Communicators’ Corner

In the response world, abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms (look it up!) are unavoidable. Complex titles are easier to recite and remember when reduced to a few letters, so Agencies become initialisms (DSHS, WaDOE), response systems become acronyms (NIMS), people become abbreviations (APIO). Even acronyms become acronyms (TMAtM = Too Many Acronyms to Mention).  Two of the many acronyms you will hear are of particular importance:  ICS (Incident Command System) and UC (Unified Command).

As we engage with our physical response planners and when we begin to plan for incident response communication, we consistently hear two abbreviatons: IC (Incident Command System) and UC (Unified Command). It is important to know a little bit about these particular response structures because, in any significant response, communicators will inevitably be operating within one or the other.

Incident Command System or Unified Command?

So what is Incident Command System? What is Unified Command? Here’s a description from the NRT ICS/UC Technical Assistance Document. (I warned you there would be acronyms!)

What is ICS? “ICS is a standardized on-scene incident management concept designed specifically to allow responders to adopt an integrated organizational structure equal to the complexity and demands of any single incident or multiple incidents without being hindered by jurisdictional boundaries.

In 1980, federal officials transitioned ICS into a national program called the National Interagency Incident Management System (NIIMS), which became the basis of a response management system for all federal agencies with wildfire management responsibilities. Since then, many federal agencies have endorsed the use of ICS, and several have mandated its use. An ICS enables integrated communication and planning by establishing a manageable span of control. An ICS divides an emergency response into five manageable functions essential for emergency response operations: Command, Operations, Planning, Logistics, and Finance and Administration.”

To sum up ICS: ICS is a formal incident response system built around specific functions in an expandable structure. It can be used by an organization, or an agency, and is expandable to include response partners. A fire department operates under ICS, as does a Police Department. An Agency can utilize ICS to respond to a spill or accident. A business can develop ICS-based response plans, often under a different acronym such as IRT (Incident Response Team), CERT (Corporate Emergency Response Team) or IMT (Incident Management Team).

It is very likely your organization has planned incident response activities within an ICS framework, and it is also likely you will respond within that ICS framework. In your role as Communicator, you will perform the specific functions of the PIO (Public Information Officer)

What is Unified Command? (From the same source) “Although a single Incident Commander normally handles the command function, an ICS organization may be expanded into a Unified Command (UC). The UC is a structure that brings together the “Incident Commanders” of all major organizations involved in the incident in order to coordinate an effective response while at the same time carrying out their own jurisdictional responsibilities. The UC links the organizations responding to the incident and provides a forum for these entities to make consensus decisions.

Under the UC, the various jurisdictions and/or agencies and non-government responders may blend together throughout the operation to create an integrated response team. The UC is responsible for overall management of the incident. The UC directs incident activities, including development and implementation of overall objectives and strategies, and approves ordering and releasing of resources. Members of the UC work together to develop a common set of incident objectives and strategies, share information, maximize the use of available resources, and enhance the efficiency of the individual response organizations.”

To sum up UC: If an incident expands past the capability of a single lead agency, Unified Command can be formed to allow multiple jurisdictions and authorities to coordinate a response across all response agencies. This preserves operational unity and common objectives. Unified Command is used in large, complex responses, and often grows out of an ICS response that has become larger or more complex.

Why does this matter?

It matters because it changes what we do, and who we do it for.

Day-to-day, we work for a our own organization. We have a boss, an address and a phone number that reflects this organization. We’re in the same employee directory. We park in the same parking lot. We all eat Costco cake at employee birthdays, and we all slog our way through our Health Plan documentation.

As communicators we answer to a specified person, or people, holding positions of authority over us. They approve our products and our plans. They assign specific communication roles to us. We’ve latitude to act within a spectrum of responsibility they have given us. If something goes ‘BOOM’ in the night, we might act unilaterally, but we will report to them. As the stakes ratchet in an incident, they are the people who will either release us to soar with the eagles, or lock us in our canary cage.

Incident Command may or may not impact this relationship. If our organization uses ICS for response planning and conduct, we’ll have access to response plans and organization charts that might codify our day-to-day relationship into response activities. This is good for rapid response communication, as we know what to do and who we are doing it for.

Sometimes, the ICS structure will expand to include one or more agencies. A Fire Department may respond to a fire at one of our facilities. Both our organization and the Fire Department will respond within ICS. We will likely begin to share information with their PIO, even collaborate on some messaging. But we’ll be free to write, approve, post and distribute information based on our own organization’s response framework.

