I have done this since my first job out of college: for a ski resort, a Denver ad agency, a billion-dollar software company, and a U.S. national laboratory. At the lab I led the digital arm of the Joint Information Command and served on the Threat Assessment Group; one responded when something had gone wrong, the other worked to see it coming. Some of it made the news. Some of it never will, by design. Here is the range.

When the ground is on fire.

My career began on the digital team at Breckenridge, one of the most-visited ski resorts in America, where the work swung without warning. One day I was building a map of where to find hot chocolate on the mountain; another, getting a webcam mounted over a snow stake, live around the clock, because part of the community was sure the resort lied about its snow totals, and the only answer that would hold was letting anyone look. And some days I was pushing closure notices while ski patrol extracted a patient, coordinating with patrol, local law enforcement, and search and rescue; at a resort that size, serious injuries are routine and deaths are not rare. I was thrown into the realities of this work at the earliest possible stage.

So in 2013, when the Black Forest Fire broke out near Colorado Springs and the sheriff's office began tweeting evacuation orders as raw text, north of this road, east of that one, I already knew how to put information on a map. I turned the words into polygons, so anyone could see whether their house was inside the line. It spread on its own; Google folded it into its Crisis Maps product, the manager who ran that product wrote to call it “incredibly inspiring,” and the map is still live today. Years later, one of the anchors who covered that fire turned up as a crisis-communications instructor for the Department of Energy, across the table from me at the lab's joint-information drills, where we rehearsed active shooters, natural disasters, and the uncontrolled release of radioactive material, in partnership with Hanford and the Department of Energy's regional field office. At a laboratory that works with nuclear material every day, that last one is table stakes.

When the threat is real.

Some crises are not stories at all. On the Threat Assessment Group I worked alongside career counterintelligence officers and national security experts: the standing team charged with defending the lab's physical, intellectual, and human assets against hostile actors, foreign and domestic. My part was open-source intelligence: scouring, synthesizing, and triaging what the public internet knew about any threat to the lab, so the right resources moved first. My training was the federal canon of behavioral threat assessment, from DHS's targeted-violence curriculum to the FBI's Making Prevention a Reality. The work included an insider matter and a foreign government's public claim that the lab was part of a bioweapons program aimed at it. These are rooms where one wrong sentence can put real people or an institution at risk, and where restraint is the entire job. It is also most of what I can responsibly say here, which, if you are hiring for crisis, is rather the point.

When a life depends on it.

Years before the lab, back at the Denver agency, I was the digital voice of Dr. Rich Mahogany for Man Therapy, a suicide-prevention campaign built with Colorado's Office of Suicide Prevention. When Robin Williams died, I got clinically vetted content onto Reddit's r/EveryManShouldKnow within days, and it hit the front page.

When the disruption is staged.

When COVID-19 sent TIBCO's global workforce home in 2020, the job was continuity and calm, across twelve executive accounts and three continents, with no playbook. In the middle of it, Conan O'Brien crashed a company video call and roasted the CEO on national television: a high-stakes prank at the boss's expense, staged with an insider's help. We leaned all the way in, turned it into a charity moment, and got the company its best press of the year. Not every crisis is a disaster; the skill is telling the difference in the first ten minutes.

When one of your own goes off-script.

Reddit is where brand crises detonate now, and I have worked it since 2011, when I broke the news of Steve Jobs's death there, for a time the most-upvoted post the platform had seen. Shortly after I left TIBCO, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team's communications director came to me directly, and quietly, about a situation on the F1 subreddit. At the national lab, a superconducting magnet quenched and a scientist's photo of the helium fog went viral: a million views in a day. Leadership's first instinct was to ban employees from photographing or posting on campus. I read it differently: people were sharing awe, not criticism, and the spectacle was the story. I counseled the executive team toward a small policy clarification instead of a ban, proportionate to what had happened, and careful to keep employees' voices intact.

When it was my own family.

The most important campaign I ever ran was for my own family. In 2022 a national shortage left my prematurely born daughter without the specialty formula she needed, and I ran it the way I would run any crisis. It reached the Washington Post, Good Morning America, CNN, Inside Edition, and CBC Radio; a Senate committee hearing, where a senator named my family to the FDA Commissioner; and, eventually, an emergency federal airlift. MacKenzie is four now. I cannot keep enough strawberries in the house.