From the Battlefield to Boardroom Crisis with Tim Robinson

What happens when a board's reputation comes under attack before anyone knows what actually happened?

In this episode of The Boardroom Path, host Ralph Grayson speaks with Tim Robinson, partner at Schillings and a former British Army Major General, about why reputational resilience is a governance discipline rather than a communications exercise. They examine how data breaches, leaked documents, extortion and coordinated smear campaigns move across social and traditional media in minutes, and why boards that place reputation near the top of the risk register often do little practical preparation. Tim argues that the most important commodity in any crisis is facts, and that boards should rehearse scenarios, appoint a small empowered task team and prepare rebuttals for the stories they can anticipate.

The argument is timely: the BBC reported in September 2026 on a deepfake victim calling for reputational abuse to be recognised as a distinct form of harm BBC News, while research published this year found deepfake fraud operating at industrial scale The Guardian. From privacy exposure audits for new NEDs to the first hour of a crisis, this conversation offers a practical roadmap for directors who want to be ready before the pressure arrives.

• (00:00) - Welcome to The Boardroom Path
• (02:33) - How People Behave Under Pressure
• (04:41) - Leadership Lessons Across Army and Boardroom
• (07:22) - Inside Schillings and High-Stakes Advice
• (08:57) - Reputation as Governance, Not Communications
• (10:21) - Who Owns Reputational Risk in the Boardroom
• (12:30) - Privacy Exposure Audits for New Directors
• (15:25) - Managing Your Digital Footprint Early
• (18:40) - When Reputational Threats Reach Board Level
• (20:17) - Out-Facting the Other Side with Facts
• (22:31) - Building Preparedness and the Task Team
• (26:52) - Simulating the First Hour of a Crisis

Tim Robinson: Tim Robinson CBE is a partner at Schillings, the multidisciplinary consultancy that advises boards, companies and individuals on high-stakes situations affecting their reputation, privacy and security. A former Major General in the British Army, he joined Schillings in 2016 as its first non-lawyer partner since the firm converted to an LLP. He is an experienced negotiator who leads internal inquiries, settles disputes, runs counter-extortion operations and handles smear campaigns, and he features in the Spear's Best Reputation Managers Index and the Citywealth Leaders List.

Ralph Grayson: Ralph Grayson is a Partner in the Board Practice at Sainty Hird & Partners, bringing extensive experience in board-level recruitment, assessment, and advisory services. With a deep understanding of the corporate governance landscape, Ralph specialises in guiding senior executives as they transition into impactful boardroom careers. His thoughtful approach, combined with a passion for developing effective leaders, enables him to facilitate insightful conversations that equip aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors with the tools they need to succeed. Through The Boardroom Path, Ralph leverages his extensive professional network and expertise to empower listeners on their journey into the boardroom.

Episode Insights:

• Reputational resilience is a governance discipline, not a communications issue, and no single discipline can prepare for or solve a reputation problem alone.
• Boards list reputational risk near the top of the register but often invest more in cyber or fire safety, because no inspector will close them down over it.
• A privacy exposure audit for a high-profile new director is a duty of care, because if controversy comes, an aerial shot of the house follows.
• Routine pressures such as media inquiries and unhappy employees are more likely to cause a crisis than rare coordinated smear campaigns.
• Facts win the day: writing down the worst story a respected paper could print, and preparing the rebuttal evidence, is the core of preparedness.

