Why small comms teams are shaping the future of crisis response

People often imagine crisis comms as war rooms filled with glowing screens, phones lighting up, platoons of press officers working late into the night. The reality, for most organisations, couldn’t be further from that.

In Britain, more than half of communications professionals work in teams of five or fewer, according to CIPR’s State of the Profession report. Despite this being the norm rather than the exception, the training, the case studies, the manuals we turn to in a crisis still assume scale, that the cavalry is waiting outside the door.

But there is no cavalry. More often, it’s three people around a table with lukewarm coffee, expected to carry the weight of a crisis that could define the future of an organisation.

For too long, we’ve equated size with strength. Big agencies and sprawling press offices have been held up as the gold standard, yet smaller teams often perform better under pressure.

There was a time when crisis comms was about keeping people at arm’s length, tightly written lines, formal press briefings, and the illusion of control. That doesn’t work anymore. Audiences are ruthless at spotting spin, and they crave something different: words that sound like they were written by a human being, not a machine. They want honesty, vulnerability, even imperfection, because those are the things that feel real today.

Small team advantage

In that space, small teams have the advantage. Closer to their organisation’s voice and closer to the people it serves, their responses resonate more deeply. That proximity to the beating heart of an organisation makes their messaging sharper and more authentic.

Of course, smallness comes at a price. When a crisis runs for weeks, there are no spares to step in. Burnout is the shadow that stalks every late-night call and early-morning media round. Nine in 10 comms professionals reported poor mental health last year, with workload the leading trigger. In crisis mode, that risk multiplies.

Leaders often miss this. They expect the output of a 30-strong department from a team that could fit in a lift. It’s not sustainable. And it only underlines the urgent need for boards and executives to understand what their comms teams look like in reality, not in theory.

What I’ve seen, time and again, is that small teams develop a different kind of resilience. Not through endless capacity, but through connection. They know the communities they serve. They know the culture of their organisation.

That intimacy makes them more effective in high-stakes moments than bigger, more distanced units. And increasingly, the profession is recognising this. Awards and professional spotlights are beginning to celebrate the agility of small teams, rather than only the scale of corporate giants. That matters, not as a mere morale boost, but as a sign that the industry is rethinking its assumptions.

Frontline comms

The crises of the next decade won’t wait for a big press office to assemble. They’ll break suddenly: a cyber-attack, a climate shock, a safeguarding scandal, a reputational storm that begins on TikTok before the press has even arrived. And they will land, uninvited, in the inboxes of small teams.

That’s why we should stop treating small comms teams as a compromise. They are already the frontline, and they may well define what the future of crisis response looks like: faster, sharper, more human.

Small comms teams are not the understudies of our profession; they are already centre stage. In a world where clarity is prized over choreography, their speed, intimacy and authenticity may not just be enough, but could be exactly what the future demands.

Daniel Coole is a head of communications leading campaigns of national significance across heritage, culture and crisis response. A passionate advocate for the power of small teams, he writes on the future of communications and the leadership needed to build more agile, human and trusted organisations.