Imagine that you’re a major manufacturer of an ubiquitous product used globally. You have an incredible safety record in your facilities and your product itself is safer than sleeping in your own bed. On top of your safety record you’ve developed an incredible crisis communication culture that supports not only your own operations but the operations of all your customers. You rightly recognize that one customer’s crisis affects all your customers and that the effects can ripple back to you.
You’ve crafted response communication plans that address every possible incident. You aggressively monitor minor incidents and related issues to be sure your brand is protected. You’re successful every day and highly regarded in your industry and across all industries. Communications alumni leave your company and extend their success and value wherever they go.
What makes you so good?
- A clear focus on the big picture: Retaining public trust in your product and its users. You know that an incident with one customer impacts all customers as well as the industry your company thrives in.
- Solid and comprehensive planning: You utilize high-performing, experienced individuals to build your plans and processes, and you aggressively incorporate new communication methods. You embraced social media before other companies knew what a post or a tweet was. Your plans are built around exhaustive analysis of previous industry incidents and subsequent media scrutiny and public reactions.
- Practice: Your team regularly engages in exercises and scenario reviews to be sure they’ll be able to respond in accordance with plans and strategies.
- Depth and experience: While major incidents in your industry are rare, you keep people around who have responded before. Your cadre of communicators includes veterans ‘who smell like smoke,’ mid-career experts who are on top of their game and new hires who bring greater awareness of the most current changes of today’s instant news world.
A formidable lineup, well versed in using excellent plans built with a clear focus on the most important things. What can go wrong? You’re locked and loaded!
The unthinkable happens; an incident involving your product.
People are killed. The industry using your products recoils, as do their customers. And your team swings into action, with both physical response plans and response communication plans. You follow the process, use the plan and the people. And it begins working. Your customers, and their customers, settle down, willing to wait for final investigation results (there are always investigations). This does not minimize the accident and the loss of life; your company and your communicators feel the horror and loss as much as anyone else. But the world seems to understand and accept the work that is being done and the actions that are being taken. Your response communication efforts aren’t finished, they’ve only begun, and you know this. But everyone in the company is hunkered down, working through a terrible incident. Is it possible that there is light at the end of the tunnel?
The unthinkable happens, again.
Another incident, more fatalities, another even larger industry and consumer recoil. What do you do now? Your physical responders are already engaged in the first incident. Your communicators are already deployed as well. Your team has been tightly focused on an effective initial response, you’re locked in. Now you have an even greater challenge: This time, you’re not starting from zero, you’re having to change direction when you’re already going full speed ahead.
You’re out of luck.
One vanishingly rare accident is a challenge to our capability; a second one simply overwhelms it. Our effective response to one accident often actually reduces response capacity for the second. Our singular focus on the first accident makes it much harder to pivot to the second. Even if we manage a quick pivot, we pivot to the wrong point. We’re tired, stretched, overwhelmed, outnumbered… and we’re fighting the wrong battle. Why?
We plan and prepare for single incidents, since probability suggests that even one major incident is extremely unlikely. Good planning advice encourages us to be most prepared for the most likely possibilities. So our planning reflects this, and the tools we use to define strategies do as well. We become adept at developing single-event message maps. Our communication response plan reflect our operational response plans. All good, until the unthinkable happens.
With a recurrence of an accident, physical response activity often replicates itself. There are only so many ways to fight a fire, stop a spill, conduct an investigation. But the communication challenge escalates exponentially. Recurring events lead to entirely new issues. Stakeholder concerns escalate and change. Concerns about safety expand to become concerns about safety culture. Concerns about investigation results turn into speculation of cover up. Measured reactions to maintain industry and consumer calm become evidence of callousness or arrogance. And our carefully prepared communication plans and products suddenly make us look flat-footed, incompetent, dishonest. Our previously effective strategies suddenly miss their moving target and our misplaced activities seem to move us in the wrong direction.
There are two levels of this malaise, physical response actions and response communication actions. Both depend on an agile communication strategy.
Physical response plans and strategies
Physical responders are trained to perform certain actions to minimize and mitigate an accident. These actions seldom change. Corporate decisions often reflect operational decisions; do what is working, keep doing it, do more of it. These decisions reflect a focus on the existing incident response strategy. If A happens, do B. If C happens, do D. But responders often aren’t prepared for both A and C to happen at the same time, nor for A and C to be entwined.
Repeating events always escalate stakeholder concerns. Communicators know this. As a communicator, make sure corporate leadership understand this. There must be an equal escalation in response plans and strategies: No halfway steps, no delays. If your product has failed, stop distributing it. If you were considering a recall, conduct it. If you have expressed regret and commitment, double it. If you’re participating in an investigation, throw it open. At the highest level, corporate officials must understand that double incidents entwined by circumstances threaten the survival of the product or operations if not the company itself.
Stop and refocus
Stop what you’re doing. Pull up from the response grindstone and consider the new implications of the new incident. Stop and refocus. Every action you continue from the initial response is wasted time and energy until you’ve developed a new Plan that addresses your new, much more dangerous communication environment.
Repeating events always escalate stakeholder concerns. Communicators know this. Stakeholders multiply along with their concerns. Issues escalate or are replaced by new, deeper ones. Refocus your resources. Integrate messages. You may not see the accidents as integrated, but the rest of the world does.
- Maximize shared messages while clearly communicating response differences.
- Don’t argue about the cause. Speculation on this issue just increased exponentially. Commit to the outcome of the incident investigation, and move on.
- Focus on the status of each response. Identify shared concerns and messages and migrate them to a unified response process.
- Every key message you’ve been using for one response will have to be strengthened, expanded or abandoned for use in the entwined responses.
Develop and coordinate response plans
Develop an ‘Incident A’ communications plan focusing on Incident A response activity. Develop an ‘Incident B’ communications plan focusing on Incident B response activity. Develop a combined Incident Issues Plan to deal with the integrated response actions.
- This plan will deal with all shared concerns and issues.
- This plan purview and priorities will be shared with, and supported by, corporate leadership.
This is really only a variation of incident command structure for a large, dispersed incident. But it will be the communicator’s charge to identify issues that belong to each team.
Pivot!
Don’t get stuck. Fight against the momentum you’ve built in your first successful response communication. Stop, look and change your strategies to reflect your new and more dangerous communication environment. Doing more of the same isn’t going to work. Stop, refocus and re-assign resources to your newer, smarter plan. Pivot away from what you’ve done well and create a new, coordinated path forward.
Plan!
Plan on not getting stuck. Instead of practicing against a single scenario, practice against two of the same incidents happening together, or two separate incidents occurring at the same time. Practice development of both incident specific impact and messaging, but also the combined impact and messaging needs.
Just do it!
We all tend to dismiss the possibility of simultaneous or consecutive incidents. Regulations and safety advances have made single incidents remarkably rare, but they still happen. But probability is not your friend: Suffering one incident does not minimize the possibility of another occurring. A probability of 1:100,000 does not mean that if one incident occurs you’ve just bought 99,999 ‘get out of jail free’ cards. Probability is all long term, always measured with the occurrence in the middle. At any given moment, it is just as likely that your organization will experience a major incident after one has occurred as it would be if one had not just occurred. If you have to plan for one, you might as well plan for two! So do it.