Action Points:

1. Write the worst-case story now: Ask your task team to draft the story a respected publication such as the Financial Times could write about your business. Include every negative allegation that could appear. Then prepare a rebuttal fact and the supporting evidence for each claim, so you are never responding from a standing start.
2. Appoint and empower a small crisis task team: Delegate crisis handling to a small group, such as the CEO, the senior in-house lawyer and the communications lead, reporting directly to the board. Keep the model simple and repeatable rather than building complex flow diagrams. Give the team the authority to employ external advisers when needed.
3. Rehearse the crisis, not just the register: Put reputational scenarios on the board agenda as live simulations rather than coloured rows on a risk register. Rehearse with the task team so everyone knows their role and decision thresholds. Treat the exercise as preparation, not compliance.
4. Commission a privacy exposure audit for new appointments: For any high-profile arrival, simulate what an investigative journalist could find from public sources. Present the findings privately to the individual and pay for it as a board. Let them decide how to reduce their own exposure.
5. Brief employees early as well as outsiders: Treat internal and external communications as equally important in a crisis. Ask employees not to amplify speculation in the early days, because sharing screenshots raises the profile of the story. Use internal messages to reassure, even before the full picture is known.

The Boardroom Path is the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career. 

Subscribe now, and take your first confident step along The Boardroom Path. Learn more about Sainty Hird & Partners at saintyhird.com.

The Boardroom Path is produced by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford, UK. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Ralph Grayson

Producer

Matt Eastland-Jones

Producer

Story Ninety-Four

Guest

Tim Robinson

What is The Boardroom Path?

Welcome to The Boardroom Path, the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career.

Tim Robinson: The single most important thing I can contribute to your listeners if I said only one thing would be that the most important commodity in this world of reputation, protection, and enhancement, is facts.

Ralph Grayson: Welcome to The Boardroom Path by Sainty Hird & Partners. I'm your host, Ralph Grayson, a partner in the board practice. In this series, we'll offer practical steps and useful perspectives for aspiring and newly appointed NEDs.

Today's conversation begins with the usual uncomfortable truth. A board's reputation can now come under attack before it is established what has actually happened. A data breach, leaked document, allegation, hostile campaign, active extortion or complex internal complaint. All these can move across social and traditional media in minutes. The board may face simultaneous demands from employees, regulators, investors, customers, and the press, each expecting clarity when the facts are still incomplete.

In those moments, governance ceases to be theoretical. The quality of the board is evidenced in its judgement, what it prioritises, who it protects, how it establishes the truth, what it says, what it records, and whether it can remain calm without becoming passive.

My guest today is exceptionally well placed to examine that challenge. Tim Robinson is a partner at Schillings where he advises on especially complex, sensitive and international high-stakes situations. His work includes leading internal inquiries, resolving disputes, countering extortion, and responding to smear campaigns. Before entering this world, Tim was a Major General in the British Army, a background that gives him a distinctive perspective on preparation, command, uncertainty, and decision-making under pressure.

Tim, welcome to The Boardroom Path.

Tim Robinson: Thank you, Ralph. It's good to be here.

Ralph Grayson: I started this with a title from Battlefield Leadership to the Boardroom. So I'd love to just explore, to start with, the human aspect of some of these issues. You've moved from senior command in the army to advising individuals and organisations where reputation, privacy, and sometimes even personal security are at stake. Perhaps let's start with what just those two worlds have taught you about how people really behave under pressure.

Tim Robinson: Well, I think the first thing is that there's not much difference between, in my experience, between the way they behave in the military one to the corporate one. The types of pressure they may face are different but the way they react and who does well and who doesn't do so well in those situations is quite consistent across both worlds.

Ralph Grayson: What habits may be of military preparation transfer well into a boardroom crisis or what did you need to unlearn as you went from the khaki to the pinstripe?

Tim Robinson: Well, those are two different questions. One's about me and one's about maybe others. But in terms of what I think works well, you've mentioned a couple of times already. There's no substitute for planning, particularly when the conditions are a bit more benign.

Decision-making under pressure can be mitigated to an extent by having a good plan. So that definitely is something which applies in military environments, operational environments that armies face, for example, and those that boards face.

I had to learn how to be part of a successful business. So for me personally, my big transition was to go from an organisation where I wasn't responsible for running a P&L and I was responsible for delivering operational effects and consuming resources in that sense to one where I had to judiciously apply my time to, in a way which was going to be good for our business as well as successful with our clients.

