How do you create a reputation crisis response plan before a crisis happens?

A useful crisis plan is twenty pages, not a hundred. It identifies the four to eight scenarios most likely to affect the brand based on its industry, executive footprint, and recent history. For each, it specifies named owners (the person on point), decision authorities (who can speak for the company), draft statements approved by counsel, FAQ pages on the relevant topics, monitoring queries pre-loaded in IMPACT and AIQ ready to activate, and explicit SLAs for response speed by tier. It is reviewed twice a year with the senior team, with at least one of those reviews exercised against a realistic scenario so the muscle is current. Plans that get written once and then live on a SharePoint folder do not work; plans that get exercised twice a year and updated every time something changes do.