?

Suzanne Bernier: 2:55

I think, if anything, to get rid of the term leader and just create it as a team and that everybody's part of a team. The areas that I've been in where the leadership sort of thought of themselves as the be-all and end all didn't work so well when you're going through response and recovery operations. You know, that could create some hostile environments, and we don't want anything like that during a crisis situation. On the other hand, I've seen really strong, effective leaders, and they are the ones that are empathetic. They're the ones that you know aren't just talking the talk, but they're walking the walk with you. And I think that's the biggest difference between a strong leader and one who may not be as strong, is as the strong leaders recognize the capabilities of their team, and that every single one has a role to play and a specialty, and not just that leader giving direction down below to the rest of the team, but having the whole team be the ones making decisions together because they're all respectively professionals and subject matter experts in their own areas. So let's let those subject matter experts come in and give us some guidance instead of it always being from the top thinking they have to go down to the bottom. Right.

Manya Chylinski: 4:23

I think that team aspect is so important and something other guests have shared as well that it's not about the leader. What is one of the first actions or responses that you look for from a leader or from a team when a crisis hits?

Suzanne Bernier: 4:42

Well, first of all, it would have to be someone who is looking at it from a team perspective. Uh, and someone who this is very key as well, for whoever you're deciding is going to be the leader that's going to be representing your company to the media. That's another big thing to be aware of as well, is you want that leader to be able to connect well with an audience who's listening in and may not even be near that person, but maybe listening on the television or online. But you want that leader to have that establish that kind of connection and trust. And once you've established trust and people perhaps recognize you as the face of the organization, and then they become familiar with that face and more comfortable with that face. I think that leads and guides the rest of the community through much better if they have a leader that's giving them information that they already know and trust. And the big part there is trust because we do know that there are a lot of leaders that for some reason or another, people don't always automatically trust them. They have to sometimes gain and earn people's trust.

Manya Chylinski: 5:55

I think it's really important that you mentioned finding that person on the team to be the face of the response. And that person isn't necessarily the CEO or necessarily the PR person, but it's somebody, as you say, who either has already built that trust or can quickly project that level of trust.

Suzanne Bernier: 6:16

Exactly. Because we all seen CEOs who didn't do it right when they were, we've all seen different examples of leaders who've kind of lost it during a media interview, and you'd never want your lead leader to do that. But that's usually those who not only are not trained properly to be able to respond to the media if they should, but also they may just not have it in them personally. Right. Right.

Manya Chylinski: 6:40

You mentioned the team aspect, which is not everybody's going to be able to do every piece of the response. Right. What kind of support structures do we need to be thinking about in organizations to help keep the leader and the team grounded and effective when they're dealing with a crisis?

Suzanne Bernier: 7:00

Yeah, that's a that's another big thing because I'm I'm sure you've seen it as well. But when we go into a crisis, there are leaders that and workers, everyone who they that's it. I'm not leaving this room until the emergency's over. But then you've got people, leaders, including those who are, you know, doing the bidding of the leaders, who are now working 24 hours straight. They should not be, they should definitely not be making any kind of real decisions. And those are exactly what you need to have when you're in the face of an emergency declared emergency, is real decisions.

Manya Chylinski: 7:38

So how do you balance that? Because people either feel they need to or being told they need to stay, and somebody needs to be taking the reins and making decisions. So how do you balance that?

Suzanne Bernier: 7:53

Well, it depends on now if you're you're focusing on which group are we talking about, on balancing that.

Manya Chylinski: 8:00

I'm thinking about the people who are responding to the crisis. So maybe the the team that includes the media spokesperson and the CEO and kind of making those big decisions.