Ralph Grayson: Let's just explore a bit about how leadership changes in those two different dynamics then. I had on as a guest, Dean Canham of the Army Centre for Leadership a while ago, who talked about some of the read across from what the army could learn from the civilian world and what the civilian world could learn from what the army does well.

You've experienced leadership at its highest level in the army and now you advise boardrooms. You advise some of the most senior people in industry around areas of reputational risk. We'll get into. But where does leadership transcend in that respect?

Tim Robinson: Well, one thing that struck me as I moved from one environment to another is how military armies in my case don't have a monopoly on leadership as an idea, and they certainly don't have a monopoly on doing it well in comparison to those in the corporate environment. What I mean by that is I was quite struck at how many successful leaders I met running companies and how I had a lot to learn about leadership from interacting with those people.

It wasn't just coming from an environment where leadership was very pure, had been very well considered, lots of theory around it, and then some practice, of course. But I did meet a lot of people I thought were very good leaders because they understood how to analyse problems, they understood how to make decisions, they understood people, as well as any soldier.

Ralph Grayson: The nature of boardroom leadership is acting as part of a collective amongst a senior peer group, whereas the army by definition is driven more by hierarchy and telling people what to do. You've seen some boardrooms in moments of crisis which we'll get into. What picks out a good or well-led board from one that perhaps doesn't have the leadership and therefore implicitly is reacting rather than leading?

Tim Robinson: Well, from a personal perspective, I'll just start with that. The way I saw it personally is having come from an organisation which, yes, you're right, in theory, has a very directive command style, chain of command, command and control, these sort of ideas. I personally moved into an environment where not only was the company I was in, but also the organisations I was advising, whether they be boards or companies or individuals with small teams, they were, in theory, making decisions in a different way. Perhaps more collaboration, trying to achieve more consensus, a flatter style. Perhaps less clear lines of accountability, authority and responsibility.

But I think, in a sense, those are two stereotypes which need to be examined in a little bit more detail and there are benefits in a directive style in the corporate environment, and of course good military leadership teams are not just run as dictatorships. They're run by seeking advice, by asking people what they think.

But what unifies both models is at the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision. I hear you both, but this is what we're going to do.

Ralph Grayson: So let's just get a little bit into the nature of the advice you give, the context in which you find yourself in boardrooms sometimes. So let's just start with Schillings as a firm what it's there to solve for and what the areas of context are that you really focus on.

Tim Robinson: Yeah, so we are a multidisciplinary consultancy advising our clients, and they may be boards, they may be other types of corporate leadership team, private individuals, government organisations, advising them on how to protect themselves from reputational harm, or breaches of privacy, or some threat to their security.

Those are the three assets that we're interested in. And we have arranged a group of capabilities to do that. We have lawyers, communicators, we have intelligence and investigation specialists and anybody that we've found through experience is additive in a crisis affecting those three assets, not just a crisis, but also an opportunity. I think people, as people learn how these assets are affected, probably from the experience of others, hopefully, in many cases, they have learned to get ahead of the problem. So this is also an opportunity-based process as well as dealing with problems when they've emerged.

So that's what Schillings does, and our clients, as I say, are either seeking to deal with a problem affecting one of those three assets, reputation, privacy, or security, or they are sophisticated enough perhaps, or maybe experienced enough, to want to plan for those things in advance.

Ralph Grayson: So that really takes us into the heart of what I wanted to talk about in this episode. Whether reputational resilience is still treated and should be treated as a communications issue or whether it's a more fundamental part of good governance.

Tim Robinson: Well, I believe it's the latter but perhaps I would say that, it suits us as a business to make that point. The reason we take a multidisciplinary approach is because most of the dealing with reputation problems in particular, cannot be solved or cannot be prepared for just by deploying one particular discipline.

Long gone are the days where you can spin yourself out of trouble, for example. Or a good comms plan or a good narrative is going to protect your reputation from some of the threats it might face. All of the opportunities, or the opportunity costs apply to that as well. You'll miss things if you take a very singular approach.

