The Big Breach: An Experiential Learning Exercise in Mindful Crisis Communication

Crises threaten high-priority goals of impacted organizations. In the field, trainings range from overviews of crisis plans to full-scale exercises that simulate a crisis. In the classroom, simulations engage multiple learning styles, and allow students to reflect on observations and provide recommendations. The objectives for this unit activity are to define and explain mindfulness, reflect on the relationship between mindfulness and crisis communication, and evaluate the effectiveness of crisis responses according to students' generation of new categories and different routines, and consideration of multiple perspectives. In the organizational communication course, students could explain the crisis according to new systems theories that attend to the self-organizing nature of crisis communication or focus on messages and interactions that amplify deviations in an organizational system.