Suzanne Bernier: 8:09

What I would say one of my biggest hints for people is most of the time the CEO is on your list as being the spokesperson. That's just how it is, usually, until either something happens and you're like, maybe we should rethink this. It's better that we get rid of them and put them in a different position before an issue happens and we have to take them off. So the best way to do that is convincing the leader, because I've been it in this situation where the leader says, no way, nobody else is in charge. It's gotta be me. It's me. And then you have to convince them, and it's it's in a way where they have to look at it as their, oh, you're right. I'm in a much more important role strategically. So I have no time to be dealing with media calls every five minutes or doing press conferences. That should go to the people that do that. I'm the one that needs to lead our strategic team on making sure we make this through. And so that's what I would say to a couple of former leaders I had who I recognized, maybe they didn't recognize, um, that they were more appropriate in a strategic level somewhere else. And so once you explain that to them, but it's all in how you word it. If you word it to a leader and say, oh no, you know what, we think somebody else would be better, no, that's not going to work. But if you say, you know what, you are way too important, we realize, to make these executive decisions. We need you over here, not wasting your time with the media. Let's put so-and-so in to do all the media stuff and you can review everything and you know, or review it. And that way you may very well see those leaders who aren't the greatest at being those spokespeople move into the more strategic role without too much argument. Right, right.

Manya Chylinski: 10:01

Because you need all of those pieces. You need someone thinking strategically and big picture, and you need the media person, and then you need the people who are doing the immediate tasks that need to be done. Yeah. So, you know, when we talk about crisis, of course, there are myriad types of crises, and some are short-lived, some last longer. So it's hard to generalize. But leaders and teams are balancing the urgency of dealing with something that's happening, but also the need to really think and listen and maybe pause for some of that strategic thinking. How do you achieve that balance? Do you achieve that balance?

Suzanne Bernier: 10:50

You could try and achieve the balance. And by achieving trying to achieve the balance is being able to be sure that you're running executives around the table, tabletop exercises, or even just scenario testing, which is more the preferred kind of terminology these days. Um, getting them around the room more often so that everybody feels comfortable with what would happen in a real crisis, um, so that everybody has some kind of a feeling ahead of time. The unfortunate challenge is a lot of the people that are not regulated to have emergency plans or business continuity plans in place, then those are the areas that I worry about. Because when you're not, I mean, we know all those areas that are legislated, they have solid business continuity plans because they have to have them. They get audited every year, they have to replace, I mean, they have to revise them every year. But there's some challenges in communities or areas where they've perhaps left the plans go for a long time. So many other emergencies have happened, they haven't had a chance to like sit back and just look at what the plan really is and if it's functional for these different kinds of scenarios or not. The best way to try to figure that out is by holding exercises at least annually. And I'd say, you know, little scenario testing quarterly with whatever might be the incident of the day, whether it's cyber is on the news today because one of your vendors got hit, or whether it's whatever, you know. I'm just bringing people together to look at all these different newish scenarios and walk them and talk them through.

Manya Chylinski: 12:34

So in industries or organizations where it isn't mandated, how do you help them understand how important it is to have these plans and to be thinking about it, as you say, at least annually, if not more often? I can imagine people thinking no one wants to think anything bad is going to happen. So, first of all, there's that. And then we don't want to spend the time or the money or the resources to focus on this because we're not going to need it. How do you help them move to a place of understanding the importance?

Suzanne Bernier: 13:07

Right. Well, I think it it's taking them through the concept, first of all, of what business continuity is. And right now, really, there's really a shift going where the BC terminology is switching to operational resilience. So that's another thing that we're going to see a lot more companies change their terminology from the business continuity group to you'll see them as the operational resilience group, or they'll change from business continuity program to operational resilience program. The difference between the two basically is the operational resilience program includes BCP as a component of it, as well as the testing and exercising and validating. It's just BCP as a one of the tools for an opera as a program where hopefully we can look at bouncing forward on things instead of instead of facing something and bouncing back, you know, how we say, Oh, we're gonna bounce back afterwards. If anything, the theory of uh operational resilience is can we possibly detect things and be able to create something against it before it hits us? Right.

Manya Chylinski: 14:26

Do you have experience helping people understand why this is so important to implement?

Suzanne Bernier: 14:32

Yeah, and usually the best way to be able to get people to really get it is by sharing lessons learned of other similar companies or enter entities where it's happened. So that's what I've learned to do is to be able to do my research beforehand and then make sure I'm aware of what other similar companies are doing or have done.

Manya Chylinski: 14:56

Right. Right, because then it then that's the closest we can get to having it be real for those executives to about how what the impact might be on their own company.

Suzanne Bernier: 15:07

Right, like sharing some real stories so that they can actually feel because we don't really feel so much in an exercise because we all know it's for play. Right, you know, but if we I just notice if we inject some real life type situations within, it just gets a lot of the team better. I mean, a lot of us are empaths, and so a lot of us will feel it more if we get told the real story and who's behind it. And so fortunately for me, I've been able to meet so many amazing, not only responders, but survivors that I deliver their main messages to my audiences on then on their behalf, because they don't have a platform. So I've kind of been asked by some of the survivors to be that platform for them. Well, thank you for that.

