These posts are written to encourage thoughtful consideration of the entire range of communication strategy, plans and effectiveness. They’re based on my experiences in actual responses, as well as drills, exercises, tabletops and crisis communication plan reviews.

Feel free to share,  comment or contact me directly.  I value your input!

The unexamined life is not worth living

| January 15, 2024
Painting: The Death of Socrates

Per Wikipedia, “The unexamined life is not worth living” is a famous phrase supposedly uttered by Socrates at his trial for impiety and corrupting youth, for which he was subsequently sentenced to death. Regardless of Socrates’ fate related to these words, it’s a great dictum to follow. And it’s particularly important for communicators to note for our own integrity.

As professional truth-tellers, our job is to ensure that our stakeholders recognize and appreciate our employer’s reputation. So what do we do when we’re attempting to protect or restore a reputation that is being attacked by its own corporate culture?

Tony Jaques, Owner and Owner and Director of Issue Outcomes Pty Ltd, offers some compelling thoughts in his recent post: How moral blindness breeds plummeting corporate reputation

“Qantas. PwC. Rio Tinto. Optus. Telstra. Medibank. Facebook/Meta. Twitter/X. Any of the big banks.

The sound you can hear across the big end of town is the shredding of reputations in the wake of corporate crises, often triggered by moral blindness.

Releasing the latest Roy Morgan Trust Index, CEO Michelle Levine said Australians have never been more distrusting of business since their risk monitor began in 2017, and distrust of corporations had soared dramatically after COVID.

“Once the crisis had passed,” she said, “they found the new freedoms they had enjoyed under the cover of COVID hard to relinquish, and a kind of Moral Blindness became endemic.”

Referring to the unprecedented decline in trust of Qantas, she asserted there was moral blindness everywhere, from appalling call center delays, canceled flights, and snail’s-pace fare refunds, to former CEO Alan Joyce refusing to pay back any of the $2 billion in “corporate welfare”, despite the company surging back to billion-dollar profitability.

Of course, Qantas was not the only company to be accused of making unfair profits during a cost-of-living crisis. Australian supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths, for example, came under attack after announcing bumper annual profits of over $1 billion each at a time of food insecurity.

While business experts explained that such profits were not extraordinary given the size of these companies, Amy Booth and Danny Carney from a Tasmanian consumer protest group seemed to be reflecting a wider opinion when they declared that people “…understand they’re being screwed by the two big supermarkets.”

“They know it’s unfair that they make billions in profits while people steal or starve themselves to survive.”

Unsurprisingly, Coles and Woolworths made reassuring statements acknowledging that many people were doing it tough, and both pledged they were looking for ways to help reduce consumer costs.

However, the challenge for issue and crisis managers is not to try to reconcile polarised views about the competing demands of consumers and shareholders. It’s to recognize that, irrespective of the facts, the opinion and experience of consumers, investors, the media, and other stakeholders is what determines trust and reputation. Brand is what you say about yourself, while reputation is what other people say about you. And corporate reputation overall is plummeting.

Two key reasons are a perceived decline in management behavior and a rise in moral blindness from a supposed growing corporate culture of money over community responsibility. Moreover, it doesn’t even matter if that’s not true.

Corporate culture is how organisations behave when people aren’t looking. But more and more people are now looking, and too often they are mightily (un)impressed by what they see. Whether it’s Royal Commissions into the banking and casino industries; the latest news media exposé; or the rapidly increasing pace of legal action by various corporate cops against a growing list of business wrongdoers. Little wonder that reputation is increasingly at risk.

While experts argue about the exact numbers, most agree that reputation generally accounts for 50-60% of the share value of corporations, and much higher in many cases, depending on the industry. That is a massive amount of value at stake.

Take the case of BP in the UK which was already under pressure because of a massive boost to profits and executive bonuses on the back of rising petrol prices because of war in Ukraine. Then last month the CEO was sacked because of “workplace flings” and BP’s share value fell by $3.6 billion.

Managers and communicators need to fully understand that reputation is a core business asset – driven by what you do, not by what you say or what you promise – and there is very little chance it will improve while bad behavior continues.”

Thank you for sharing this insight, Tony!

So what does a communicator do?

Whether undertaking day-to-day communication, response or recovery communication, the communicator has a unique role: We represent our organization to the public, and we represent the public to our organization. We’re pretty good at the first one, but often lacking in the second. There’s little reason to expect an organization to see itself as the public does: It’s up to communicators to point it out. Doing so may be a career altering moment, but it is the dividing line between communication and obfuscation. At the end of your career, do you want to be remembered for your integrity, or your lack thereof?

