Advanced High-Stakes Communications Training (Crisis Ready Autumn Intensive)
When your community is scared, angry, or confused, you’re the person reporters and residents look to for the communications that will help them feel safe and assured. Everything rides on how you communicate.
The Crisis Ready Autumn Intensive is built for the moment right before you speak: how to regulate yourself the second stress floods your system, how to identify the fear-based emotions actually driving the reporters, the residents, and your own leadership, how to build the specific levels of safety a community needs before they can hear anything you say, and how to bring it all together using a framework that doesn’t just allow you to respond, but allows you to position yourself and your agency as THE voice of trust and credibility when it matters most.
These aren’t the media-training basics most PIOs already have. They’re the advanced skills built for the most challenging moments you’re responsible for leading communications through.
In this Intensive, you’ll build the following skills across four live sessions:
Session 1, Leadership Resonance, Power & Influence: moving your community, and your own leadership, from resistance to trust, while keeping your own nervous system steady and stress lowered.
Session 2, Strategizing High-Stakes Communications: the Crisis Ready® Formula for responding to emotional escalation, practiced against real scenarios, not hypotheticals.
Session 3, AI & the New Crisis Landscape: the Crisis Ready® Engagement Decision Matrix, and how to use AI to get ahead of misinformation instead of chasing it.
Session 4, the VIP bonus working session: hands-on practice to truly help you hone and apply this skillset.
Taught by Melissa Agnes, whose bestselling book, Crisis Ready, is part of Harvard University’s own curriculum, was named one of Forbes’ top ten business books of 2018, and is ranked by Book Authority among the best crisis management books of all time. Melissa has worked with NATO, the Pentagon, and government Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, and she sat on the international panel that created ISO 22361, the global standard for crisis management.
This Intensive is the difference between knowing what a PIO in a high-stakes moment should do, and being someone who can actually do it, in the room, under pressure. You’ll leave with a deepened approach to your crisis communication skills that will truly serve you when your agency’s credibility is on the line.
The Crisis Ready Autumn Intensive runs live, September 15 through 24, 2026, for $950 (VIP bonus session, $59 more). Enrollment is open now. If you’re the person your agency turns to when everything goes wrong, check out the details and enrollment in the link below.
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