Ralph Grayson: How does a board then think about this area holistically? i.e., without just knowing whether it's going to a lawyer or a PR firm? At the board level, how does it think about this as an agenda, board agenda item?

Tim Robinson: Well, perhaps I'll start by saying who is normally in the team that a board would deploy to deal with these problems? Where does the responsibility on a routine basis probably lie for this aspect of governance? The reason I keep talking about reputation, privacy, and security, by the way, together is because in our experience, they tend to be affected by the same circumstances together as a kind of knock-on effect on, from one to the other in many situations.

In most boards would have somebody who would be responsible for that aspect of protecting the business and that could be normally the general counsel, company secretaries, if that's what they're calling them, or head of communications, and these might not necessarily be all board positions. But those are the kind of classic people that we would probably get our first phone call from. I mean, ultimately, in many cases, the CEO is the one, possibly the chairman, but more likely the CEO, who's going to be engaging when they really need to.

Ralph Grayson: And is there any difference as people think about this between the corporate entity, the corporate body, and the individual either employee or board member? Is an individual different from a corporate entity and vice versa?

Tim Robinson: Well, in one respect, which doesn't quite answer your question, but one respect in which individuals are different to the corporate organisations is that well, you get a decision out of an individual quicker than you get one out of a group normally. We're talking here about boards mainly in how they handle the sort of situations that I deal with, but in comparison to a, let's say, privately owned business, a founder-led business, an entrepreneur business, maybe a very large company, but nonetheless, essentially run by one person. They have the ability to deploy resources very quickly, they don't have to ask anybody else, it's their name over the door, and they're going to do whatever it takes to protect their equity.

So that's an easier, probably an easier, conversation than it is where certain processes have to be followed and one of those processes, obviously the one we're often talking about is what goes on within the boardroom and how that board is going to interact with whichever group it delegates to deal with the problem, because I'm assuming in many cases this is not going to be all of the board, all of the time involved, nor should it be.

Ralph Grayson: So when a board is thinking about an individual, either looking at them as a prospective board member or an employee of the organisation, what is the appropriate level of care and interest that they should and can show in that? i.e., is there a balance between doing appropriate due diligence and inappropriate intrusion into somebody's personal privacy?

Tim Robinson: Well, they should take an interest in the privacy of the person they're employing and the more senior the person they're employing in whatever role, the more interest they should take, in my opinion, because somebody else is going to. So a high-profile arrival at a board, a new board member let's assume that it's going to be covered by the media, automatically there's a privacy risk just in that fact alone.

I think it is an element of good leadership to have at least asked yourself how could more focus on them as an individual, how that might compromise their privacy. And that's something which we actually have invented something for, which is a process of, what we would call, privacy exposure auditing. Where you essentially do a kind of a simulation of what a, let's say, an investigative journalist, the approach they would take to look into the background of a high-profile individual who's just arrived on the board. Particularly a big-name hire, someone who's come from another organisation. Someone who has a backstory, they're going to dig, and what are they going to find in the public domain? So we're not talking about confidential information or rummaging in bins, we're talking about they could find it somewhere out there publicly available. Not necessarily easily available, but publicly available.

So that process of finding that information and then presenting it to the subject, done in the correct way, making it clear that it's for their benefit, not something to catch them out or to intrude, and probably privately addressed to them. I mean, I think the best kind of boards I work with actually commission that kind of work, pay for it, and then it goes to the subject and no one else. Because what that is actually saying to them is, "Do you know how easy it is to find out where you live? Do you know how easy it is to find out how much your house is worth? Because we can pretty much guarantee that if there's a controversy, there's going to be a picture, an aerial shot of your big house and some commentary about how much it's worth. So let's just make that less easy to find and either you can do that yourself or you can get someone else to do it."

I would see that as being a direct answer to your question, an exercise of a duty of care rather than something sinister.