MQI for you or I?

| September 9, 2023

How can you know you’re the best person for your position?

Are we fully invested in Incident Command’s core tenet that every response position should be filled with the individual best suited to it? If so, we have to be certain we are actually filling the box on the organization chart that we should.

It’s easy to decide this for other people; there’s nothing we like more than being an armchair quarterback. We each posses the innate ability to immediately discern another person’s thoughts, intents and motives, often from a single news article or social media post. And we live in a culture that expects immediate and accurate analysis of every observed incident or response action.

We find it all too easy to join the crescendo of criticism, sharing our humble opinion with everyone else’s in a whirlwind of judgement and blame. It’s amazing that anybody is willing to serve in a public position of leadership when public pillorying seems to be the prescribed predicament.

How do we build a culture of constructive criticism? Here are a few suggestions:

Investigate…and wait

We all know the importance of accuracy in what response information we share, but we easily forget to wait for it when it’s someone else’s response. We join the crowd of instant experts, losing our professional perspective as we join the rush to judgement.

The truth is clear; the truth isn’t clear in the immediate present of a major response. It takes time to figure out what really happened, and we’re all used to hunkering down to wait out the storm of blame that swirls over us as we respond. So why do we jump into instant analysis when it’s someone else’s response? Let’s practice what we preach: Wait for the investigation to be complete and facts are finally determined. Share them and apply them in your own planning. We need a professional inertia against early judgement, or each of us may lose our own credibility.

Don’t judge too soon!

Self-Assess

At a time when leadership qualifications are under scrutiny due to perceived management failures in a crisis, it’s good to remember that we are each far better served to examine our own capabilities rather than someone else’s. It is proverbially easy to focus on other people’s shortcomings instead of taking a hard look at our own.

Before we judge someone else’s actions, let’s ask ourselves what we would have done in their shoes. Of course we can’t do this very accurately since our elevated sense of our own capabilities so easily intervenes against good judgement. And we need facts (see above). We need to develop the ability to honestly and critically ask ourselves if we would have done any better ourselves, basing our response on experience and truth.

Practice some humility! You may not have done any better!

Remember the fog of war

We simply have to accept that major incidents and response activities always suffer from the fog of war. Too much is happening all at once, facts are shifting, plans are changing instantly, people and things are moving unexpectedly, resources are appearing and disappearing, and the list goes on. Initial response decisions are difficult because so much is at stake and so little is known. Responses and reputations may suffer from bad decisions, but they will also suffer from slow ones. We need to remember that, even if decisions made in the fog of war don’t stand up to post-fog scrutiny, they were the best decision at the time based on what was known.

Remember and respect the fog of war when judging others’ actions.

Self doubt

Even as we plan for success in our efforts, preparing assiduously and practicing to perfection and piling experience on top of our training, we inevitably have to deal with self-doubt. Am I really the best person for my role? Am I ready? Can I succeed? Will I make decisions that cost reputations? Will I make decisions that cost lives?

How do we decide? How do we balance between confidence and doubt in our capabilities? Especially when the stakes are so high? It’s time to invoke the MQI Doctrine: Every person in as response should serve in the position they are the best equipped for by training, experience and position. Incident Command positions should each be filled by the person best able to fulfill the responsibilities of the position. When every position in a response organization is filled by the best person, the Incident Command adage ‘the best people making the best decisions for the best outcome’ is finally fulfilled.

How does this help with self-doubt? It switches your focus from what you think you can’t do to what you think you can do. There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to a position based on your capabilities, and there’s nothing wrong with expecting to succeed instead of fearing failure. And since IC positions are filled by assent from leadership, your capability is determined by more than yourself: You serve by consensus, not fiat. So if you’re doubting your capability, remember the tenet of IC is fulfilled by MQI: You’re the best for your position unless someone better comes along. Hold tightly to the tasks and loosely to the position. If you’re best suited to the role, you’re the best person for it. So do it!

Apply MQI, and trust it!

Grace

Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes, every day. Before we judge others, let’s remember that our own lives are a melange of success and failure, our decisions and actions a mix of selflessness and selfishness. We do the best we can and we quickly remind our detractors that ‘no one is perfect’. What we usually mean is that we aren’t perfect, but that they should be. Grace as unmerited favor is grudgingly practiced by imperfect people, yet we all depend on it. Every day.

How are you at grace? It’s easy to tell: How do you handle traffic? How much do you support a losing coach? How about a colleague late to a meeting? Parking meters? Line-cutters? Undercooked food?

