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!

Lizard Brains at Work

| January 30, 2018

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!

The Compassion Challenge

| January 25, 2018

Why don’t people care any more?

It’s a decades-old puzzle: Human beings are noted for incredible acts of heroism, kindness and generosity, yet we’re also known for selfish, self-centered actions and the capability to seemingly ignore evil as it occurs around us. Sociologists debate the answer, ethicists explain the issue and we just accept it and move on, certain in our hearts that we would never do such a thing. Each of us are, of course, individually better than humanity as a mass. We each consider ourselves ‘above average’ in our compassion, certainly better than ‘them’.

What does this have to do with communication? Your mission is to garner understanding and acceptance, both which require stakeholder engagement. Engagement is the secret sauce that makes us compassionate. Compassion is a by-product of engagement; once we engage with another person, we will help them, protect them, or rescue them.

This noble, real human dynamic is at risk from a new and subtle foe; self-publishing. When we tweet, post or Instagram we are practicing self-publication. At that point we see ourselves as ‘the news’, as the media. And with this self-assumed position, we become non-compassionate. Not less compassionate, as we all consider ourselves to be caring people, but non-compassionate. We choose not to respond to what we are reporting. We do this because we have been taught ‘media’ is above the fray of care and compassion, dispassionately reporting the facts without becoming involved in the story. We innately believe and accept that we will break our ‘journalistic integrity’ if we allow a story to impact us.

There is a reporting discipline in journalism that is substantially enforced within professional media: Don’t become involved in the story you’re telling! There is an objectivity gained from non-involvement that preserves the integrity of the media. Hence media outlets give us news clips of evacuated residents searching for water after a hurricane, but we don’t see news crews dispensing their personal water supply. We view people running from snipers but don’t expect members of the media to run out to shelter them. In fact, journalists who do ‘get involved’ in their story often have their professionalism questioned. Any individual who turns on their cell phone camera intrinsically shares in this mindset: There is a fundamental difference between recording and responding.

As a communicator, you are probably already considering the impact of this new reality. When everyone is the media, nobody is the stakeholder:

  • When everyone is reporting instead of viewing, who are you communicating to?
  • When people are talking instead of listening, what can you say?

The ramifications of this in effective communication are large. How do we get people to listen to our story, understand our actions and support our efforts, if they aren’t listening? As communicators, we need to find ways to capture citizen journalists and turn them back into citizens. An issue becomes an issue because it impacts people, so we will always need to engage with our impacted stakeholders. We need to devise messages that pull them away from their platforms back into our community.

Some suggestions to bridge this compassion gap:

  • Invite ‘citizen journalists’ to your party: Initiate opportunities for people to send you videos, photos, reports or suggestions. Share news releases with all who request them. Include them in media briefings, or offer an equivalent town hall meeting.
  • Welcome them in: Like a good host, thank them for coming, praise them for what they brought, and feature their gifts as important and appropriate.
  • Engage them in the discussion: Get them talking with you, invite them to join your ongoing conversation about the response.
  • Help them report: Offer them new information, images or people to talk with.
  • Ask them what they think: Pull them into the conversation that leads to understanding. Use surveys, acknowledge key questions, meet in small groups.
  • Be real: Speak truth. Personalize events’ impacts and actions’ benefits. Don’t be afraid to express dismay at what has happened. Offer condolences for losses.
  • Say you’re sorry! Expressing sorrow is not the same as accepting responsibility. We expect too much of ‘I’m sorry’ when we’re a perpetrator, but too little of ‘I’m sorry’ when we’re the participant.
  • Invite them back: Develop long-term interaction for future conversations and reporting. Pull them in to the communication cycle. Sow to their interest in the event and reap their investment in the response.

At the end of the day…

Capture, captivate and convert your ‘citizen journalists’ by being as personable, engaged and involved as you want them to be. Geography says they’re impacted citizens before they are professional journalists. They are more impacted than they say or post. Give them the respect and ownership they need to accept, hear and understand your message.

If engagement is the secret sauce of compassion and caring, aim at engagement and assume caring will follow.

