Smart in Public What to do When Everything's on Fire with Tara Goodwin, Crisis Expert and Founder of Goodwin Consulting
Crisis communications expert Tara Goodwin has seen it all: executives freezing under pressure, companies making bad situations catastrophically worse, and the rare leaders who actually nail it when everything's on fire. In this no-BS conversation with the Katies, Tara shares why most organizations are dangerously unprepared for inevitable crises and what actually works when your reputation is on the line.
Most CEOs don't have a dedicated crisis plan. They're operating on vibes, crossing their fingers, and hoping their "strong company culture" will save them. In theory, this type of CEO sounds like a fun person who you'd want to have a beer with. But in reality this mentality is a bomb waiting to go off.
Why this episode slaps:
🚨 The preparation gap - Why "we'll figure it out when it happens" is the most expensive strategy in business (and why most executives still believe it)
👥 Your employees are your crisis team - How the most underutilized asset in crisis communications is sitting in your Slack channels right now
⚡ Speed vs. perfection - Why social media has made your 24-hour response window obsolete, and what crisis communicators are doing instead
💰 Accountability is your superpower - The counterintuitive reason why owning your mistakes faster actually limits damage (not extends it)
🧠 The executive toll nobody talks about - The emotional and psychological impact on leaders during crises that changes how you should structure your crisis team
🤖 AI's crisis planning advantage - How smart teams are using AI for scenario planning without letting robots write their actual crisis responses
The Hot Takes That'll Make You Rethink Everything:
Tara and the Katies dive deep into three recent crisis case studies that reveal exactly what works (and what fails spectacularly):
- Astronomer's Coldplay Gate and the slow responses
- The Tylenol autism litigation crisis - When letting lawyers control communications for too long undermines your public credibility
- Jimmy Kimmel's FCC showdown - Perfect crisis PR in action: emotional accountability without full apology, thanking enemies, and flipping the narrative
- Sydney Sweeney's response strategy - Why ego and perception management can make or break your crisis comeback
- Why Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni just can't seem to let it go.
Crisis management isn't about avoiding mistakes—it's about having the infrastructure, team diversity, and emotional resilience to respond effectively when (not if) things go sideways. Proactive planning and backwards mapping from worst-case scenarios prevents escalation that reactive organizations never recover from.
Your crisis plan needs to account for the fact that transparency isn't just expected anymore—it's demanded. Your employees will talk, social media will accelerate everything, and your window for controlling the narrative gets smaller every year.
Read Tara's book: Manage the Message, Change the Outcome: An Executive’s Guide to Crisis Management
Thank you Tara for coming on the show!!!!!!
Connect with us on:
Have a topic or a guest idea? Email us at hello@smartinpublicpod.com