Once upon a time in the 1990s, this cub reporter spent many an hour calling the local fire brigade from a landline to fish for a front page story about the Brave Boys in Blue saving the day in Brixton.

I learnt quickly in that busy newsroom, where word processors had only just arrived, that whoever frames the story first, usually influences how it lands and what legs it might grow.

That has not changed.

But what has changed is speed and scale.

Today, when something goes wrong, people don’t wait for investigations to conclude, or for carefully drafted statements to arrive.

Screenshots start to make the rounds, the LinkedIn litterati comment, the journos come ‘a calling. Opinions form quickly.

The truth is, though, the incident itself is rarely what defines the message outcome.

Take a large-scale IT outage at a global forwarder. Systems down. Cargo delayed. Customers frustrated. Within hours, posts appear online. Competitors watch closely. Media enquiries land. The narrative starts to move.

In those first few hours, stakeholders are not just reacting to the outage. They are asking themselves something far more important.

Do we trust them to fix this?

If the company has spent years communicating expertise, trailblazing new ideas, championing innovation and building brilliant relationships with the trade media that matter, then the outage becomes a problem to solve.

If that company has not invested in its brand profile, the chances are, the outage becomes a reputational story.

That is the stress test.

Reputation is hard currency, and when pressure hits you either spend that currency with confidence or discover you never earned enough in the first place.

I don’t believe many would argue with me if I said that volatility is the new norm and that has a very real impact on our industry

It is shaped, not only by geopolitical pressure, but by AI disruption, sudden regulatory shifts, capacity crunches, sanctions, trade policy swings, and the reality that almost anything can change overnight.

It is one thing to claim agility in that environment and quite another to explain it clearly when stakeholders want answers.

The seconds matter because that is when perception starts to form.

The years matter because that is when resilience is built.

So the real question is not whether something will go wrong at some point. It most probably will.

The question is this.

If tomorrow morning your organisation faces scrutiny, what would people already believe about you?

And who is actively managing that belief?

At Meantime Communications, we help leaders build reputational capital long before they need to spend it.

Because stress tests are inevitable.

Reputation is built before the moment that tests it.

As this one time cub reporter discovered long before LinkedIn and live feeds, what people already believe about you determines how the story lands.

Interested in a career at Meantime? Head to our Careers page: https://meantime.global/careers/