Every incident brings upheaval, fear, inconvenience and often actual harm. No response effort can effectively meet every need of impacted stakeholders. We can hand out dollars all day, but the cost of doubt, fear, anger or outrage is higher than we can pay. The Social License to Operate highway may be paved with dollars, but it is open to traffic when the affected community embraces your activities. All the money in the world won’t buy respect or trust. Only engagement will. Take the effort to engage your ‘citizen journalists’ so they can help tell your story.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Related article:  A Brave New World – Lessons for Communications

The Danger of Being Unprepared

| January 20, 2018

What happens if you’re not prepared when a crisis strikes? What will happen if you simply haven’t got around to crafting a crisis communication strategy, plan or process? What could go wrong? First of all, remember that 99% of the time, no preparation is enough preparation. This is not an excuse to defer the important work you have to do. It is, however, the main reason you never get around to it. There is no daily fee charged for delaying.

But don’t forget the other 1% of the time: When you need to communicate RIGHT NOW, but you can’t because you haven’t prepared. Here’s a list of what will go wrong should you be caught unprepared when you really, really should have been prepared.

No communication strategy

Most likely, your organization’s leadership daily chooses to delegate the responsibility for stakeholder communication to others. This includes marketing, public relations, government relations and employee communications. These tasks are daily delegated to ‘experts’ to carry out. There may be corporate-level emphasis on some specific functions, likely marketing more than others. CEO’s seldom reach their rank because they are good at public relations; they get there because they are good at management, growth strategies, finance or investor relations. Or they had the idea that got the company started. Or they inherited their position.

One thing for certain, it is the rare and special CEO who lies awake at night thinking about crisis communication. They delegate it and they expect it to be done. Then they ignore it. When was the last time you were called into a meeting to help your executive leadership understand the public impact of a possible decision, and to ask your advice on how to deal with it? If you’ve had this happen to you at all, you and your organization are fortunate.

Now imagine that something very bad has happened. Operators are under stress, costs are suddenly going through the roof, regulators are concerned, customers are cancelling orders, shareholders are asking questions, and reporters are calling…. It is suddenly not a good day. Everyone asks; ‘Where’s our public affairs person?’ Someone remembers your name. You are called in and told; “Make it better!”

Congratulations, your newly coined strategy is ‘make it better’. But you don’t have direction, buy-in, support or attention. As quickly as it turned to you, leadership’s focus has now switched away from you as they focus their efforts on operational areas that have always held their attention, not stakeholder communication.

Your responsibilities? Great. Your authority and resources? Small. You’re in the worst possible place to be. You’ve been given responsibility to immediately provide immensely important stakeholder communication. The leadership of your organization has charged you to save their proverbial bacon and your career is on the line. A crisis communication strategy not only identifies risks and actions, it also identifies authority, resources and recourse. Without this you will be spinning your wheels alone.

You might attempt to outline a basic plan: Listing of risks/events, affected stakeholders, likely concerns, key actions and messages, dissemination plan and resource list. You might even get it done. But you’ll likely not get it approved, let alone implemented. It won’t be approved because everyone is too busy and distracted. You won’t get it implemented because nobody will be willing to make such a decision under stress/threat/risk.

Your only recourse will be to implement it anyway, and risk the wrath of reluctant responders for what you did. But even if you manage to implement a last-minute strategy, you’ll likely find that you can’t get staff dedicated to support you and you can’t get people to respond to any of your requests. Everyone in your organization has gone into crisis mode. Email in-baskets are instantly overflowing. Everybody now has two jobs to do: their normal one and their crisis one. Without an accepted, approved and implemented crisis communication strategy and plan, you are not on their list.

The cost of this failure? Your organization is being labeled more non-responsive with every moment that goes by without information. Affected stakeholders are deciding whom they will trust to give them information, and your organization isn’t on their list. They’re starting to listen to people telling them what to do, and your voice isn’t being heard. They’re starting to worry about their safety, jobs, homes and future, and you’re not helping them. Good will is going away, and it is going away for good. Minutes wasted in failing to communicate early in a response become hours expended later to regain a voice and stakeholders’ trust.