Unified Command changes this.

As more agencies join in a response and as the stakes go up, Unified Command (UC) is formed to coordinate all response activities across multiple response organizations. This includes the Joint Information Center (JIC). In UC, the JIC includes representatives of all response partners, each a trained, professional communicator. This dynamic leads to several important changes to consider:

Staff structures change: All communication staff fit into the single JIC structure, checking their Agency/Organization hat at the door. The JIC enforces a structure of operations made up of functional Sections, each Section staffed by the MQIs (Most Qualified Individuals) for that Section’s function. You may be the VP of Communications for your Organization, but in the JIC you’ll fill the position that is the best fit of your skills, training and experience. We may not have the same role or position in UC that we have daily.

Approval processes change: In the JIC, each participating Agency’s or Organization’s approval process changes even more dramatically than personnel positions do. In our own organization we follow a specific approval process, one that we’ve likely fine-tuned for maximum effectiveness. In the JIC, it is gone. Approvals are conducted within UC. Our organization’s approvers no longer have control over the message.

Priorities change: In a non-UC response, our organization’s reputation is our top priority. We use key messaging and statement templates to provide positive information about our organization and its response efforts, aimed at preserving both reputation and right to operate. UC doesn’t share these concerns; it has its own priorities and plans. Unified Command is interested in the response, not our reputation.

Pace changes: UC determines operational periods and approves communication plans that follow these operational periods. The beast called UC supplants the desires of partners, community or media with its own response pace. For communicators, this can mean a longer time between updates, slower approval process and resources assigned differently than we would. UC doesn’t care about our desire to release volumes of information to help stakeholders understand our own organization’s efforts. UC only cares about its own information flow.

Concern changes: In UC, nobody cares about us or our organization. It’s not personal. Nobody cares about any individual response entity. This isn’t spiteful, shortsighted or arbitrary; it is necessary. There’s a new Sheriff in town, called UC. Everybody else comes out with their hands up. Unified Command only cares about Unified Command.

Is this all necessary?

Yes. The trust of the public is wrapped around Unified Command now, not our organization or one of the Agencies that responded to the incident. It’s not ‘our’ incident any more; it is UC’s incident. Our organization may be labeled as the Responsible Party (aka Wallet, Perp, Black Hat), or as one of the response partners (FOSC, SOSC, LOSC, etc.) but UC is now completely responsible for the outcome of the event. The collective Unified Command reputation is now on the line, not individual organizations’ reputations.

When Unified Command works

As Ben Franklin expressed it in another dark and dangerous time; “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” In the worst of times, Unified Command is the bastion between all of us and the darkness of chaos.  When Unified Command works, it is a beautiful and terrible thing; beautiful because everyone works together under a common banner, terrible because it is invoked in truly terrible times. At the highest level, Unified Command protects every response partner, mobilizes all responders and protects impacted stakeholders, all while bringing the best people, best tactics and best resources to accomplish the best outcome.

But it isn’t perfect! (more to come).

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You know the ‘Us’ around you – the people you work with every day.  You know these people and you’ve learned to work with them and trust them.

But an incident has occured, and here you are, showing up to join the response and walking into the Joint Information Center, a room filled with ‘Them’!

Maybe they’re strangers, or barely acquaintances. Where did they all come from? Who is this person from the SOSC? Where did the FOSC communicator come from? Why is the city’s PIO here? You’ve never seen these people before! You want more ‘Us’, but you’ve got a room full of ‘Them’.  Now imagine you’re reporting to a response in another location, somewhere else, where your organization is embroiled in an incident and YOU are the ‘Them’. The other response communicators look at you and see a stranger. They might look at everyone in the JIC and see only strangers.

And who trusts strangers? Who gives ‘Them’ the benefit of the doubt? You’re starting off your response efforts with no reputational or relational gas in your tank. What do you do?

You become ‘Us’

There are two arenas where ‘Them’ must become ‘Us’ – one arena for efficiency, the other arena for impact.  First, become ‘Us’ inside Unified Command, with your response partners. Then become ‘Us’ outside Unified Command in the community as you all, together, communicate with affected stakeholders.

The people you will work with in the JIC are your response partners; learning to work well together with them will impact the efficiency of stakeholder outreach. This is the ‘inside’.

The stakeholders you’re reaching out to are the ‘outside’; the people impacted by the incident. They’re looking for information they can trust, as they try to decide what to do next. Their decision of what to do next will impact your response, for better for worse, much worse.