Ralph Grayson: I'm always surprised, particularly in the case of NEDs who are being appointed to a PLC, how extensive reference taking is and I always say to first time NEDs in particular, be ready for who you want to offer as a referee, but also think about who else is going to be asked who isn't a formal referee.

How should a prospective director think about their digital footprint, family exposure, historical statements they may have made and how that could be construed as potential vulnerability, if that's the right word to impersonation and coercion if those are going to be two of the nefarious ways in which your clients may be impacted?

Tim Robinson: I think most people now know in business that, certainly if they're in a position to become a board member, they probably know by now that their profile goes back a long way, and their profile isn't what they necessarily want it to be, however it's being curated they are responsible for probably pretty much everything they've said publicly and everything that's available online about them.

So I think that consciousness in itself is an advantage. There's no room for arrogance or complacency. If something is there, then get to it first. Check it, remind yourself what it was and if you can do something about it before someone uses it. Bear in mind a lot of this stuff is actually put there by the person we're talking about. It's on LinkedIn, it's in interviews, or it's in articles or it's in social media commentary, nothing to do with work, maybe it's in WhatsApp groups.

I think just that consciousness is part of it, but then see how that might look in a new context. That's probably the thing that catches people out, is they don't quite understand that the world has changed or maybe the expectations of them have gone up.

Ralph Grayson: And from the other side of the equation, how should boards think about hostile actors, if we can label them, that might try and exploit gaps either between the company, its employees, its board members? Where are the gaps that boards should think about and perhaps ever been surprised that they haven't thought about it?

Tim Robinson: Well, where do these problems come from? The media, obviously. Employees, you've mentioned a couple of times, and ex-employees. Particularly disgruntled ex-employees, if it's a negative story, it might not always be a negative thing. Other people in the sector, competitors who may not be too distressed if you're getting into difficulty. Governments, regulators, let's call them authorities, potential investors, business partners, banks.

I mean, you can kind of create on a side of A4 and quite quickly a little network map of who your stakeholders are. I mean, nothing I've said there would be of any surprise to any board member. But then it's to ask yourself what mitigations do you have in place to deal with a problem which may emerge from one part of that network?

Ralph Grayson: And do you see any patterns emerging or has the nature of those threats changed during your tenure in this role?

Tim Robinson: Well, I've been doing this for 10 years since I left the army, and we've only recently set up our own PR agency, Schillings Communications. So I've interacted with journalists as colleagues. And when I talk to those colleagues, they will say, particularly the ex-journalists amongst them will say that there's a small handful of ingredients that are in almost every story and so being aware of those ingredients, things like, failure of authenticity, saying one thing and doing another obviously is often a feature within a story. So being conscious of the things which are probably going to be of interest to the media.

Ralph Grayson: I'm just wondering whether there's a hierarchy that a board should worry about, whether it's online criticism, legitimate whistleblowing, a journalist, misinformation more generally, or something that's more nefarious as a coordinated smear campaign or even extortion. Is there a point at which this becomes a board level issue?

Tim Robinson: No, I think it's a board level issue if it presents a threat to the value of the business and to the reputation of the business. Certainly at the point at which the board's doing nothing else but managing this problem and it's not really running the business anymore.

The hierarchy is an interesting question because some of the kind of more routine, not at all nefarious reasons why there's a problem could actually cause a serious problem. So, it's not a nefarious thing that the media wants to report on your company and wants to make inquiries. It's not nefarious that the employees might get upset about something that's going on within the company. But those are the sorts of things that are most likely to cause a problem, which could really focus the board's mind.

There are truly nefarious reasons why reputation comes under attack and those are coordinated smear campaigns. Sometimes they're even campaigns organised by competitors or by people who want to diminish value in a business for their own reasons. But I think it's a mistake in a way to plan for those, because they are, by definition, rare. You certainly wouldn't want to fail to recognise that was what was happening. But you wouldn't want to plan for those extreme examples of coordinated smear campaigns at the expense of keeping your eye on all the routine stuff that actually is going to be more likely to cause a problem.