Practice grace!

Drinking from the firehose

| August 14, 2023

Managing information flow in Incident Command

At the beginning of a response, hard facts can be scarce or hard to find. As communicators, our approach to this ‘information desert’ often entails gathering every bit of information we can, regardless of its importance or relevance, to have something, anything to share.

Drinking from the firehose

As the response unfolds within Incident Command (IC), more and more information becomes available, to the point where it can easily overwhelm us in both its pace and quantity. Every physical responder is either reporting incident developments (inbound incident information) or acting against information provided (outbound incident actions).

IC members are requesting and receiving additional information from response partners and resources. After the requested information is gathered, its sorted and analyzed to determine response status and needs. Then the analyzed information is shared across the response. Each Section provides summaries of incident status and their recommendations for specific response actions. This process culminates in coordinated response plans and tactics being implemented by IC and activated across the response. IC does this to ensure the best possible response actions, conducted by the best possible responders, for the best possible outcome.

As IC settles into this rhythm of response, communicators now have to sort through a massive amount of rapidly developing, quickly changing information. Congratulations! From now until demobilization, we’re drinking from a firehose.

How do communicators decide which information is important?

Now there’s too much information, so we have to choose what is most important. How?

First, focus! Remember that in a response, the Joint Information Center (JIC) represents the public. Our role is to provide the affected public with information about the response that meets their information needs. To do this effectively, we need to know which information is, or will be, important to them. Try the following three-pronged approach to determine which information is needed for effective communication content:

1) Stakeholder perceptions: What are affected stakeholders concerned about, and what developments will alarm them?

  • Any incident developments or response activity that touches them. Perceived risk is a powerful motivation for increased concern and scrutiny. Any actions that directly impact the public, such as smoke, fire, road closures, odors, etc. require rapid and comprehensive sharing. If the stakeholders perceive risk, they will have three questions: “What has happened?”, “What is being done about it?”, and “Why are we doing what we are doing?”
  • Response actions they can see: This one is simple: If they see it, we need to say it.
  • Key issues as defined by stakeholders. Identified stakeholder concerns (from effective inquiry management, media briefings, elected official or community briefings).
  • External information or misinformation. In a response external information sources spring up, often attempting to impact or interfere with the response by sharing information that reflects their bias, instead of being factual and supportive of response actions and priorities.

    In the ‘good old days’ communication strategy suggested out-waiting these alt-news sources, but in todays media environment, misinformation will both persevere and grow in impact and reach. The good news about today’s media is that everyone in the world can quickly access information about what’s going on; the bad news is that the information may not be accurate. Accuracy comes from the JIC, and our source is the firehose. Scoop into the firehose to find information that answers stakeholder concerns.

2) Key issues as defined by communicators: We need to use an incident assessment process to apply a communicator’s sensitivity on both incident impact and response activities.

  • This assessment of incident impact and key issues will provide us with a list of what information we need. Once we know what will be important, we can go to the firehose to find the information that meets these needs. Do you need an incident assessment tool to help with this? Contact me about it.

3) Critical Incident Requirements (CIR): In a response, IC will create a list of critical information that all responders must immediately share with IC. It typically includes items such as spill landfall, responder injuries, closures or access restrictions, shelter-in-place, etc.,

  • If it’s important to IC, it will likely be important to stakeholders. Use the IC CIR to determine content needs to immediately address each identified contingency. Be prepared!
  • JIC Critical Information Requirements (CIR): The JIC must provide IC with a list of critical information required to keep the public on the response’s side. As IC prepared a list of response developments that would make their job harder, so the JIC needs to create and share a similar list of what would make the JIC’s job harder. Share this list with IC and make sure you receive immediate notification of any occurrence. Your list will typically reflect much of IC’s own list but will include stakeholder-centric concerns as well. Incident Command needs to listen to the PIO! Communicators’ sensitivities are critical to ensure ongoing public support of response activities.
    • As an example, while IC is concerned that response plans include the likelihood of a spill coming to land, the JIC needs to identify the actual landfall of the spill as a CIR. Communicators must know if people are getting oil on their beach or boats!

Why do this?

If the public doesn’t understand the response, they won’t trust the response. Communicators need to be certain we’re enhancing public understanding of Incident Command’s mission to provide the best possible response actions, conducted by the best possible responders, for the best possible outcome.

The list above allows us to focus on what is most important for public awareness, understanding and acceptance of response actions. Instead of gathering every bit of information we can find, responders can focus on information that will help stakeholders, enhance public understanding and bolster the reputation of the response.

