The first five minutes of any crisis—the Golden Five—can set the course for success or failure. If your team isn’t acting in sync on the right priorities during this critical window, you’re already losing ground. You and your teams need to be prepared to take advantage of the Golden Five. But, many emergency response plans fail to do because of some common assumptions:

• Don’t accommodate new team members: They are new, but they can be a real valuable asset in a critical situation. Get them up and running with clear actionable tasks so they can contribute effectively from day one.
• Teams know exactly where the plan is: The reality - they don’t. Too often, emergency response plans are stored in places that are hard to access, require special permissions, or are simply forgotten. When a crisis strikes, the last thing you want is your team scrambling to find a document instead of responding to the situation at hand.
• Individuals can quickly find the right section: Ever tried locating a single page under pressure? Good luck. Analogue emergency response plans tend to be long, complex, and difficult to navigate. Even if someone finds the document, flipping through dozens of pages to find relevant instructions wastes valuable time that should be spent on execution.
• Response teams have memorized their tasks: The reality - they haven’t. Employees don’t memorize crisis response plans—they have jobs to do. Expecting them to recall specific steps in a high-stress situation is unrealistic. Without clear, real-time instructions, confusion takes over, and critical steps are missed.
• Can manually assign priority actions: Which leads to confusion and wasted time. In a crisis, team members must act immediately. But without clear leadership and automatic task delegation, they end up waiting for instructions, duplicating efforts, or assuming someone else is handling key actions. This delay can mean the difference between containing a crisis and letting it escalate.

An emergency response plan should be an operational tool, not just a document that collects dust. It must drive action immediately.

Digitalization is the key

My advice is to look for a digital solution for your emergency response plan. At a minimum, you need a solution that supports the following:

• Instant Mobilization:  Pre-defined scenarios trigger immediate alerts and action assignments. The right people are notified and ready within seconds.
• Live Task Coordination:  No need to sift through a plan—each team member gets clear, prioritized tasks based on real-time updates.
• Centralized Communication: No more juggling emails, texts, and calls. You need one unified crisis communication platform, ensuring a single source of truth.
• Automated Documentation:  Every decision and action is logged instantly, so reporting happens in real time—not after the fact.

If you’re looking for some more insight on digitalization, check out our on-demand webinar Simplify Incident Management to Save Time, Money and Lives.  This webinar explores how RAYVN’s easy-to-use solution can help any organization plan, prepare, respond, recover and assess & adapt with greater efficiency.