Ralph Grayson: And how does the board think about fact versus fiction? And should it need to in that respect, i.e., in the world of AI impersonation, Trumpian dystopia or fake news? Is the board or is it the executive's first responsibility to identify whether it's fact or fiction or does that not matter when the balloon goes up?

Tim Robinson: The single most important thing I can contribute to your listeners if I said only one thing would be that the most important commodity in this world of reputation, protection, and enhancement, is facts. Facts are the commodity which will win the day. The only thing you can really do is out fact the other side in whatever problem you're dealing with.

Having possession of the facts and being really confident in them and having the evidence to support the facts, knowing the facts, having them prepared, having the evidence is the way to work through a problem generally.

Ralph Grayson: So how do you advise clients to plan for that? You can try and get in front of the story, but how long do you spend getting the facts before you have to react and say something?

Tim Robinson: Well, again, there's a self-interest health warning here. I think this is the core part of what I do is actually ascertain the facts. I would say, I'll have to say ideally, but I'd like to say essentially well before you actually need to deploy them.

What we're really talking about is a, sort of rebuttal process in legal language. So, a board that really knows its business should be able to work out what a Financial Times or a Bloomberg story would say about them. Just think on a rainy afternoon of all the stories that could be written in a publication like that, very respected, widely read, very influential. What's the story? Write the story down, include all the negative stuff that would have come out through a process of alleging certain things about the business, and then have a rebuttal point, have a fact to deploy. You said that we were doing this, we're not, and here's the evidence. The earlier that is done then the more likely it is to be a robust rebuttal, a robust fact and the less time you're going to waste when you really haven't got it, when you've got 24 hours to comment by just that element of preparedness that you start at the beginning.

Ralph Grayson: So that reputational risk then, what you're implying to me, if I'm hearing you correctly is reputational risk is a formal part of the risk register that is a formal part of the board agenda.

Tim Robinson: Yes, temperamentally, I'm not overly excited by kind of you know, long documents with lists of things and colours next to them and comments and so on.

Ralph Grayson: But how do you know when you're crisis ready? You may think you're crisis ready.

Tim Robinson: Yeah. Well, I'm not diminishing the value of writing things down, but I just think I've seen reputational risk as number one or two on a board's register as many times as I've seen crises then hit those boards and companies. They're more likely to spend time on cybersecurity or even health and safety, even fire safety in their building, than they are on actually doing anything about protecting a reputation in advance, in some cases. Because it's a little bit, well, it is very intangible. It's a bit abstract. No one's going to come in and inspect you and close you down if you haven't got a certificate for the reputation line in your register.

It always gets put high and it always gets listed , and the impacts of it going horribly wrong are always red. Put it on the register of course, but do something with that. Something practical, something probably involving a rehearsal, having an understanding about who your task team is because the board doesn't want to be grouping around.

Ralph Grayson: And by task team, that's internal and external?

Tim Robinson: Could be both. It definitely needs to be internal. I'm talking about a delegated model where the board is giving a small team of empowered people, let's just say for sake of argument, the CEO, the in-house senior lawyer, and the comms person, a group of people reporting directly to the board and they employ external advisors if they need them. And having that ready to go and probably rehearsing with that team some sort of simulation is probably as much as you can do, but also this business of having your facts in a row for the stories you can anticipate. And maybe some you can't, get someone else to suggest stories that you haven't thought of and then assemble the facts for those as well.

That's preparedness in my mind. From that, then at least you've got the communicator can go off and write their reactive statements or you can start thinking about how you're going to brief your shareholders and stakeholders. Because that's another aspect we haven't spoken about yet, but it's, while you're dealing with what is right in front of you, the media headlines or the social media, cancel culture and all of that, people boycotting your products. You've also got some people who are interested in asking you questions and saying, "Tell me what's going on. What's happening to my investment? What's happening to the company that I'm regulating?" and so on. So again, you need to be answering those questions very quickly, and that requires preparedness.