Remember, while an information firehose may deliver too much information at too much force, diverting some of its power to meet a more focused need will result in a more effective information flow for a communicator, and for concerned stakeholders.

Interested in more information?  Contact me! The crisis communication services I provide have a common goal: To improve your capability to effectively communicate to important stakeholders before, during and after an incident or issue. I work with clients to identify their greatest crisis communication needs and provide services to address them. You can enhance your response communication capability with cost-effective, systematic steps to enhance your planning, preparation and performance.

Put the pieces of your exercise program together

| June 16, 2023

Have you been able to put the pieces of your exercise program together? Is your organization’s exercise program preparing you for stakeholder communication in a crisis? Do you feel that your communication structure is adequately tested?

Exercise planners often don’t recognize the importance of effective stakeholder communication. This bias is evidenced in how often the words above are true. It shows up in funding: “Save some money, don’t include the JIC”. It shows up in exercise planning: “Hold a press conference” becomes the only JIC objective, the widest notion of communication that planners can envision.

The result?

Communicators and the stakeholder communication process end up either minimally tested or not tested at all. All the exercise planning and investment is expended on testing the physical response. The result? While an investment is made to ensure response capability, communicators don’t benefit.

Failing to prepare, or preparing to fail?

Preparation is vital, otherwise we face the possibility that we won’t be prepared for an actual crisis. As the adage goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail. After watching or enduring crises, participating in exercise after exercise and spending uncounted dollars, is our organization any more prepared to provide effective stakeholder communication? Or are we conducting exercises in futility?

What is a communicator to do?

How can we prepare? What if we actually have the tools we need to accurately test our capability? What if we have all the pieces and just need to put them together? What if our exercise in futility could be an exercise in utility?

Create a JIC Tabletop Exercise

Put the pieces of your exercise program together. You can plan and conduct a dedicated tabletop exercise (TTX) for your communication team, incorporating full testing of the JIC functions without involving other parts of Incident Command. You can create a full TTX scenario and injects to test a combined JIC. You can use HSEEP principles to develop your TTX to reinforce JIC processes and test for specific capabilities to meet communication objectives.

It is possible, perhaps even preferable, to create and conduct a TTX specifically for your communication team. Its likely you already have all the pieces you need for an effective TTX:

  • Has your organization participated in any functional exercises recently?
    • If so you have the scenario.
  • Does your organization have an Emergency Response Plan, or the equivalent?
    • If so, you have the physical response activities.
  • Do you have a crisis communication plan?
    • If so, you have the road map you want to test.
  • Have your team members taken the available NIMS training courses?
    • If so you’re all ready to be tested on your skills.
  • Do you have authority to gather your communications team together for a few hours?
    • If you do, you can test individual and group capacity at the same time.

All the pieces of the puzzle

If you have an exercise scenario, a communication plan, available training and authority to participate, you have all the pieces you need to prepare an effective crisis communication exercise. You can bring these pieces together to create and conduct a powerful exercise experience:

  • Without limited, artificial objectives: You design the TTX to test communication actions you want.
  • With great impact: Your people being tested on their capabilities for your organization.
  • With every communicator involved: At your workplace, with your people.
  • Without great expense: The cost will be your time and the time of those who participate.
  • With great effectiveness: A TTX maximizes your organization’s response investment by multiplying it in delivering a comprehensive test of your communication capability.

A great investment

Communicators know what is needed for effective stakeholder communication. We’re trained in providing communication leadership to our respective organizations and we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Instead of trading war stories of trials, stress and failure, let’s multiply the effectiveness of our organization’s existing investment in response plan creation, training and exercise programs? We have all the information we need to demonstrate our team’s competence and capability. And we have the opportunity to demonstrate our ability to provide communication counsel to Incident Command along with our expertise.

What are you waiting for?

Put the pieces of your exercise program together!

Interested in more information? Contact me!

Stopping the Tide

| September 28, 2022
Ocean wave coming ashore

Sometimes communication isn’t about what has happened: Instead, it’s about what didn’t happen.

We all have emergency response plans in place, and we’re all good at activating them (right?). Most organizations conduct near-perfect responses, thanks to excellent planning, training and practicing. But the best of responses are often insufficient to assuage stakeholder concerns.

Consider the incident at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio, Texas, as reported by the Associated Press:

Parents besiege Texas high school after false shooting call

“SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Alarmed parents converged on a Texas high school Tuesday after a classroom shooting report that ultimately proved to be false.