No priority for response communications

In addition to failure to plan and subsequent performance issues, you will likely face a persistent and pernicious problem: perpetual lockout from important deliberations, decisions and actions.

Remember that other people your organization are not communicators, so they are not considering communication risks or issues when they make decisions. Most people regularly feel that their specific function in an organization is one of the most important functions. A crisis response often breaks this, but it does so by edict: everyone is told what is the most important objective, and everyone focuses on the elements and tangents of that named objective.

Without development, review, acceptance and implementation of crisis communication strategy, stakeholder communications default to lower and lower priority, attention and resourcing. Not only will you will not be at the table, over time you will be moved further and further away from the table. You will struggle for attention and resources from people who spend less and less time considering your needs.

Then, when stakeholder communication isn’t on the thought horizon, someone under stress will make a bad decision about a public-facing action. Response needs will suddenly be apparent and response plans will be activated. But without a priority on crisis communication, response efforts will turn inward. Decisions will be made in a vacuum, and not communicated with a worried public. Reporters will be shunned, TV crews will be turned away for ‘security reasons’. Community meetings will be cancelled due to ‘schedule conflicts’. Media will be told there’s no time for questions. Activists will be arrested, badly. People will be told that solutions are too technical to explain, and to ‘just trust us’.

Credibility and trust fly away, at the hands of people who should care the most; they just don’t know they should. It isn’t a priority.

Communicators not mobilized in time

Since response communications aren’t seen as a priority, response communicators often aren’t on the callout lists. Instead of being notified immediately when an incident occurs, you may be notified late, or not at all. It may take someone at a higher level of the organization who has worked with communicators before to realize you need to be brought into the response.

Unless you’ve been able to enforce a strong communication process into your organization’s response plans, producing accurate and timely communication products is going to be challenging enough without any additional delays in notification.

If you haven’t been able to enforce a strong communication process and priority into your organization’s response plans, you will always be in this position, having less time to produce stakeholder communication product. The delay will only exacerbate what will already be a very difficult process. Consider delayed notifications as an additional cost for ineffective planning and implementation.

No response communication staff structure

If you haven’t thought out what you will need to do during a response, particularly during the first few hours of a response, you won’t know who, or how many, staff resources you need. If you don’t know whom you need, you won’t have their contact info handy to mobilize them. If you could effectively mobilize them, you won’t be able to make clear, concise task assignments based on qualification.

The result? A lack of communication resources; you will be overwhelmed with tasks, time demands and deadlines.

Only careful planning can prevent this dilemma. It’s not enough to know what communication products are going to be needed; you have to know who will produce them; those individuals will need pre-approved templates to use and they will need to know any necessary approval flow and distribution plans. They need to be available, up-to-speed and capable of actually helping you.

If you haven’t identified needs and staff resources, quantified staff member capabilities and assigned specific roles, you won’t have any staff to help you. If you do mange to mobilize staff, they’ll likely spend their time waiting for you to tell them what to do, or you will have staff taking the wrong actions and doubling your workload.

No statement template preparation

It is very difficult to be creative under stress, a constant in response communication. You may think you are good at ‘winging it’ under pressure, but you won’t be.

In the early response, when the greatest demand for information is matched with the least amount available, we all need prepared statements that will frame the few facts we can confirm with statements of commitment and caring. If you’re having to write as you go, two things will happen: You’ll be too late because you’re waiting for ‘a bit more’ information, or you will forget to frame the facts in a context that will give you an opportunity to continue the conversation later.

Templates aren’t generated to shield your organization from scrutiny; they’re designed to welcome it by focusing on your strengths. They aren’t written to hide bad news in a bunch of ‘feel good’ commentary; they’re written to frame truth in context with the response efforts. Well-written templates allow you to maximize use of verified facts while welcoming stakeholders wanting more. Finally, prepared templates ensure that you are able to actually communicate at all, since they are already approved for your use. Which leads us to…

No approvals

Remember that stress reigns throughout a response. Placid coworkers become panicked, mellow supervisors become manic. Communicators become tongue-tied and attorneys become obdurate. The challenge of gaining content approval during normal times is multiplied in a crisis.

