Reputations are built in bad times as well as good. In a crisis, speed and decisiveness are crucial. But you learn stuff by breaking it and opportunity is often never far behind, which is why a good crisis can be worth its weight and should never be squandered.

In 2010 no one knew this better than Telecom CEO Dr Paul Reynolds and his whip-sharp comms team.

There was much at stake.

It was bad enough the shiny new XT Network had gone on the fritz more than once, what was really causing concern was the outages coincided with Telecom’s bid to build the Government’s multi-billion dollar fibre network. Customers had lost all confidence and Telecom quickly needed to restore the faith.

Not the least of Telecom’s problems was the media, who loved to give them a good kicking, and every move was made under the brightest of spotlights.

So yeah, a right old cluster-shambles.

We got the call to help document their response and craft an apology message, just a small part of their crisis management plan.

Before the work can begin, it’s customary to have a meeting. The object of this meeting is usually to get another meeting on the books, called a presentation. If the presentation goes well, things are very nearly underway and you can now start work.

In a crisis, the rules change a bit. Often the first casualty is a meeting. Two meetings if luck is really with you.

I’ve always liked presentations though. They can be nerve-wracking, but it’s theatre, and there’s no shame in being a bit of a show pony now and then. Who doesn’t like a show?

I was once part of a new business pitch led by the late David ‘Devo’ Walden. Devo introduced me to a game that they’d played at The Palace. I forget the name, but the rules were you each wrote a word - something quite out of context - on a piece of paper and then swapped it with another team member.

The objective was to gently slip the word you were given into your part of the presso without anyone noticing. I’m sure you could read a lot more into it if you had the time, but the main purpose of the game was to take your mind off the pitch and relax you.

I’d given Devo ‘supercalifragilistic’ which I smugly thought too clever by half. He managed to ease it elegantly and undetected into his opening remarks, just to put me back in my box and show me how the grown-ups played.

But not before he’d handed me my challenge, a slip of paper upon which he’d written not one word but several: ‘Interesting when you consider the rise of the oligarchy today.’

We didn’t get the business.

Humour is a great way to diffuse a situation and put things in perspective, but I still wasn’t looking forward to the presentation with Dr Reynolds and his artful strategic comms chief, given that the guts of my advice was: ‘laugh at yourself.’

Lishy had written a lovely gag we’d originally intended for Chorus, but we managed to put it to much better use on the river mouth of the Greenstone. Always a win when an idea finds a home.

You can tell a lot about people by how they behave under pressure. It can be as revealing as how someone treats hospo staff. The ad was approved in the room. I concluded these two would make excellent diners indeed.

The network kicked back into life. The tide was coming back in, and taking all the flak with grace and good humour - something the good doctor did deftly - sure didn’t hurt a bit.

The crisis wasn’t averted, but it sure wasn’t wasted either.