There’s an adage for all responses: Incidents never happen at headquarters, and they never happen during work hours.
This is patently not accurate, but it is prevalent. Your entire operation may be located next to, even around your headquarters facility, or you may hold several far flung facilities. Your operations may run nine-to-five, or around the clock. And while classic ‘property damage incidents’ are what we most prepare for, today’s fast moving ‘issue incidents’ can escalate a virtually non-physical issue into a reputation-challenging incident.
It’s still good to plan for the unexpected, to happen off-hours and in a remote location. We need to be ready to land in a strange location, at an odd hour and with nothing familiar around us. And we’re supposed to communicate effectively at that instant, and plan an ongoing communication response that reflects WHAT happened, WHERE it happened and WHO it happened to. How do we to this?
Here are three questions to start with:
What has happened?
How bad CAN it be?
Who is my local expert?
We’ll look at each of these to see how they help us prepare, plan and publish effective communication products.
What has happened?
This is the ‘facts’ question: As nearly as responders can tell, what has happened? Sounds simple, but it isn’t. This simple question can quickly lead to complicated answers, particularly with responders.We need to be clear as to what we need to know. Our question is really a minimalist query to responders. Responders are trying to figure out exactly what happened, why it happened, what the likely outcomes are, how long it will last, if the incident location can be accessed, if it is safe for responders to be nearby; a plethora of questions and concerns. Communicators need a simpler, publicly consumable version; assume that everyone can see the event, and now explain what they are seeing. Is it a fire, an explosion, an accident? Is it still releasing product? What observable physical actions are being taken?
Note that this does NOT include cause of the event. ‘Cause’ won’t be known for some time, until an investigation is completed. We need to leave ’cause’ out of our event descriptions. Any explanation of cause is speculative and uses up words that are needed for a better definition of what actually happened.
It also doesn’t need to be long, in fact the shorter the better. This is only our first exposure to the event; much more information will come. We need to get information from responders that helps us quickly, simply and effectively communicate what happened. Here’s an example: “We’ve experienced a fire in our tank farm that is currently involving three tanks. We’ve dispatched early responders who are determining the safest way to battle the fire. We’re aware of air safety concerns and are setting up air monitoring systems to keep our responders and the public safe.”
How bad can it be?
Here you want to know the worst case scenario. Remember that Facility Response Plans, Emergency Action Plans (or whatever they’re called) always include a worst-case scenario. Regulators want to know what you’ll do on the worst day, not the best day. Every responder can provide you with a worst-case evaluation.
Why worst case? Can’t we trust our responders to get control of the situation before it gets worse? Unfortunately not. Until the incident is fully contained, basically over, we need to assume it will get worse. This is particularly important to us communicators, as we usually hope for the best outcome. Our job is to make things better, to make people happier, to help people keep perspective so they won’t be too mad at us. We’re the clown in ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ always hopeful that everything will work out. We need to be more pessimistic. We need to firmly understand how bad it could be. We need to root and ground our stakeholders with effective expectation management.
What is worse than a bad event? An event that keeps getting worse.
We need to be careful we don’t fall into the trap of minimizing an event or its impact. There’s no better news than that something isn’t a bad as we thought. There’s nothing worse than a steady drip of bad, ever-worse news. Use worst-case until you KNOW it isn’t.
Remember too that we don’t have to wait for an incident to review what the worst-case outcome is; it’s already in our organizations’ response plans. As communicators, we need to be reading these bedtime horror stories now, when they aren’t really happening. We need to identify any instance where ‘worst-case’ is actually too bad to survive. Remember that responders rate impact and survivability on a physical scale, where communicators see a virtual scale of impact, including reputation and right-to-operate. If we do see something in our FRPs that will likely result in irreparable public harm, we need to flag it and strongly suggest that our responders come up with strategies to provide a ‘better-worst case’ outcome.
Who is my local expert?
We each need to accept the fact that there is a high probability we’ll be called on to provide fast, effective and sensitive information to people we don’t know. In many responses, the most affected public may be completely new to us. We don’t know their history with our facility, we don’t know their most cherished values, we don’t know their greatest concerns and we don’t know who we should talk to first, or most.
Every community has its own influence chart. Who has the power to make change happen? Who spreads the word around town? Who casts the community’s attitude? Who creates conflict, and who mitigates it? Coming from the outside, we might be able to quickly identify local media and we might be able to find out who the elected people are. We might even look at our FRP/EAPs and find out who our fence-line neighbors are or who is notified locally. But we don’t know the relational warp and woof of the community. So we plan and communicate at our peril.
Our first assignment is to develop trust with the most affected stakeholders, always the local population. Who works at the facility? Who delivers products? Who caters food? Who lives downstream? How has our facility interacted with the community before? Do they trust outsiders? What is their relationship with State or regional agencies? We need to recognize that we simply don’t know this, yet it is the most important information we can have.
What do we do?
First, don’t over-assume your ability to read a community! In times of crisis, we have only one chance at most to make a good impression. We simply need to do it right.
Second, find the person or people who truly know their community. Good news! They are likely to already be in the room, or available to join us. Look for the Local Expert, who is usually working with the Local On-Scene Coordinator, the ranking local Agency in the response. Find this person, bring them into the communication sphere and pick their brain. They know the locals, so we need to ask them to help us communicate effectively.
Why should they want to help us? They may wonder about this. We need to remind them that their reputation is riding on the effectiveness of response communication as much or more as on the response itself. The truth is that most physical responses go well: Responders work together effectively, fires get stopped, product stops leaking and everything is pretty well cleaned up. Unfortunately, a successful response isn’t the same as a successful recovery; recovery is complete when everyone trusts each other again. Poor response communication can break this trust apart, sometimes permanently. And our local person is the one at risk. For their own career and for their own day-to-day relationships, they need to help us communicate well.
Assume for a moment that we’re responding to an event away from our day-to-day location. We will parachute in, provide effective strategy and product, then go home when the rest of the response team goes home. We’ll go back to where we live, where nobody know what we do or who we work for. Local response people stay in town, where the incident occurred, wearing the same name-tags and holding the same positions. The most affected people know where they live.
Finding these resources, recruiting them and persuading them to help us communicate effectively and using their counsel and advice to meet the greatest needs of the closest stakeholders will also help them the most. It just happens to help us too. Our goal is acceptance and trust. Then we can go back to business. Their best outcome is the same.
A note on employment security: It isn’t greater in the public sector than in the private sector. Look at past incidents and see who ends up losing their jobs afterward. As many agency or government employees end up pillaged publicly as any private citizens do. In the court of public opinion a public employee is much more vulnerable. This is a case where our relationship with local experts is truly symbiotic. They need us as much as we need them. Find them, support them, use them and protect them.
To summarize:
What happened? Develop the best capsule summary of what happened, one that people looking over the fence line can understand, and relate to what they’re seeing.
How bad CAN it be? Assume worst-case, know worst case and build your stakeholder concern map from it. Don’t succumb to wishful thinking and above all, don’t get caught having to explain why things are getting worse!
Who’s my local expert? Find and utilize the people who know the affected Community the best. Help them help you, and protect their reputation along the way.
Questions? Did you see ideas in this post that you’ve never heard of before? Contact me!
Comments? Leave them below.