And that is if you can even find someone to approve content. Often, all key decision makers are in transit – either to the office or to a plane, on a plane or in a vehicle. Cell phones don’t work in congested command spaces, laptops are left at home, and IT is scrambling to match bandwidth to appliances while leadership waits to receive anything from anyone. Email inboxes explode, text messages multiply all by themselves, phones aren’t heard, or aren’t answered. And your approvers disappear into the ‘fog of war’.

Your approval trail leads nowhere. About the time you do find someone, the burgeoning command structure moves them up or down the command chain. So you wait, already late and watching seconds, minutes, or hours go by. The phones ring with media questions. Your organization’s social media accounts fill up with comments and a pervasive theme emerges: Your organization is choosing not to communicate. Every minute without released information is verification of this; suspicion becomes conviction, and conviction leads to condemnation. Without recourse and without a voice, you watch your task shift from communicating facts to defending inaction. And there is nothing harder to defend.

Unauthorized messaging

At this point it is almost inevitable that someone will say something to break the cycle. A responder may tell a friend, who tells a friend, who calls the media. A spouse may write a post on Facebook. Or an instant expert, retired fireman, or ex-employee will become available for interviews. And the information available veers away from accurate facts, to suspicions, impressions, suppositions, recollections – anything but truth.

This dynamic is inevitable in the best of responses, but it can be moderated by quick and continuous release of factual information and context from response officials who have been authorized to speak for the response. If you fail to provide information when your stakeholders need it, others fill the vacuum. They often have neither the capability nor the concern for accuracy Wrong information is presented in a sensationalist, biased manner. Opinions and agendas parade as facts. Graphic, sensationalist imagery is used without regard to privacy or propriety. The end result at best is a public lumbering off after misinformation. At worst, desperately needed trust is squandered, accurate information is overridden by false information, and false information leads to public harm, reputation damage and loss of trust in response efforts.

No distribution capability

Assume that you managed to scribble up a brief update statement, by some miracle an approver dropped by on their way to the restroom, and your statement was actually approved for distribution!

Now what? You may not have access to your organization’s distribution tools, so you only have your personal or work email accounts. You can’t send the release to your list serve or a commercial distribution vendor; that’s another level of review, approval and action by people other than yourself. They likely aren’t available, either because they’re on their way to the response or off-shift; crises never happen during regular work hours. And you don’t have a contact list of key stakeholders ready to use anyway.

Your best option may be to go outside to the gathered media to share the information you have, or to post it on your Twitter account. In either case you’ve generated an ‘exclusive’, not on the basis of relative value of each outlet, but on their availability. And you’ve missed the most important people to share the information with. Without preparation, your critical audiences will likely be neglected, and they may become… critical.

The solution?

There’s only one: Prepare now. Count this blessed 99% time as an opportunity to get ready for the brutal 1%.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Policy Without Perspective Can Ruin Your Reputation

| January 10, 2018

Here’s an example of how policy without perspective can ruin your reputation, courtesy of the Vermilion Parish School Board, in Louisiana.  Take your pick of the following headlines:

Watch and read KATC’s full coverage of the Vermilion teacher incident

  • “He did exactly what he was hired to do. He followed the procedures completely.”

Teacher handcuff video leads to death threats, investigation

  • “His job is to make sure we have an orderly meeting,” Fontana said. “He knows what the law is. He knows what our policy is…The officer did exactly what he is supposed to do.”

Teacher handcuffed, arrested after questioning school board about superintendent’s contract

  • School Board President Anthony Fontana said in an interview that the security officer did nothing wrong. “He was just doing his job,” he said.

YouTube carries a video of the incident:

Communicators, providing perspective is our job.

At the end of the day, a local School Board issue became a national issue.  Why?  Because policy was followed to the letter.  What went wrong?  Nobody considered the public repercussions from perfectly enforced policy.

Any policy that touches the public needs to be carefully reviewed to ensure that it accomplishes the desired result.  In this case, the School Board’s policy to keep order at public meetings should have been reviewed to be sure that enforcement wouldn’t sabotage overall Board objectives.