The siege at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio began about 1 p.m. Tuesday after police received a call of a possible shooting in progress at the school, according to a police statement. The school was placed on lockdown as police entered and began clearing the campus but found no evidence of an active threat or shooting.

“Our department and San Antonio Police Department established there was no shooting, but then we had to do a methodical search room by room with our strike teams,” said Chief Johnny Reyes of the San Antonio Independent School District police. “We went to the place where they said the shooting had occurred and we were able to quickly establish that no shooting had happened.”

Dr. Jaime Aquino, Superintendent of SAISD said it well in a letter to parents following the incident:

“Yesterday’s incident highlights that the district and city are prepared for a unified approach when a crisis occurs. The call prompted an immediate lockdown and a large and confident police presence – 29 district officers and 58 from SAPD. Officers conducted a room by room search of the entire campus and found no evidence of a weapon or a threat. All students and staff were safe, and we are extremely grateful for this outcome.”

A perfect response, well coordinated and conducted:

  • A demonstrated high level of preparation and coordination of both District and the San Antonio Police Department.
  • Effective response procedures that ensured safety of students, staff and responders
  • The fortunate discovery that no shooting had occurred, and that there were no student injuries or risks

What could be better? Congratulations all around!

What was going on with the parents?

Back to the Associated Press story:

  • “But frightened students already had made alarming telephone calls to their parents,
    • (Parents received messaging from their children before they did from the school.)
  • …who descended en masse on the school where 29 school district officers and 58 city police officers were on hand.
    • (Parents descended into an already crowded response location, increasing danger and the possibility of escalation)
  • One man shoved his fist through a window in an effort to gain entry to the school, lacerating his arm. Police applied a tourniquet to that arm.
    • (Parents weren’t waiting for an all-clear, and panic overwhelmed reason)
  • Others were handcuffed and detained after physically struggling with officers, but there were no immediate reports of arrests.”
    • (Responders were diverted from protecting students to arrest parents)

How did this happen?

External Events happened. Parents panicked due to what they knew from what they’d heard.

Again, from the Associated Press article:

“The scare was the latest in a wave of such incidents since the May 24 mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers. A similar panic occurred at Heights High School in Houston on Sept. 13 after the school received a threat. Threats last week also prompted school shutdowns at districts near Austin and Houston and in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Illinois, Kansas and Oklahoma.”

This incident’s big question for communicators

Can you say enough to parents so they stay away from their children’s school instead of flooding the response?

  • Can you provide a robust, rapid and open information flow that helps parents make the right decision and wait until they’re notified that the school and students are safe?
  • If you realize that communication efforts actually won’t stop them, let your response planners know this reality, and plan how to safely accommodate panicked parents; parent gathering area, dedicated parking in a safe location, place communication staff on-location to direct and assure parents, etc…

Superintendent Aquino said it right:

“San Antonio district Superintendent Jaime Aquino said the district needed to find better ways to communicate with parents in real time. “I’m assuming that if we had not had Uvalde, perhaps we would not have the reaction of the parents. So we just have to understand that,” he said.”

‘So we just have to understand that’ means that SAISD and other school districts need to be ready for the reality of parent reactions.

What does a communicator do with someone else’s incident?

  1. Be thankful that your organization has been spared the trauma of an incident!
  2. Reach out to your fellow communication professionals who have been impacted. Offer your help, offer your sympathy, express condolences. Do this more than once – people in the middle of a crisis usually don’t have bandwidth to really hear what you’re saying, nor to recognize or accept your offer to help. But they will in time, and professional-to-professional support and debriefing will expand the learning process for all.
  3. Analyze your own plans to see if your communication plans and processes are robust enough to meet your particular stakeholders’ information needs. Remember that reaching out to stakeholders isn’t just for ‘our’ good, it’s for their good as well.
  4. Learn from each incident. Review incidents related to your operations to see if your plans would work, or if you need plan changes or additions.

Every incident brings new challenges and new lessons to learn. What do we ‘just have to understand’ from incidents related to our operations? What do we have to learn from each incident?

In this incident, we’re reminded that one purpose of stakeholder communication is to promote understanding, that leads to trust, that leads to compliance with response restrictions or safety messages. We’re also reminded to be sure our organization’s response planners are aware of a possible tide of people (parents, volunteers, protesters, residents, etc.) that could impact the safety and effectiveness of our response.

From every incident we observe, our goal should be to devise the combination of communication and response solutions that ensure both an effective response and effective communication.

Be thankful, reach out, analyze, learn.