How will the Unified Command relate with affected stakeholders? This is the job of Joint Information Center; you have to become ‘Us’ to your stakeholders so they can trust the response more easily. This topic will be featured in a later post. For now, let’s focus on how to turn ‘Them’ into ‘Us’ inside Unified Command, in the JIC itself.

How does ‘Them’ become ‘Us’ inside the JIC?

Invest in this new team of ‘Them’ to build a partnership of responders. All of Unified Command is built on the expectation that the organization trumps the entities. Multiple entities come together for a single cause, and the organization provides the structure for people to work together.  So trust the structure. It has actually worked well for decades. Settle into your box on the response organization chart. Introduce yourself to the PIO, the APIOs, and other communicators. Then go to work turning the ‘Them’ into ‘Us’. Exercise some core team building muscles.

All high performing teams share common characteristics:

• people are good at what they do
• they learn to be good together
• they learn to support one another
• they learn to trust each other
• they learn to fight, and they learn to make up
• they learn to defend each other

How can the JIC look like this?

Accept that the people in the room are good at what they do. They may not do everything the same way as you, but they’re in the room because they are good at what they do. The organization that sent them has a reputation at risk in the response, and they chose this person to mobilize. Expect excellence.

Learn to be good together. Adjust your methods to enhance their methods. A winning baseball team doesn’t field nine pitchers, it fields an expert each for every position. Pitchers and centerfielders do a lot of things differently, but it’s their combined competencies that win games. The people around you that do things differently bring the strength needed for every communication task.

Support one another. Don’t reserve your resources for your own people. Offer them to the others. Support ‘Them’. Look for ways to augment others’ actions with your own. Help them excel. This starts as easily as sharing a charging cable, but expands into offering resources, knowledge and experience to each other. Engage with people around you and offer to help them out.

Offer trust. Everybody’s reputation is as stake, not just yours or your organization’s. Expect that each person will do the best they can and recognize that their best is pretty good. Assign tasks, release responsibility and trust the outcome.

Incident Command is built on a core value; the most qualified person will fill the most important role. As responder ranks grow, every person is slotted into the job they can do best. Unified Command expands on this by committing more resources with a common mission. With Unified Command, the best people should be making the best decisions for the best response. The ‘Most Qualified Individual (MQI) doctrine ensures such. Integrate this into your thinking, and trust the outcome.

Sometimes Command Staff (often Incident Commanders) break this rule when they don’t select the MQI, opting instead for familiarity and selecting ‘their’ person. Of course, this is institutionalization of ‘Them’. It is difficult to trust the ‘Them’ around you if they hold their positions because of institutional nepotism.  This topic will be a later post.

Learn to fight. What if your trust is misplaced, and excellence isn’t the outcome? Then fight, properly. Conflict is inevitable, and it is part of the formation of every high performing team. When you want the best, you have to expect it and demand it. And if you don’t get it, you need to push for it. Be sure to apply the core tenet of all effective conflict; what you do is not what you are. Don’t attack the person, address their actions or product. Respect them even when you have to correct them. Keep the discussion focused on the product and the actions; don’t assume or attack motivation or motives.

Then offer grace! Acknowledge the effort made for the outcome. Thank them and praise them for a job (finally) well done. Reinforce excellence.

Defend each other! When you’re working well together and trusting each others’ work, this will come naturally. Stand up for the end product. Push back on recommended edits to someone else’s work with the same vigor you would edits to your own. Protect and defend each member of the team. Don’t offer a human sacrifice unless it is yourself.

Outside

This is another topic, for another post: How do all you strangers in the room become ‘Us’ to your affected public?

Comments?  Leave them here.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

America mythologizes the rugged individual; the lone cowboy out on the range who can herd the cattle, find the gold, rassle up the rustlers, woo the heroine and speak sagely to the townsfolk before dispatching the villain. We all want to be like Shane, or John Wayne. We synthesize this rugged individualism into our communication persona, both as individuals and as organizations.

As individuals, we strive to be the strong silent type. We treat transparency as a weakness, keeping our problems to ourselves and controlling our image as much as we can. We hesitate to admit worry or fear, and we never admit failure. We practice a repressed form of communication, with information shared sparingly, defensively, hesitantly and reluctantly. We don’t talk in elevators. We don’t talk to sales. We don’t go up to Corporate. We don’t ask for help with projects.