School Boards and their elected/appointed officials depend on public support to accomplish their mission-critical objectives.  They depend a harmonious relationship with dedicated teachers.  They depend on qualified leadership.  In this event, enforcing policy at a meeting has sabotaged all these relationships.

Only communicators can provide perspective

Only communicators are used to living on ‘the outside’.  We deal with stakeholders every day, so we are the ones who can provide perspective.  One of our roles within our organizations is to protect policy makers on ‘the inside’ from the people on ‘the outside’.   But this doesn’t mean that our ‘insiders’ can set policies or procedures that impact the ‘outsiders’ without careful review.  And we are the ones who need to review them, using our ‘outside’ perspective.

In this event, all the negative national attention was the result of a policy to have law enforcement officials remove people from public meetings.  Due to lack of proper perspective in casting the policies, the Vermilion Parish School Board’s local issue about the Superintendent’s compensation has become a negative national story.

  • Tone deaf policy and enforcement has led to death threats and national scrutiny.
  • Media is noting every negative fact of this issue, from apparent sexism to avoidance of media calls.
  • Teachers are outraged.  The Louisiana Association of Educators has denounced the actions.
  • The public who matter to this School Board – local parents and voters – are embarrassed and disturbed
  • A single action in accordance with policy has alienated virtually every stakeholder group

What about policies of your organization?  How do you know what to look for?

  • Any policy that leads to public impact should be carefully examined.
  • Use ‘the outside’ perspective to review proscribed actions.
  • Modify policies or procedures to prevent public outrage.
  • If policies or procedures can’t be changed for safety reasons, be ready to immediately explain and defend them.

What does hindsight suggest in this case?

  • Removing people from public meetings is fraught with consequences – none positive.
  • Pervasive video capability ensures that any physical actions taken will be portrayed in the worst possible light
  • Video is capturing expressions of disapproval or shock from bystanders as well – your incident’s own Greek chorus
  • A trained moderator could have acknowledged concerns and moved on to other petitioners
  • At worst, the meeting could have been adjourned – a local issue but not a national one!

What would YOU do?  Leave a comment below!

This issue is further examined in my post: A brave new world – lessons for communications

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Don’t Fight the Last War

| January 9, 2018

Don’t look in the wrong direction!

Responders easily look in the wrong direction for planning. They tend to focus on past responses and ask past-tense questions: What happened last time? What could we have done better? As a result, Command strategy is built on best practices, policy and process – but all from past experiences. Truly effective response strategy includes both looking backward, to be sure we’re incorporated lessons from the past, and looking forward to be sure we’re ready for future events.

The danger of looking backward instead of looking forward

A major university narrowly escaped impact from a hurricane that decimated major portions of their city. University leadership determined that the campus was intact and utilities were working, so they announced a resumption of classes only three days after the hurricane.

When the reopening announcement was made, campus communicators were flooded with irate comments protesting the insensitivity of the leaders in expecting students back so quickly. Students’ homes had been destroyed, streets were still flooded, vehicles and busses remained inoperable and many students were still dealing with trauma. Still, the campus reopening decision was announced resulting in great detriment to their reputation as well as poor attendance by returning students.

Why was this decision made? Partly due to a previous major storm, when campus leadership waited more than a week to reopen. In that instance, they were criticized for slow recovery and reopening. In the true spirit of looking backward, lessons learned from the previous storm, along with the university’s resolve to portray stronger leadership, combined to forge a wrong decision.

Past performance is important and learning from past experiences is critically important, but the world moves on. Events themselves are unique, so rote decisions based on past data can be damaging. In this example, communicators had to deal with their university’s self-induced stakeholder relations crisis on the heels of a natural disaster. The natural disaster was unavoidable; the self-induced crisis was completely avoidable.

Looking forward

Communicators are uniquely positioned to influence Command decisions because our core ethos is different. Communicators are always looking forward. In a sense, we’re pseudo-marketers: As marketers create a need for consumption, communicators identify a need for information. Our product is not widgets, but words. We want to identify information needs and respond to them with communication products. We are by profession looking forward, not behind. Our work is always in front of us, always new and always changing.

