Communicators’ Corner

Every so often, a sea change occurs in our communication world.

Sometimes without us realizing it.  We tend to notice major sea change, when its impact makes recognition and understanding unavoidable. But some changes sneak up on us and change our world without us realizing it.

In the FX television series “The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”, the prosecuting attorney’s office was portrayed as confident of their capability to win the case. They had the evidence, the chain of custody, the motive and the method. Yet the series portrays how, through a series of missteps, they lost the case badly.

As I watched the series (binge-watched – all 10 episodes over a single weekend!), I was struck at the lesson for communicators: If we don’t remain aware of the world changing around us we won’t even know the peril we’re in. Instead of watching and learning, we will try to address new issues with the same old strategies and tactics. We’ll end up losing before we even start.

In the show, the prosecution team failed to realize that the defense was launching an unforeseen strategy.  The defense team contested neither facts, timeline or evidence. Instead they challenged the veracity of the witnesses and used outside events to cast doubt in the jury’s minds. The prosecution didn’t lose because O.J. was innocent, they lost because they gave away the confidence of the jury. The prosecutors failed to establish a narrative leading to O.J’s guilt for the jury, instead they depended on the facts. The defense did provide a narrative regardless of the facts, and their narrative led the jury to doubt the prosecution’s case.

As expressed in the LA Times review of the series: “The explanation for the phenomenon was addressed in the “Conspiracy Theories” episode when Alan Dershowitz (Evan Handler) instructs his Harvard law class that, “You need to provide a narrative, not just in the courtroom; in the world” before saying, “Look at what the culture is becoming. The media, they want narrative too. But they want it to be entertainment.” It’s a meta moment in a television series filled with them.”

As proof of point, consider that O.J. lost the subsequent civil trial with the same evidence, where a judge, not a jury, rendered the verdict.

Dealing with Sea Change

New tactics that weren’t foreseen by the prosecution decided the ‘trial of the century’. The prosecution didn’t recognize the sea change, to a world where opinions and innuendo could neutralize facts.  In the same way, if we don’t adapt to emerging communication realities we will lose our effectiveness. If we don’t recognize the sea changes that impact communication strategy, we’ll expend scarce resources on the wrong actions and lose resources for the right actions.  Sea change leads to new strategies and tactics – old ones need to be discarded as relics of another time.  We need to recognize our relics – the old ways of doing business we keep using – and address them.

What are today’s response communication relics?

In today’s world some of ‘what we’ve always done’ is fruitless at best and wasteful of scarce resources at worst. Much traditional response communication strategy won’t help us succeed at effective stakeholder communication when we need it the most. Yet response structures tend to enforce and rely on the following relics:

1) The Press Release: Developed in the day when we depended on the Press to multiply our message, the press release gave members of the media key information and statements they could use to write their stories. It’s an anachronism today. The news cycle doesn’t follow media publication schedules, nor do progressive media use content of press releases to generate news stories. Today’s instant demand for the latest information forces media outlets to find and publish instant news. Media will publish or air longer stories when they can, but first they need a flow of information that helps them keep their viewers.

Crafting a press release for distribution wastes time and resources that could be used to disseminate facts and justification of response activities. Better for you to establish a flow of facts, as short as single statements. Give your stakeholders the ‘what’ first; then provide regular releases explaining why Command decisions are made with subsequent actions taken. The media you depend on to multiply your information will be happier and more cooperative if you are giving them the fact-flow they need for relevance.

2) The media packet: Today’s media packet is easily defined as ‘everything they can find online about you’. Response communicators must ensure an online presence of pertinent information, immediately posted for global use:

• What spilled? Post the product MSDS and other safety information or fact sheets.
• Are you using dispersants? Post the dispersant MSDS and any pertinent fact sheets about dispersant use.
• Are you mobilizing SCAT (Shoreline Cleanup and Assessment Technique) Teams? Publish local Ecology agencies’ SCAT fact sheets.
• Do you have equipment deployed? Are you cleaning a specific beach? Post images of it.
• Is Command making critical decisions about sensitive issues? Provide information that supports an understanding of these decisions.
• Questions about your financial capability? Make sure your latest Annual Report is available.
• Questions about your commitment? Post your latest Sustainability Report

3) The Press Conference:  Who is going to wait for a scheduled Press Conference to gather information or ask questions? Media don’t have the luxury of waiting for you to tell them what is happening. They need information now. Reporting resources are ever more scarce in the news business; the media outlets most affected by your incident may not even be able to expend news staff time and travel funds to attend your press conference.

Where will you hold the press conference? At Unified Command? Why would any media come to the Command center? Every response plan includes identification of a location for Press Conferences, usually close to Command but not in Command. Planners seem equally concerned with allowing media to get close, yet keeping them away. But nothing ever happens at Unified Command.