Ralph Grayson: So what I'm hearing here is no matter how well you think you've prepared, a bit like a cyber attack. It's going to happen. It's what you do when it happens. I guess BP will be a current example. I hope it's not a client of yours, just so I can't comment if it is. They've had both CEO and chair succession issues. I guess one of the practical issues if I'm a board member is thinking, okay, if my CEO is implicated or my chair is implicated, yes, that's what we're telling the outside world, but how's the internal governance going to react to that of who takes the tiller?

Tim Robinson: Well again, imagine the stories that could be written, and it's not difficult to imagine a story that is about a CEO having to step down. That's not a black swan event. So, imagine the story would be written and as much as you can, prepare to handle that story. I use the term story to, not just to imply the media, but the narrative that the people are telling themselves about your business.

Everything I've said, by the way, Ralph, you could just completely ignore, and you could just wait until it happens and deal with it and some companies are extremely good at navigating a crisis, and maybe that's their best day. But it's not what I would advise for most.

Ralph Grayson: Well, and that's back to where we came in, right? Which is how do you simulate good leadership amongst the team? But it's difficult. It's a bit like a board appraisal. Internal board appraisals, everybody says everybody's great. And people say, "Yeah, we've done the appraisal and aren't we super?" But then you do an external appraisal and all of a sudden you find out, who's swimming naked to use that analogy. So my guess from what you're saying is actually having somebody who's been in battle and seen the scenarios, they're the best players to be advising this might happen. How often should you gameplay this?

Tim Robinson: Well, how often should a board gameplay it? I'm sure it'll be dictated by the experience of the people around the table. Because actually when I started doing this 10 years ago, probably there were more people who hadn't had experience of a reputation, a corporate reputation crisis.

However let's assume there is a common definition in most people's minds. Maybe not so many people had been through the mill but more have now, maybe they did at the last place they were at, and now they're importing that experience. So I think it's set the amount of effort people put into this is probably heavily influenced by that.

I do think that it's better to invest the time and the money. Of course, the other thing about corporate environments, it can be sometimes hard to work out, not that they don't have the money, they have the resources, but they might not have the systems in place or there might be ownership of the resources or budgets to argue about which can very quickly inhibit doing something about this in advance.

Ralph Grayson: I'm going to try and bring this to life and I'm going to put you on the spot and you're going to kick me under the table because we haven't rehearsed this. So seven o'clock in the morning.

Tim Robinson: I don't think we rehearsed anything, have we?

Ralph Grayson: The chair is told that sensitive information has been stolen. A journalist is asking detailed questions. Social media is doing its usual stuff. So there's allegations about the CEO. Employees are now sharing screenshots. The board doesn't know whether the material is authentic, AI altered, incomplete, not true at all. What happens in the first hour apart from they ring Tim? What shouldn't happen and what should happen?

Tim Robinson: Well, it shouldn't happen, I suppose, don't panic and don't start firing out kind of knee-jerk reactions. I mean, if I've understood you correctly, at the moment, we're dealing with a media inquiry. That's the only thing we know. Everything else needs to be checked. Perhaps we're aware of employees looking at screenshots, as you said, but we've got to ascertain what is actually happening and what isn't and not overreact or react too quickly and make early mistakes in that sort of initial period.

Ralph Grayson: So who takes ownership of that? Should there be an internal crisis team kind of SWAT team amongst the Excom or the board that if scenario A happens, these are the first people who are briefed, this is the subgroup that takes ownership of it?

Tim Robinson: It's very hard to have a situation where you have a flow diagram for who does what depending on what the fact pattern is, and in each case. That could be quite complicated and chances are it wouldn't survive contact with a real situation.

But I mean, there is obviously some variables because if, for example, the problem involved the CEO, then I guess the chair would be playing a different role than if the issue is entirely unrelated to anyone around the board table. So I think the most efficient ways are the ones that are simplest and can be easily repeated and "Oh yeah, I remember we did that last time."