We are the people in the room who can help focus Command on the importance of NOW to counter the influence of THEN. In the case of the university, the issue should have been on current realities and sensitivity to current conditions, not the rote reflex to prevent what had happened before. The university had been blessed with minor damage, mostly free of the storm impacts.  They even had water and power. But a look up from their past practice and out their windows would have revealed the real, current issues to be addressed before their decision was made. Communicators’ input would have captured this current reality, not the past one.

We need to perform debriefs of past responses, create lessons-learned and apply them to our planning and practice. But our discipline should not be insular. Our plans and strategies should reinforce right thinking as well as right actions. Every event will have its own dynamics and we need to practice the discipline of avoiding fixed strategies in fluid situations. Fortunately this is a trait of communicators. We just need to remember to do it! Every response should start with a real-time reality check: What just happened, who is being affected and what are their current concerns?

Share your knowledge from looking forward

As a communicator, you need to help responders make more informed decisions:

  • Who is being impacted by the event?
  • What concerns will these impacted stakeholders have?

In this incident, students were impacted by the hurricane in every way. Some were flooded out of their homes, some were stranded in flooded neighborhoods, some had to drive through damaged and dangerous areas, some had lost their source of transportation. All had greater issues to deal with than attending class. Parents were concerned for their students. Students were afraid to drive to campus,  trying to dry out their homes, replace lost items, find missing loved ones.

A careful reflection on these external influences would have impacted the school’s reopening decision. In fact, after the fact, the resultant outrage led to additional decisions not to require attendance for the entire week. To repair their self-inflicted issue, they actually ended up allowing the same level of student absence as experienced in the prior storm!

In every response, it will be the communicator’s role to focus the response outward to affected stakeholders, and to make decisions from this proper perspective. Of all the seats at the Command table, the PIO’s is the most externally focused, hence the most sensitive to the real-time, real-people issues facing the stakeholders who hold your reputation in their hands. Don’t expect other responders to see this, in fact expect resistance to your vision. But persevere. You are unique and your perspective is powerful to protect your organization.

How does a communicator share the process of looking forward?

When you’re at the Command table, help Command Staff recognize the current realities that you can identify from your position.  Share the sensitivities you have as a communicator:

  • What are the current physical realities or response actions – What is the stakeholder impact?
  • Who is being impacted by these realities or actions – Who are the stakeholders?
  • What will affected stakeholders be concerned about – What are the issues?
  • Will planned actions placate or provoke our stakeholders?
  • How can we modify our plans for the best outcome?

Responders focus on actions without necessarily regarding their non-operational impact.  You as a communicator will have the greatest, or the only, understanding of non-operational impact. In the case of the university, they were focused on reopening an unaffected campus, not on their already affected students.

Communicators alone keep track of non-response stakeholders. Responders job assignment includes working with other responders, not the people outside the room. You alone have the greatest awareness of event stakeholders (people who are interested in your actions). University responders in the room were focused on physical capacity, not individuals’ fears or emotions. They saw the unaffected buildings but didn’t see the affected people.

Without knowing stakeholders, responders can’t possibly identify stakeholder concerns.  Communicators deal with issue identification every day, so share your expertise. Every concern on the university responders’ lists had been checked off. They knew campus grounds and buildings were safe – but they weren’t thinking about roads, buses or neighborhoods around the campus

Separated from stakeholder awareness, the best physical response decision can cause more disruption than it prevents. Only communicators can share likely impact or outrage from an operational decision. An understanding of stakeholders (students) realities would likely have led to a longer campus closure, at least more flexibility in attendance requirements.

Looking forward is important

When you’ve fully shared the non-operational impact of Command decisions, highlighted stakeholders and their sensitivities and shared likely conflict or outrage, Command staff can make a better decision about the best action. In this case, instead of being inadvertently tone-deaf, campus leadership could have been seen as sympathetic and compassionate. Strong leadership would have been portrayed with a heart.

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