The action is all ‘out there’. If you invite media anywhere, they should be invited to visit any location where command activities are underway.  The only restriction of media access should be for safety reasons.

Think of responding to an incident that impacts shorelines: Why would media want to come to the command center?  The action is on the shore. Instead of Press Conferences, hold Press Briefings, where they’re needed, on a scheduled basis. Use the Press Briefing entirely for the ‘why’. Expect media to have the latest facts, and use the time with them to provide and explain Command perspective.

4) Prime time or drive time interviews: Countless exercise injects include provision of interviews at selected times. There is value in providing sound bites or video footage for media use, but there is no value in providing it only at specific times. Media can’t wait for a quote or image – they need it NOW.

You need to provide a constant source of quotes, images and video. This is one function of the Command location; Open a Media Center at Command facility where media can visit with subject matter experts, assigned information officers or command staff. Keep this center staffed with one or more spokespersons for an extended time, and for heaven’s sakes serve coffee and meals. Treat it as a drop-in center for wayward media. Welcome them with food and conversation – and it is all on-the-record conversation.

5) ‘Off the record’: Off the record doesn’t exist at any level. Remember this with community meetings, agency briefings or elected official briefings (Liaison). Anything you say can and will be used against you. Period. This does NOT mean you don’t talk. It just means you never consider any discussion to be ‘off the record’.

6) The photo pool: The Internet killed the photo pool, and cell phones and drones drove the nails into its coffin. Response communication today must include provision of high quality imagery and video, not by selected media but by trained response personnel. Communication plans and resourcing must include this capacity. YOU are the photo pool!

Don’t yield to sea change and give up the battle for imagery; providing high quality imagery from within the response is a powerful communication advantage. Media will use any images they can get, but they will replace them with better quality and better perspective images, that only response personnel can provide. There is no better source of high quality, in-demand images than a trained photographer can provide from locations only accessible to responders. They will be used, and they will replace the ubiquitous and impersonal distance shots.

7) The flight restriction: Drones. Enough said. The flight restriction may keep piloted aircraft and news helicopters out of a safety zone, but you can’t control drone images and video. This is another major sea change when every study shows the massive impact of video on stakeholder understanding and acceptance.

All the more reason to provide quality imagery and video.

And don’t accede to any suggestion to announce Command’s intention to disable or down drones to neutralize their intrusion. This ‘reasonable’ command impulse is death to Command reputation. Flight restrictions do apply to drones, as well as numerous other regulations for safe flying.  But not all drone pilots follow them.  Let law enforcement deal with this, and do not comment on it. Do you really want to be known as the people who shot down drones?  Or arrested people for flying them?

8) “No comment”: Many organizations coach line staff to defer media questions to an ‘authorized spokesperson’. This is common in responses as well, when Command instructs all physical responders to defer any media questions ‘to Command’ or ‘to the PIO’. The problem with this fourfold:

• The media is on-location. Media want to be where the people are and the action is. They’re not going to leave the people and action to ask someone else, somewhere else, their questions. They will either keep asking until someone talks, or they will report ‘a spokesperson was not available for comment’ – allowing themselves full reign to determine your reputation. If you want response personnel to defer to a spokesperson, the spokesperson needs to be where they are.
• It sounds evasive. Why don’t you want response personnel to talk? Are you trying to hide something? Any deferral requires careful coaching, and it won’t stop additional questions. Better to empower personnel to share specific comments and give them suggestions for how to defer if they really don’t want to talk.
• Someone else will talk. There is always someone who will talk. If not response staff, a bystander will always be willing to become the ‘instant expert’. Instructing people who know something about what is happening to refuse to talk simply ensures that a less knowledgeable and less qualified person can become the voice of the response.
• ‘Your people’ still talk.  Even if ‘your people’ don’t talk to the media on location, they still talk. They talk on Twitter, Facebook, across the fence, at dinner, out for drinks. This may be the greatest sea change;  every person is now the media, multiplying your message on multiple platforms.  You simply are not going to staunch the flow if information, and it will inevitably end up as public comment.  Far better to include all responders in the response information flow so they know the big picture of what’s going on, and to provide solid guidance in what to say in response to media inquiries.

How about you?

What response communication relics caused by sea change do you know of? What tactics have you used to be effective in today’s communication world? Share them here!

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Trauma exposes the real us: We may look sleek and shiny on the outside, but the truth is that there are always messes inside. When trauma slices across our lives, it exposes our secret side even as it impacts our prepared public face. In every personal crisis, all our internal stresses and strains come to light. The messy truth of our lives emerges and we have to deal with it. It’s part of counseling, part of social work, part of all our lives.

