Crisis as a Story: Colonel Thomas on Communication, Trust, and Control

When Colonel John J. Thomas, a 1988 and ‘91 UVA alum, returned to speak at Batten, the conversation wasn’t about strategy or spin, but people. The retired U.S. Air Force officer, who spent decades leading communication efforts in war zones and disaster responses, wanted students to understand one thing: Crises are human before they are operational. 

Introduced by his daughter, Anna Thomas (MPP ’25), the former Air Force spokesperson and current deputy director of public affairs for the National Guard shared how lessons from his career, spanning Afghanistan, the Pentagon, and post-Katrina Louisiana, taught him that communication can make or break trust in a crisis.  

For Thomas, that realization reshaped how he sees leadership itself. Crises, he told the audience, are not just moments to manage; they are moments to connect. 

Defining the crisis 

Thomas dismantled the notion that a leader controls what qualifies as a crisis. “It’s not your choice a lot of times what a crisis is. It’s what other people prescribe it to be,” he explained. The key, he argued, is learning who your audience is and understanding how they perceive risk and trust. 

Crises, he said, are emotional before they are logistical. “Crises are fundamentally emotional and human,” Thomas emphasized. The structure includes a beginning, a climax, and hopefully, an end. When mishandled, that final act may never come. 

Thomas reflected on what happens when leaders lose control of the narrative. After Hurricane Katrina, he said, public frustration grew because “no one looked like they were in control.” The turning point came only when officials began to communicate clear, actionable plans. Once leadership came together with an action plan, day-to-day, people stopped fighting, he recalled. 

Control, competence, and concern 

At the heart of Thomas’s framework are three principles: control, competence, and concern. He tied them back to his studies in rhetoric at UVA, connecting them to Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos. 

Control, he explained, means projecting calm even when circumstances are uncertain. Competence is about demonstrating that you can act, that there’s a plan in motion. Concern reflects empathy, the acknowledgment that people are affected by a crisis situation and deserve honesty. “You have to take accountability and find something to apologize for,” he said. “You share their concern.” 

Crisis leadership, he added, doesn’t mean pretending risk doesn’t exist. It means naming it. “There’s a risk factor, here’s how we’re mitigating that risk factor,” he said. “The public wants someone in charge. That person must assume that risk.” 

Ethics and accessibility 

For Thomas, effective crisis communication isn’t about spin—it’s about ethics and accessibility. “You have to do the right thing,” he said, “but you have to tell people.” Transparency, he argued, builds trust, especially when information is limited. 

That means experts must be willing to meet the public where they are. “Experts have to take the time to humble themselves and bring themselves down to the public’s knowledge,” he urged. Simplifying complex information isn’t dumbing it down—it’s leadership. 

Finding opportunity in uncertainty 

Thomas also reminded the audience that crises can become opportunities. Borrowing a Winston Churchill quote, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” he reframed the idea with optimism. “You can choose to see it as an inflection point,” he said, “an opportunity to tell your story.” 

For him, narrative is power. “A crisis is an inflection point in a story,” he explained. “You can be the person who describes that narrative, and that narrative has to be forward-looking.” The goal isn’t to revisit the past, he warned, but to define the path forward. “You can’t do anything about what happened. Focus on what you do next.” 

History and humanity 

Thomas drew reassurance from perspective. Echoing sentiment from another famous quote, “Everything is unprecedented if you don’t read history,” he followed it with another reminder: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” These lessons, he noted, can steady leaders in moments of chaos.