Know Your REAL Enemy

Don’t make shelling personal.

Last post, we spent some time looking at likely candidates for the sobriquet ‘enemy’, only to determine that they are not, in fact our enemy. I ended the post with an encouragement to soldier past the hurdles in communication by recognizing each one as an opportunity instead of an enemy.

If media, activists, trolls, naysayers and a polarized society aren’t our enemies, who are?

Our enemies aren’t people, or circumstances. They’re not objects or coincidences. They’re not bad luck or fate. They’re our own attitudes and actions. In all areas of our lives, we’re better served when we recognize that we are usually the authors of our own misfortune. Circumstances we face may not be attributable to us, but our attitudes, responses and reactions always are. And these attitudes, responses and reactions get us into trouble. Our most pernicious foe is ourselves.

Consider the following foes

Here are some examples of our propensity to cause ourselves trouble or heartache in a response.

  • Complacency: The most unfortunate hindrance to our success is our own complacency. We know what could happen in our market, operations or infrastructure. It’s no mystery that every human activity incurs risk. Yet we don’t plan or prepare for it. We avoid taking on the important task of preparation and planning. Something more important always comes up, we rationalize. But what really happens is that we defer, delay and minimize. We accede to the urgent and postpone the important.
  • Resistance: This is the inertia we all face to bad news. We don’t want to hear it. We feel flat-footed, and our responses are delayed. Yes, this is natural. Surprises do this to us. Most drivers can steer away from a potential crash slightly faster than they can avoid it by bringing their vehicle to a stop. But most drivers don’t. By the time their brains remind them what to do, it’s too late; they’ve lost precious seconds, and the opportunity to minimize the situation. So you hear the bad news of an incident, accident or issue and your first response is… no response. Our untrained response to unwelcome data is to freeze. People don’t step out of the way, we don’t swerve to the other lane, we don’t duck. In a response, seconds and minutes go by before we respond.
  • Delay: Introducing resistance’s cousin. Delay is inherent on our daily activities. We pace ourselves, practice good time management techniques, wait for elevators, meetings, phone calls, emails, traffic lights, dinner. We don’t want to be ‘that guy’ who is always rushing, always pushy, frenetic. We don’t want to be Patricia. So in the comfort of our speed-governed world we craft policies and plans that reinforce delay. Our time targets are way off, far too slow. We build multi-layered procedures and approval processes. We institutionalize slowness.
  • Blame: The hardest thing to do when something goes wrong is to accept that it just might be your fault. This is true in virtually every setting. We all have an aversion to accepting blame for anything. It marks us as deficient, less than adequate. We bleat about vulnerability, but we’re all Fonzie at heart. I know from personal experience how hard it is to face people when the organization you’re involved with is blamed for something. Add a corporate aversion to any admission of legal fault to our natural hesitancy to face up to a situation and communication efforts can freeze up. This is ironic since every other element of a response is designed and encouraged to go full speed ahead. In the absence of rapid empathy with stakeholders affected by the incident, we hunker down in defensiveness and lose their trust.
  • Minimizing: As with life itself, we all tend to minimize any bad occurrence. We somehow think that we can kind of sneak up on how bad something really is. Part of this is our own wishful thinking, part is an unwillingness to accept the full impact, part is an attempt to minimize blame. Some of it is simple ignorance; we really don’t know how bad it is. But the bottom line is that when we under report or minimize the impact of our incident to the public, we lose credibility. As credibility flies out the window it takes trust with it, and our communication challenge gets worse and worse. Who cares if you’re sharing accurate information if they don’t trust you?
  • Fatigue: It’s true, fatigue makes cowards of us all. We leap into action filled with commitment and energy. We initially prevail and see success. But our enemy keeps coming, and like a boxer we realize that while we’re landing some good punches, our arms are getting tired. There’s a basic truth when packing to respond to an incident; always take more shirts than you think you’ll need. Any significant response is going to take longer than you think. A major response may go on for months. You will experience fatigue, and your capabilities will wane. In the worst case, you’ll run out of people before you run out of response.
  • Short-term thinking: Any significant response is going to take longer than you think. You will need more shirts than you think. Incidents and their responses aren’t static; they grow and shrink, settle down and flare up. Even when the physical response is over, stakeholder communication isn’t. If you don’t plan for long-term response communication, you run the risk of losing your organization’s voice and reputation. I’ve seen opportunities to cement good relationships with stakeholder squandered by short-term communication planning. Any response is a huge investment, so why do we squander it by leaving the field early?