The same thing happens with organizations: No individual and no organization is completely transparent. If for no other reason, there simply isn’t time or interest in reporting every peccadillo or stumble. So we continue our everyday practice of being or looking ‘good enough’. We work to deflect attention from mistakes or misdeeds.

Then a crisis occurs, and suddenly everything is fair game. Past indiscretions don’t remain in the past. They’re always there, under the surface and waiting to bubble up when we least want them to. Past issues well-dealt with still emerge, and issues never resolved emerge anew alongside the latest outrage:

A refinery suffered a major accident resulting in injuries and fatalities. This refinery had endured decades of bad relations with employee unions and the local community. Guess what information emerged during the response: The old antagonisms between the company, the union and the community again rose to the surface.

Rumblings about poor corporate safety culture were reinforced with release of previous confidential internal memos outlining safety concerns. Community complaints and grievances were aired publicly. On top of the current accident and tragedy, all the old baggage came out on display.

There were practical impacts to this feud:

• The refinery owner didn’t allow photographs of the response efforts to be taken, due to fear that the communities’ prevailing animosity would use the images as ammunition against claims of poor safety record (“If we post pictures of responders in protective gear, the family will want to know why their dad didn’t have any”).
• Without effective imagery of people responding, the response was never ‘humanized’, defined instead by aerial photographs of the facility damage and spilled product.
• The discussion quickly shifted from incident response to the stewing debate about neglected safety and poor community involvement.
• In the poisoned atmosphere, the resulting bunker mentality merely ensured that the public dialogue ignored response efforts while focusing on decades-old issues.

You don’t get do-overs in crisis response. You can’t correct old wrongs. You have to play the messy hand you’re dealt. This will always happen. Every person, every family, every community and every organization has skeletons in the closet. They will be exposed, one by one, as a crisis unfolds. The glare of the public eye will find your every mishap or misdeed and broadcast it for all to see.

You need to be ready for this. It is inevitable. So what can you do?

Know your flaws

Don’t ignore your organization’s history. Research past incidents and issues that have impacted your community’s perceptions of your organization. Determine what has been done in the past to rectify or resolve them. Don’t be caught by surprise!

Accept your flaws yourself

Know that dirty laundry will be pulled out of the hamper, skeletons will rattle out of closets and dirt will be drug out from under the rug. Don’t waste time, emotions and energy in despairing or reacting. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. You need your energy and emotions for proper response communication.

Verify, verify, verify

Confirm the charges. It they are real, they are real. Acknowledge past issues and incidents. Express your commitment to prompt and accurate reporting. Assure stakeholders that you take all charges seriously, examine them carefully and own what is true.

Acknowledge reality

Don’t attempt to deny or deflect: Don’t throw red meat to a critical audience. If the charges are true, acknowledge them If they are new, say so. If they were previously received and addressed say so. If they are your’s, own them. Remember that facts tell us what, not why. Acknowledge the ‘what’.

Never deny the truth

Today’s pervasively connected world has foisted a level of transparency on all our actions. It is not possible to keep secrets any more. So here’s a radical thought: Tell the truth. Telling the truth may be painful and may expose your organization to a harsher light than you may wish, but it is also economical. Tell the truth, apologize and make amends, and the issue is done. If it comes up again, refer to the original acknowledgment and move on. Lies require constant repetition or reinforcement. Truth is truth. Save time and effort.

Promise action

Accept new allegations as valuable in your organization’s efforts towards safe and responsible operations. Express a commitment to include them in any investigation or discovery process. Promise to deal with them seriously, and to report back. Share why this action is important; it reflects your values, and your values define your reputation.

Pivot to the current response

Remind your stakeholders that you’re committed to an effective response for the current situation. Indicate that your organization is committed to resolving the current issue with all diligence. Express your commitment to transparency and sharing.

Move on

Receive, verify, acknowledge, promise and pivot. Then leave it behind. If the same charge comes up again, refer to the original statement. Turn the conversation back to current response information. If a new charge comes up, wash rinse and repeat.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Why does it seem like we go brain dead in a crisis? We plan and prepare assiduously, locking procedures into our minds and increasing our muscle memory with regular exercises. Then when ‘the big one’ hits, we seem to forget everything we’ve learned. Even if we don’t, it seems like everyone else has. Everything seems to slow down, and the procedures we’ve practiced suddenly don’t work. What happened? Stress happened, and our ‘lizard brain’ took over.

What’s our lizard brain? Here’s what the American Museum of Natural History has to say: “Lizards and humans share similar brain parts, which they inherited from fish. These parts handle basic body functions like breathing, balance, and coordination, and simple survival urges like feeding, mating, and defense. Together, these parts–the brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia–are casually referred to as your “lizard brain.”