Manya Chylinski: 15:59

Speaking as a survivor, knowing the hard work that you do, we appreciate you. So, another thing that's going on in a crisis is everyone, the leaders, the executives, the workforce are feeling strain and stress and fear and all of the things because of the uncertainty and potential danger, as we know, depending on the crisis. So, what is the leader's role in in that in helping people feel safe and that they're taking the right steps to protect them?

Suzanne Bernier: 17:07

I think the biggest importance is for whoever the leader is or whoever's sending out the message, um, that you're informing your people, whether whatever stakeholders they are, internal and or external, making sure that if the incident is the one that you've created or that you're in and that you're aware of and know details about, that you share whatever important information as soon as you're aware of it. The last thing people want is to see in the news a story about their own organization that's being affected by something and they never heard from their organization first, and they find it out online through the media when they Google. That should not happen because they're going to Google and get disinformation. So the best way to prov to make sure we don't have rumors, we don't have misinformation during an incident is we are the ones first to be the ones to push out the message. Then we know the first message out that that's the first message out. We confirm it by validating with whatever official sources to make sure police services have confirmed that blah, blah, blah or whatever it is, has to come from us first. And what that's, I think, a ch a challenge I see in a lot of companies is they constantly forget how communications is always the number one threat and always the number one fault that happens during either an exercise or an actual event. We don't do enough to be able to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Interesting.

Manya Chylinski: 18:55

You said they forget about the communications piece. I'm wondering, in in some cases, do we think it's that there's a fear of liability or some other issue that if we say something, we're gonna that's gonna be bad for us?

Suzanne Bernier: 19:11

Sure, there may be, but then that's people who don't really understand the issue of, okay, so let's say people say, oh, off the record, blah, blah, blah. And we know a lot of politicians or other people have who said something like that, oh, off the record, blah, blah, blah. And then you end up hearing about it. Well, it's because nothing is off the record ever. Do you and the media person, as you're having this little one-on-one, are you signing an agreement and dating it, saying that they will not say anything that you repeat to them? No. So you have to be, you know, prepared.

Manya Chylinski: 19:44

I'm just curious about organizations that feel like they shouldn't share or can't share, maybe because of liability.

Suzanne Bernier: 19:52

Liability, otherwise known as legal. And so one of the things I have noticed every time anything goes to legal, as soon as it goes to legal, they legal says don't say a word. That's legals, that's their practice for pretty much anything. Don't say a word because in case we get caught at fault. But in the meantime, there's a lot of things that we can say that are not going to get us in trouble and that have nothing to do with the investigation. Just acknowledging. We've seen airlines who a plane crashed and 300 and some people died. And it wasn't till hours later that that airline had the decency to even put messaging out on what happened. Yet there were other airlines who were in who saw what happened, and they were tweeting out messages of support, telling people what happened, informing people, but it wasn't the company that owned the plane of the accident. Wow. Yeah. And I mean, we just need to be aware that in these days and ages, we really have to try and get that message out as soon as possible because we know every single person is an iReporter with a camera and the ability to transmit all over the world within less than 60 seconds. Yes, that's the thing.

Manya Chylinski: 21:15

Back in the day, whatever day that you want to make that, you only got news from official channels. So you only got the official message. And now it's so much that you are getting other people's perspective. And sometimes that's an appropriate perspective, and sometimes it's from someone who misunderstood what was happening or had an agenda about what was happening. As an organization who's involved in a crisis, how do you manage all of this real-time information with the messages that you're trying to get out?

Suzanne Bernier: 21:51

Yeah. Well, that's where you've got different teams that are set up. If they're set up in the incident management system, then it's pretty clear on who would be responsible for doing what. If you don't have the incident management model set up, um, it would just be to make sure that you're assigning one person to one area and making sure that because some plants that I've seen as well list like so and so as the primary person in an emergency for this, but then they're the secondary person for something else. And then I found them in a third area as well, where if we can't have that happen, so making sure that we've got the one team working on one message, this team working on the ops stuff, this team working on so that we're all doing what we need to do. Nobody's walking on top of each other, and there's no duplication because there's no time for duplication during an emergency.