What can we do to defeat these enemies?

What practical steps can we take to neutralize them?

  • Complacency: Remember a basic economic theory; the price of any object is determined by the supply of, and demand for, that object. When an incident occurs, you will have enormous demands on your capabilities, expressed as a function of time. But you’ll have less time available. This combination, of high demand and low availability, makes your time a precious asset; important and urgent are one and you’ll wish you had used more time to prepare. Prepare, now! Don’t deny known data – incidents do occur. Don’t defer known activities. You know what you need to do to be ready. Do it now. The cost of complacency is high; the cost of unpreparedness is extreme. Plan!
  • Resistance: If you want to learn to use your steering wheel correctly, you sign up for a defensive driving course where you learn how to steer around obstacles. If you want to respond quickly in an issue, incident or crisis, make sure your planning and preparation includes the element of immediacy. Identify possible triggers and practice your response to them. Test for speed and quickness. How quickly do you begin to respond, how fast do you get going?
  • Delay: If procedures take too long, simplify them. If approvals build in delays, lighten them. Build speed in. Lotus Cars’ Colin Chapman was famous for his design esthetic; ‘”Simplify and add lightness”. A good model for crisis communication! Less known was his supporting truth statement; “Adding power makes you faster on the straights; subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere”. Subtract the weight of conscious or unconsciousness resistance everywhere you can.
  • Blame: Legal fault is a huge issue with any organization, justifiably. Remember that acknowledging an incident has occurred is not the same as admitting fault. Say you’re sorry. Saying you’re sorry for the impact isn’t admitting fault, it’s empathizing with the affected stakeholders. Even in obvious circumstances, fault is allocated after thorough investigation long after the initial response is over, sometimes years later. In the meantime all the amazing, sometimes heroic, efforts of responders are shrouded in poor communication. Communicate quickly. Share all you can while constantly reminding stakeholders that you’re doing so regardless of final fault. Don’t give up the reputation of the response in an effort to protect your own organization’s. Remember that affected stakeholders need a source of truth to make their own response decisions. Don’t lose the opportunity to gain their trust and acceptance. Finally, remember that good engagement with affected stakeholders is one of your only hopes if fault is ultimately assigned to you. After fault come penalties, when your care and attention to affected stakeholders becomes an asset.
  • Minimizing: Ask responders two questions; ‘How bad is it now?’ and ‘How bad will it be?’ Communicate on the basis of their answers. The US Coast Guard enforces a ‘worst-case’ determination to any spill that can’t be accurately measured. While this can seem extreme, nobody is upset when reported spill amounts go down instead of up. Same with other impacts. Better to reduce reported impact than increase it. We all cite Aesop’s ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,‘ to justify under-reporting, but we forget that the shepherd boy had done so multiple times, and we only get to do it once. Minimizing an incident affects other response decisions, so just don’t do it.
  • Fatigue: Pack extra shirts. Plan for the long term. Create a response communication plan that includes a realistic timeline (from your Planning Section). Make sure you identify how many people you need to meet Plan objectives. Assign your communicators effectively. Put your people in the right places. Request more resources, from the very beginning. Don’t wait until your team is exhausted before securing replacements. Stagger your team’s involvement so you never have to replace all of them at once. Don’t be a hero and work non-stop. Take breaks. Schedule shifts that allow down time AND sleep time.
  • Short-term thinking: Remember that the incident isn’t over until the affected stakeholders think it is. Responders want to go home, and they will as quickly as possible. Affected stakeholders ARE home, and they expect to keep hearing from you until they aren’t interested. Of course this affects your response communication plan. Keep your focus on stakeholders. Encourage your organization to maintain a local presence until you determine stakeholder interest has waned. Don’t throw away a reputation for caring by leaving too early.

Now here’s a question for each of us

Where else in our lives do these dynamics work to our detriment? Is there someone we need to go to and make amends for how our attitudes, responses or reactions have caused harm? The process of acknowledging, apologizing and making amends is an intimate, personal application of good practice in a crisis: acknowledge, apologize, make amends and rebuild your relationship.

Interested in more information? Contact me!

My mission is to help clients communicate better in a crisis, both in preparation and in performance. If this post raises questions about your crisis communication capacity, let me help.