Consider everything you do in a response to fall under the ‘defense’ role. We’ll leave the other simple survival urges to another time, though you see evidence of the ‘feeding’ urge in the amounts of food put out at for an exercise!

How we react to stress

You see it every time you’re stressed; you get tongue tied, you forget where you’re going, your motions slow down and you strain to hear what is being said. Our brains focus on survival, and stop thinking about the unimportant things like strategy, response activities, organization or critical thinking.

Of course this impacts our ability to do our jobs! It impacts every area of stakeholder communication. We depend on our ability to listen, hear, analyze and determine response strategy and words. And suddenly it isn’t there.

Sometimes the basic motions continue to work – enough people are in the room to develop a ‘group think’ that pushes us forward – enough habits coalesce into a resemblance of effectiveness.

But the lizard is still there, manifesting itself in subtle and dangerous ways. What impact does our lizard brain have on our actions? Much. Here are two examples:

1) The survival instinct – pushing the same buttons

Every response is different from every other response, but we can find ourselves doing exactly the same thing we’ve done before. Our muscle memory remains but the critical thinking it’s designed to support is hindered. So we do what we did ‘last time’. We do this because ‘the known’ feels safe, and our lizard brains are focused on safety.

We might even find our behavior reverting back months or years, to the most dominant habits we’ve developed. How do we break this survival instinct and focus on what needs to happen, now?

• Verify current facts: What happened? How bad can it be?
• Look forward: What will we have to do to return to ‘normal’? How long will it take?
• Focus outward: Who will be impacted by the event? What will their concerns be? How do we help them understand and accept our actions?

Draw these points out. Focus on them. Plan your actions around them. These considerations will allow you to break away from you lizard brain, leave behind ‘safety’ habits and pursue planned, logical and conscious actions relevant to right now.

2) Tunnel Vision vs. accurate decisions

We’re all aware of the false warning issues by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. A drill designed to assure preparation and capability devolved into doubts about the same. Note that results of the Agency’s internal investigation are still pending, and will likely be amended, appended or adjusted ad infinitum due to this very public failure. What caused such an error?

Let’s look at an early account:

“The state worker in Hawaii who sent a false wireless alert warning of an inbound ballistic missile on Jan. 13 issued the message intentionally, thinking the state faced an actual threat, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday.

The mistake, which touched off widespread confusion and panic in Hawaii, occurred when an emergency management services worker on the day shift misinterpreted testing instructions from a midnight shift supervisor, the commission said. Believing the instructions were for a real emergency, the day-shift worker sent the live alert to the cellphones of all Hawaii residents and visitors to the state.”

In another account, “In a written statement, the employee, who was not identified, said he believed there was a real emergency on Jan. 13 after hearing a recording that stated “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” But the employee did not hear the first half of the message that stated “EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE,” the FCC said in its preliminary report Tuesday. Though the recording also ended with the “EXERCISE” message, the officer did not hear it.”

The officer did not hear the most critical part of the message – the EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE part. Other people did, but there appears to have been ‘a misunderstanding’. And that misunderstanding can be caused by our lizard brain. It’s how we don’t hear words, don’t connect sentences, don’t think critically about what we have just heard or seen. Stress and threat cause this. Remember that the alert warning of a nuclear attack (Stress!) was sent out as part of a ‘no notice drill’ (More stress!).

Stress + More stress = Lizard Brain!

What can be done to prevent this type of tunnel vision? There are many possible solutions, and many recommendations will be posited from investigations, lessons learned and policy changes.

But here’s a short, simple discipline any of us can use right now:

• Read or listen to the entire message
• Ask yourself what it means
• Write or recite the original message out in your own words. Be sure you keep the same first word and last word (those pesky ‘Exercise’ or ‘Drill’ words, or thosae ominous ‘NOT an exercise’ or ‘NOT a drill’ words)
• Ask yourself who will want to know the content of the message
• Ask if the original wording will be clear to those people. (This step may have rectified the conflicting phrases ‘This is not a drill’ and ‘Exercise, Exercise,Exercise’)
• Reread the original message
• Accept/deliver/send it.

This approximately two-minute discipline forces us to engage in critical thinking, hopefully enough to break away from any tunnel vision so we can actually process the data correctly.

This applies to all received information. In this case an Exercise Text was misused, but it could have been an injury notification, an evacuation notice, an incident update. Test your understanding, comprehension and recognition of all information to be sure your lizard brain is safe in its cage.

Remember too that by definition, the more critical or impactful the information, the more likely our lizard brains will kick in, and the more important a process of re-engaging our minds becomes.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!