Manya Chylinski: 22:47

And as you were answering this question in the previous question, I was thinking again how important that planning ahead and having a crisis plan is. Like, for example, you mentioned legal, and if you have to send something to legal, well, with your crisis plan, you can figure out ahead of time, perhaps, what are the things we need, what can say, what are the kinds of things we can say without having to go to legal. So you can answer some of those questions when you're not in that crisis moment. Right.

Suzanne Bernier: 23:20

And even if you're in that crisis moment, that's sometimes as well where we get caught, where right away something comes in and we get a reporter in our face asking us to respond. But realistically, honestly, we don't know anything yet. And that's this has happened before. Something's happened off site, someone's taken a picture, shown it online, and then the CEO finds out about it.

Manya Chylinski: 23:42

So, Suzanne, we are getting close to the end of our time. What is one question that you wish I had asked you, but I didn't ask you? And how would you answer it?

Suzanne Bernier: 23:54

One question that you didn't ask me that I would have liked to have been asked. I'm not sure if I would have liked to have been asked, but I like to sometimes tell people about something that has nothing to do at all with anything that I do professionally or volunteer-wise with uh with uh survivors or anything. But just one little fun fact on the side. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved watching game shows, like a lot of us did, I'm sure. And I always thought one day, one of my goals wasn't to be speaking at the White House, but it was to be on a game show. So several years ago, I auditioned and I was able to go on a game show. So I was on the Canadian version of Match Game, which is back again. Um, but yeah, and I won. And so I only won a little bit because it was Canadian match game and we only have a little money, but the repeats keep going on. So I'll have colleagues from all over that will sometimes, you know, Facebook me or email me and say, I just saw you won match game, but it would have been like a rerun from seven years ago. Luckily, I won because otherwise there'd be a repeat of me losing every year. So I never thought of that part beforehand.

Manya Chylinski: 25:07

And that's that's no fun for the people who lost. Oh, well, that's so cool that you were on match game. Congratulations and for your win. Well, I will tell you if we're talking game shows here, that as a child, my friend and I made a plan that we wanted to um audition for the gong show. Oh, yes. We wanted to we planned something that was so bad that we would get gonged. It was very exciting. We never got farther than the planning, but um it was it was a briefly a dream of ours. So, Suzanne, before we go, can you please tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what you do?

Suzanne Bernier: 25:50

Sure. As you know, I'm Suzanne Bernier. You can find me uh if you want to know more about me on LinkedIn, of course, as well as I have a website that hasn't been updated for a bit, but you'll get to know a lot about me if you go on it. It's just my name.com. So suzannebernier.com. And uh if you want to find out about a little bit more on what I was doing with uh these amazing disaster heroes from 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, as well as some of the most famous uh disasters that we've heard of in our time, check out my website, disasterheroes.com. Please do not buy, do not go on Amazon and buy the book because I have not seen anything from Amazon. So um, if anybody wants a copy of the book, just shoot me a message and I can get one out to you and actually personally sign it for you.

Manya Chylinski: 26:42

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you for letting us know. And now your podcast, Disaster Heroes. Do we have any news about that?

Suzanne Bernier: 26:49

Well, do we want to share the news that we have about that? Let's do, yes. Let's do it. Okay, so you are the first audience that are going to hear this from us, Manya and I, are going to be restarting um the Disaster Heroes podcast, originally based on the theme of the book. Um, and there were several podcasts that I had started, and then the pandemic hit. And then just didn't have the the time to get back to it. But now Manya and I have chatted on the side, and we have decided to do the podcast together, which I think is going to be amazing to have both of us kind of be able to interview these different uh survivors and heroes from all over the world. And so we'll be able to bring their voice in. Right.

Manya Chylinski: 27:40

And you and I will bring our different perspectives, you as the crisis management emergency management professional and myself as the survivor, we will be able to bring those two perspectives in and help share other people's stories. I'm very excited. And uh so be on the lookout for that, listeners. And Suzanne, thank you so much for chatting today. It was lovely, as always, having a conversation with you. Thank you, Mania. Same thing. And thank you to our listeners for checking out this episode of Notes on Resilience, and we will see you next time.