There was a time when many of the issues companies and institutions faced rarely spiraled into public crises. Organizations often had time to understand what had happened, address the problem and determine what needed to be communicated before the issue attracted broader public attention. That time has passed.

Several forces have changed the risk environment. AI is transforming how information is created and making false and misleading content easier to produce and spread. The media landscape has become more fragmented, with more voices shaping the conversation. And organizations operate in a far more transparent environment. What employees say internally can quickly become public, while gaps between what an organization says it stands for and how it operates can be exposed more quickly and visibly. Together, these forces are accelerating the speed at which reputation risks can emerge. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 50 percent of enterprises will be investing in disinformation security products, services or TrustOps strategies, up from less than five percent today.[1]

The recent CFDA incident illustrates this new reality. On September 13, video of CEO Steven Kolb physically intervening with PETA protesters at a New York Fashion Week show began circulating widely online. Within two days, Kolb had apologized and taken a leave of absence as the organization announced a review. On September 18, he resigned as CEO and president of the CFDA after two decades with the organization.[2] In just five days, a single incident had led to a major leadership change at the top of the organization.

Understanding reputation risk therefore requires understanding the business itself: how it operates, where its vulnerabilities lie and where its actions may create risk. At RF|Binder, we view reputation risk as a business risk because threats to reputation increasingly originate in how an organization operates, makes decisions and delivers on what it says it stands for.

Having a crisis communications plan is only the starting point. What matters is whether an organization has the decision-making structure and leadership readiness to recognize an emerging threat, establish facts quickly, make decisions under pressure, and ultimately, protect trust.

Reputation Now Takes Shape Across a Fragmented Information Ecosystem

New platforms, voices and technologies continue to change where information originates, how it spreads and who can shape the narrative. Traditional media remain critical, particularly in establishing facts and providing context. But it is now one part of a system that includes social platforms, employees, activists, online communities and, increasingly, large language models.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report illustrates this change. Across the 48 markets it studies, social media and video networks are now, for the first time, the most widely used way of accessing online news, used by 54 percent of respondents, compared with 51 percent who use news organizations’ websites and apps. Since 2020, use of television news has declined 13 percentage points and use of news websites and apps has declined 12 points.[3]

This fragmentation also means there is no longer necessarily a single audience or even a single version of the story.

The First Version of the Story May No Longer Be Yours

Pew Research Center found in 2025 that 21 percent of American adults regularly get news from social media influencers, rising to 38 percent among adults ages 18 to 29. Among those who regularly get news from influencers, 69 percent say they mostly happen to come across it rather than actively seeking it out.[4] Increasingly, people may not seek out a crisis story. The story finds them.

For organizations, the challenge is understanding how a narrative is forming, who is giving it credibility and whether it is moving into more influential networks. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review describe this as understanding the “social resonance” of information: not simply whether a narrative exists, but how it is spreading and who is influencing its reach.[5]

Employees can also play an increasingly visible role in the information ecosystem. Internal and external communications can no longer be treated as entirely separate. An internal email, employee post or comment from a town hall can quickly become part of the public conversation.

A Crisis Reveals the Gaps Between Narrative and Reality

Corporate narratives, purpose statements and values are put to the test under pressure. If an organization says employee safety is paramount, stakeholders will evaluate its actions against that commitment. If transparency is a stated value, they will judge how forthcoming leadership is when the facts are difficult.

The greater the gap between what an organization says and how it operates, the greater the potential reputation risk. This is why corporate values need to be grounded in the reality of the business.

Clarity Enables Better Decisions Under Pressure

Clarity about an organization’s narrative and values provides more than a communications framework. It gives leadership a framework for making decisions when the stakes are serious.

Compounding these challenges is the growing business risk posed by misinformation and disinformation. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most significant global risk over the next two years.[6] This creates a central tension in managing reputation today: the pressure to respond has accelerated just as establishing certainty has become more difficult.

Organizations need speed, but they also need facts. The answer is not simply communicating faster. It is building the organizational capability to establish facts faster.

