New Phillips Group research
The warning patterns and underlying drivers behind reputation failure

Reputation crises rarely begin with the event that makes them public. Phillips Group reviewed 30 major reputation crises across Australia and internationally. In many cases, warning signs were already evident in complaints, incidents, audit findings, employee concerns, and regulatory feedback. The failure was not simply a lack of information. It was an inability to connect separate issues and recognise the emerging reputation risk they collectively revealed.

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The crisis is only the visible layer

A cyberattack, regulatory action, governance failure, misconduct allegation or operational incident is the point at which reputation risk becomes visible. The conditions that create it often develop much earlier.

The research identifies three connected layers that boards and executives need to understand:

Pyramid_5 The Crisis The Warning Patterns The Underlying Drivers
What the analysis revealed

The information was often already there

Complaints, audit findings, employee concerns, operational incidents, and regulatory feedback frequently served as warning signs. The failure was in connecting those signs, understanding what they collectively indicated and acting before the risk escalated.

The strongest pattern was a failure to recognise systemic risk

Emerging risks not recognised as systemic recorded the highest cumulative score across the 30 cases. Organisations often managed individual issues without recognising the broader organisational risk developing across them.

Reputation resilience is an organisational capability

The warning patterns were sustained by deeper conditions involving leadership, governance, culture, accountability, incentives, information flows and risk systems. Addressing the public event does not necessarily address the conditions that allowed it to develop.

The warning patterns identified before the crisis

Across sectors, geographies and crisis types, five warning patterns appeared repeatedly:

Concerns and information existed but failed to reach the people who could act with sufficient clarity, context and urgency.

Organisational behaviour no longer reflected public commitments when commercial, operational or leadership pressures intensified.

Responsibility was dispersed across functions, business units or partners, leaving no one with visibility of the complete reputation exposure.

Decisions that appeared reasonable in isolation ultimately undermined confidence in the organisation’s judgement, integrity and leadership.

Individual issues were known and managed separately without recognising what they collectively revealed about a broader organisational risk.

The patterns do not establish that a crisis will occur. They provide a way for leaders to examine whether separate warning signs reveal a broader exposure that requires attention.

Inside the report
The three-layer framework

A practical way to distinguish the visible crisis, the warning patterns that emerge beforehand and the underlying drivers that allow them to persist.

Analysis of 30 reputation crises

Australian and international cases spanning governance, conduct, cyber, safety, regulatory, workplace and stakeholder trust failures.

Five recurring warning patterns

Case examples showing how similar organisational failures developed across very different crises.

Questions for boards and executives

Prompts to test whether warning signs are being connected, escalated and interpreted before they become strategic risks.

Phillips Group reviewed 30 major reputation crises across Australia and internationally. Cases were selected to provide diversity across sectors, geographies and crisis types, and because sufficient public information was available to examine events before the crisis became visible.

Sources included court judgments, regulatory findings, public inquiries, company disclosures and credible media reporting. Each case was assessed against the five pattern definitions developed through the review. A score of 0 indicated no clear publicly available evidence, 1 indicated some evidence and 2 indicated strong evidence.

The scores represent Phillips Group’s qualitative assessment of the strength of publicly available evidence for each warning pattern in the cases reviewed. They do not measure crisis severity, establish causation or predict future crises, and do not constitute independent findings of fact, wrongdoing or legal liability.

About the research lead

Andrew Buckley led Phillips Group’s analysis of 30 major reputation crises and developed the warning-pattern framework presented in Before the Crisis. As Group Executive Director Corporate, he leads the agency’s corporate practice, specialising in reputation management, issues management and crisis communication. With more than two decades of experience and national and international industry recognition, Andrew advises boards and executive teams on reputation risk and has guided organisations through high-profile legal matters, regulatory change, parliamentary inquiries and intense media scrutiny.

Research report

Before the Crisis Report

Read the full analysis of the warning patterns and underlying drivers identified across 30 major reputation crises.
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See the risk before it becomes a crisis

Phillips Group helps boards and executive teams identify emerging reputation risks and strengthen the leadership, governance and organisational awareness needed to protect stakeholder trust.

If this research raises questions about how warning signs travel through your organisation, who owns the cumulative exposure or where deeper vulnerabilities may be developing, we can arrange a private conversation with Andrew Buckley or another senior adviser.

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