Ralph Grayson: To that comms point, is the internal comms as important as the external comms? Does it matter? Should employees be reading the press statements or is it important you brief your employees separately, earlier, later?

Tim Robinson: Well, if they're reading stuff and, clicking it voraciously, they're probably increasing its profile. So there's, for purely practical reasons, you want to communicate and get people to not do certain things in the early days, otherwise you're just sort of making things worse unintentionally.

I can't honestly say that internal and external one is more important than the other, you just got to do them both. Most people are acutely conscious, maybe overly conscious of talking inside. But talking inside isn't necessarily going to solve the problem but it's going to reassure people.

Ralph Grayson: And is being seen to be independent important there? i.e., one reads in the press a lot, particularly if there's a chair or the CEO involved. Or we've asked an eminent KC to come in or we're getting a law firm to come in and look at it. Is that after the dust is settled or where does that independence and that transparency fit in your hierarchy of recommendations?

Tim Robinson: Well, inquiries are an interesting thing. Internal inquiry is an interesting thing because they become almost a default setting. It depends on the circumstances, but if the story that you're managing if there's a fair criticism to make, or if there's something that needs checking out, then it's probably prudent to have some sort of inquiry.

There is a downside, obviously, as soon as you start mentioning internal inquiries, it kind of solidifies, gives another kind of hook for the story, kind of solidifies the sense that something's gone wrong, otherwise, why would they be having an inquiry? But nonetheless, going back to my point about facts, the most important thing I'm really saying today, actually ascertaining those facts is essential.

Ralph Grayson: And where does trust and judgement come into that independence? So how would you advise a board if one of the board members has been accused of something, your natural human behaviour is to close ranks and protect one of your own. How do you advise a board member to separate themselves from that brand loyalty or that individual loyalty?

Tim Robinson: It's interesting that you say that the instinct is to protect your own. It's quite striking in these crises how quickly people are moved out, suspended, forced to step down. The idea of innocent until proven guilty kind of slightly gets, well, not slightly, very much gets compromised when an organisation rightly has to protect itself and even the individual recognises that maybe it's better that they're not the focus of attention for a while.

No doubt some organisations will stick with someone no matter what happens, but I think it's much more likely that those that have the kind of boards we're talking about are going to try and cauterise the problem early and then there's a big question about is there a way back even once their facts have been ascertained? So it all depends on the situation and what the allegations are, how much they're tagged to an individual. There's obviously a big difference between the whole story being about one person's conduct and the whole story being about a failure in the business, maybe a supply chain failure for which the same person was responsible, but it's one removed from them. It's not really about them and so that personal nature of one's allegation versus another, I think is also material.

Ralph Grayson: So let's just try and conclude all of this then with kind of the one sentence bullet then. So resilient reputation is best built by...

Tim Robinson: Preparedness and out-facting the other side in your argument.

Ralph Grayson: Tim, what I take from this conversation is that reputational resilience is not the art of making difficulty disappear it's much more the product of preparation, sound and good information, clear authority, principled judgement, I use that expression but most of all, discipline or disciplined action.

So for boards, the test comes before, during, and after the event, whether they've understood their exposure, whether they can establish facts and make decisions at speed without abandoning fairness, whether they communicate with humility, humanity even, and precision, and whether they learn from the immediate pressure once it's subsided.

So that's why reputation and privacy now belong, to my mind, at the centre of governance. They concern trust, control, culture, continuity, and ultimately the legitimacy of the organisation and those who lead it.

So, Tim, thank you so much for joining me on The Boardroom Path.

Tim Robinson: Thank you, Ralph.

Ralph Grayson: I hope that you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and have found it helpful when thinking about how to approach your own path to the boardroom. If you would like to push this a little bit further, Sainty Hird runs a bespoke one-to-one programme designed specifically to this end. For more information, please visit our website saintyhird.com, follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the Boardroom Path to receive new episodes. Thank you for listening.