The Crisis Can Outlast the Event

The Reuters Institute reports that ten percent of people globally now use AI chatbots for news each week, up from seven percent a year earlier, reaching 16 percent among people under 35.[3] Search engines, social platforms, news coverage and other digital sources can continue surfacing information about a crisis long after the event has passed. As AI platforms and large language models become increasingly important to how people seek information, organizations also need to consider what information these systems may surface.

While the operational crisis may be over, the reputation crisis may linger. Organizations need to understand what damage was done. Did the crisis undermine confidence in management? Raise questions about competence or governance? Damage relationships with key stakeholders? Expose a gap between stated values and behavior?

Recovery requires more than communications. If mistakes were made, organizations need to demonstrate what has changed through their policies, leadership, oversight or operations. The objective is to build credible evidence of what was learned, what has changed and why there should be renewed confidence in the organization.

What Crisis Readiness Means Today

A crisis plan tells you what to do. Crisis readiness enables you to make good decisions when what happens is not in the plan. At RF|Binder, we define crisis readiness as an organization’s ability to recognize an emerging threat, establish facts quickly, make sound decisions under pressure and take actions that protect stakeholder trust.

We believe that requires preparing for what happens before, during and after a crisis.

1. Establish clarity before a crisis occurs. Understand what the organization stands for, how the business operates, the value it creates and where vulnerabilities may exist. RF|Binder’s Clarity Audit provides a structured way to establish that foundation.
2. Identify vulnerabilities and build realistic scenarios. Assess the crises the organization is most likely to face and establish in advance what requires escalation and who has authority to act.
3. Create an integrated crisis leadership team. Communications, legal, human resources, investor relations, operations and senior leadership need to know how they will work together and who has decision authority, including when the board should be involved.
4. Monitor what matters and understand social resonance. Real-time monitoring should identify emerging issues and reveal who is shaping the conversation, where it is spreading and whether it has reached the threshold requiring intervention. Knowing when to act and when to wait is equally important.
5. Build a rapid fact network. Know who across the organization can quickly establish what happened, who is affected, whether the situation is continuing and, critically, what is and is not yet known.
6. Practice before it matters. Simulations expose unclear authority, slow fact gathering and cumbersome approvals while building the organizational muscle memory to respond to the unexpected.
7. Separate speed from speculation. Organizations can acknowledge an issue and communicate what is known without having every answer. Different stakeholders may require different communications, but all should be grounded in the same facts and messaging.
8. Build credible allies before they are needed. Employees, customers, academics, industry experts and other third parties may have credibility an organization cannot create for itself in the middle of a crisis.[5]
9. Plan for recovery from the beginning. Assess reputational damage, address underlying causes and develop a sustained strategy for rebuilding trust through consistent actions and credible evidence.

The organizations best prepared for the next crisis will be those that have clarity about who they are, understand the risks the business could face and align the people who will need to make decisions together. Managing reputation today is not simply about responding to what happened. It is about understanding how what happened becomes the story people believe, making the right decisions as that story takes shape and taking the actions necessary to rebuild trust.

Footnotes

[1] Gartner, “Gartner Says AI Powered Disinformation Is Becoming a Brand Risk Marketers Can’t Ignore,” June 9, 2026.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-06-09-gartner-says-ai-powered-disinformation-is-becoming-a-brand-risk-marketers-cant-ignore

[2] Reuters, “US fashion council CEO Kolb resigns after clash with runway show protesters,” September 18, 2026.
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/us-fashion-council-ceo-kolb-resigns-after-clash-with-runway-show-protesters-4908048

[3] Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, “Overview and Key Findings of the 2026 Digital News Report,” June 16, 2026.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary

[4] Pew Research Center, “News Influencers Fact Sheet,” November 4, 2025.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-influencers-fact-sheet/

[5] Michael Etter, Patrick Haack, Simone Mariconda and Marta Pizzetti, Harvard Business Review, “How to Counter Fake News,” September/October 2025.
https://hbr.org/2025/09/how-to-counter-fake-news

[6] World Economic Forum, “Global Risks Report 2026,” January 14, 2026.
https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/in-full/