Organizations do the same thing, so we end up with silos between departments, competition between business units, secrecy across operations and exclusive org charts to protect our turf. Our organizations look like us!

Then crisis slices into our existence. Something terrible happens and we react, then respond. As we live.

I remember a Sunday morning many years ago, when the Sunday newspaper had a front page story accusing my boss, and by default my employer: Lying, cheating and stealing. Abusing staff. Falsifying records. Explicit and exposing. Extra, extra, read all about it!

I remember how hard it was to get dressed and out the door to church. I remember thinking everyone was looking at me, feeling like every spotlight was on me. I just wanted to avoid everybody, sit in a corner by myself and avoid interactions, even with friends.

That is how we all feel when we walk in to a crisis. Even if it isn’t our fault personally, it’s our organization’s fault, or one of our coworkers fault. We suffer guilt and shame by association. Yet here we are, having to step in to stop an incident and start rebuilding our facilities, lives and reputation. We are afraid of blame, accusations, questioning, examining, all the intrusive interactions suddenly thrust upon us by the agonizing, public debacle we’re caught up in.

At that point, we discover that we’ve become our own worst enemy. As we begin to respond we run into the very communication barriers we’ve unconsciously erected in our everyday existence.

Communication barriers we’ve erected

What barriers have we unconsciously erected in our ‘day jobs’ that impact our ability to communicate in a response?

Hesitancy to share information:
In the best of times, it is hard to be open when we’re wrong, and now it’s the worst of times. We each hold a personal resistance to transparency that is magnified by stress. As communicators, we will have to push for maximum transparency, even when we ourselves are resistant. Our problem won’t age well. Our public won’t wait.

As painful as transparency feels right now, not sharing will hurt more, and for much longer. An organization that hasn’t communicated transparently in the ‘good days’ now is forced to communicate transparently on a very bad day. It’s your reputation at stake now, and you need to talk about it.

Frozen edit and approval processes:
Every day, our organizational chart reinforces who has authority over us. Our job descriptions spell out who we answer to. We exercise a daily process of draft and review: We draft, THEY review. We’ve all had the experience of getting our draft back with markups, revised words and commas, different paragraph structure and edits to punctuation, terms or tenses. We’re used to it, and we’ve likely labeled each editor’s peculiarities in our minds. We know who will always want to invert a sentence, who favors semi-colons; who wants colons: And all this during everyday message creation.

Now multiply this daily process by the stress of the situation and the import of the message. Content freezes in the edit/approval structure. Nobody is willing to say ‘OK’. Everyone wants ‘one more thing’ changed. Messaging stops.

Dinosaurs roaming the earth:
Our organizations aren’t prepared for today’s demand for fast response communication. Today’s communication reality is dramatically different from even a few years ago. Information is pervasive, actions are public, everyone is the media, there are no secrets. The communication curve is vertical. Everybody knows everything, or wants to know everything, right now. Accuracy is flexible. Truth is optional. Opinions are facts. The time span between an incident and public reaction is infinitesimal. Our world grows smaller and smaller.

As communicators we live in this new reality, but responders don’t. Yes, technology is impacting response planning, but not at the pace it has impacted response communication. While it takes only seconds for a Tweet to go around the world, response actions are still limited to time and space. It takes time to get people and equipment on-scene. It takes time to set up response efforts. It takes time to set up shelters, desks, cafeterias, restrooms. All response activities include the expenditure of time. Many response activities remain unchanged from 10, 20 years ago. The world isn’t physically smaller and equipment isn’t that much faster.

So almost everyone we work with is still thinking the way they always have. They aren’t aware of the dramatic difference in communication expectations. They don’t know that today’s stakeholders don’t want to know if you’ve ordered equipment, they want to know when it will arrive and where it is right now. They don’t want to know there are SCAT teams at work, they want to see them right now. They don’t want to know that the fire might be out in an hour or two, they want to know why it isn’t out right now.

Immediacy is everything. Everywhere. Only fast and continuous communications can buy patience.

Wrong arena:
Corporate-level executives may be outstanding in their field, but when it comes to response communication, they’re usually standing in the wrong field. They don’t understand that their reputation rides more firmly on communicating about response actions than it does on the response actions themselves.

Their mobilization priorities will reflect this, with vast sums of time, money and bodies mobilized to physical response, yet hesitation to commit time and resources to communication. A VP, perhaps even the CEO, will be dispatched to the incident location. Scores of executives will be mobilized to reinforce the physical activities of the response.

And we communicators will suddenly get answering machines, out-of-office notifications to emails and empty offices when we’re looking for resources or approvers. Today, trees don’t fall in the forest without the every interested person in the world hearing it. At the time when the world is looking for information and updates, our resources; approvers, spokespeople, Subject Matter Experts, are headed out to the wrong field.

Poor resourcing:
Communicators and Web servers have one thing in common: Every organization has only as many of each as are absolutely necessary. We all know where the budget axe falls first, and it isn’t on Marketing or Sales. On a good day, this is a good decision; expenses are minimized by cutting costs, income is maximized by increasing sales.

Most companies view communication as a cost center, so there are barely enough of us to maintain everyday functions. Sales grow at a given pace, market share increases at a steady rate. Stock value increases gradually. And every support function grows apace.

An incident blows this equation to pieces. Our organization will suddenly start spending money like water. They will hire contractors or call in already response resources. But they likely don’t have plans for an exponential growth in communication needs. They should.

In a crisis the cost of everything goes up; fail to communicate effectively and the cost goes up again, exponentially higher. The only thing protecting our brand, market share, consumer acceptance, right to operate or stock price is effective crisis communication. Yet it is likely that our organization has no plan for rapid escalation in communications.

What can we do to eliminate communication barriers?

Hesitancy to share information:
Desperate times require desperate measures. Accept the truth: We’re exposed by this event and hesitancy is not going to minimize our exposure. Not engaging now isn’t going to prevent the embarrassment of public scrutiny.

The best way to get out of the spotlight is to dive deep into it. Engage transparently. Share all possible information that will help our reputation. Our organization has probably done a lot of good things in the past that we can share, and if our people are actually involved in response actions they’re probably doing them well. Share these positive actions.

Frozen edit and approval process:
Thaw this out now, not during a crisis. Cultivate an understanding of the urgency of response communication at the corporate level. Practice like you want to play, with mini-drills consisting of a select scenario and a single initial statement containing responses to key stakeholder concerns. Push for pre-approval of short, specific and appropriate mini-statements for each stakeholder concern.

If you’re in a crisis and your editors and approvers are frozen, shorten your statements to the briefest possible content. Minimize words and ideas to minimize edits and delay of approval. If this doesn’t work, hope that Unified Command overrides your organization’s delay by fiat, salvaging some of your reputation by default.

Dinosaurs roaming the earth:
We all use new technology without fully considering it’s impact on our lives:

• We order shoes online and they’re on our front porch tomorrow
• We send emails to deal with customer issues.
• We answer work calls at every hour on our cell phones.
• We use Waze to get across town as fast as possible.
• We Skype with our relatives on holidays.

Everyone in our organizations does this, but many don’t consider that:

• Zappos has taught us to expect anything on our porch by tomorrow
• Gmail has taught us that we’ll get instant response to our concerns
• Samsung has led us to expect immediate contact and comment from any individual.
• Waze has taught us anything can be done faster.
• Skype has taught us that we can expect instant video images of whatever we’re interested in.

Connect these dots with your people. Help them see that it’s not just the world around them that has changed; they have changed too. Every stakeholder expectation is also their own expectation. Then examine communication protocols, and response protocols through the same expectations we hold every day.

Wrong arena:
Of all responders, communicators should have the most direct line to executive staff. But they’re likely outstanding in their fields, not ours.

The best leaders make other people better. They do this by directing their efforts and resources to maximize their people’s performance. As their people succeed, they succeed. We need to coach our leaders to remember this context for their actions in a response. There will be plenty of occasions later in the event when our leaderships’ presence will have huge impact, but right now supporting and facilitating our actions will have larger benefit.

Poor resourcing:
Response communications should have a large share of all first response resources. Anything less is a threat to your organization. Our organizations will excel when it dedicates the resources for us to.

Who can we call on? Do we have contingency agreements with outside firms? Can we even count on other communicators within our own organizations? If we can’t answer ‘yes’ to these question, we are under resourced for the most critical task we’ll ever have. Be sure we can say yes!

Call a truce!

Don’t be your own worst enemy.  Work now to identify, eliminate or ameliorate unconsciously erected crisis communication hurdles.  Make sure your organizations’ crisis response plans include clear processes and resources for effective communication.  The more we do to prepare, the more likely we will be able to communicate effectively when our organizations most need to.

Comments?  Leave them here.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!