Take actions to ensure that you are really ready to communicate effectively.

It’s time to take actions to ensure that you are really ready to communicate effectively. The recommendations I offer below, for greater and more focused preparation, are formed by actual experience. Each will be expanded on in future posts, but these are actions that you can take right now.

Of course you can do this later. Nothing is going to happen right now, right? Consider the definition of an accident: “An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.” When is ‘unexpectedly’? When is ‘unintentionally’? Maybe ‘now’ should mean ‘now.

The hard truth is that when we think we’re really ready, we’re not.

This is the time to realize that crisis preparedness is more than thinking about performing risk assessment and stakeholder mapping, planning to prepare statement templates, approval processes or distribution lists, or reviewing policies. It’s time to take action.

Mark Twain has frequently been credited for Charles Dudley Warner’s phrase: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

There is a big difference between thinking and doing. Instead of worrying about unpreparedness, you need to become prepared. If you don’t take concrete steps to enhance your preparedness, all you really know is that you be neither ready to communicate in a crisis, nor allowed to communicate effectively.

What do you need to do to be really ready?

Polish your policies

Make sure your organization’s policies support rapid communication:

• Protect your position of being the source of initial information for stakeholders who are important to your organization.
• Incorporate permission to utilize the information from initial regulatory reporting as key facts for your initial statement.
• Ensure you can use reporting organizations as key non-media contacts for your initial statement.
• Formalize the process of utilizing HR to disseminate updates to employees within your organization.
• Codify use of Government Relations contacts or processes for distribution to elected officials.
• Institutionalize use of a short top media list.

Socialize your policies

Communicate all policy changes and planned actions with all key decision makers. Remind them of the primacy of stakeholder communications to preserve your organization’s reputation – and likely their personal reputations.. Share your commitment to regular review and testing. Build a schedule of tests based on your risk assessment, starting with the most critical risks.

Practice against your policies – the mini-drill

You don’t need to wait for a formal response exercise to test your communication preparedness. Instead, conduct mini-drills on a regular basis. For each mini-drill:

• Select a likely scenario from your risk assessment.
• Use your statement templates to create an initial release.
• Send it to a list of internal contacts, would-be approvers, HR, Legal and/or Government Relations. Any person who would hold approval rights in an actual response.
• Add language indicating that this DRAFT statement would be immediately distributed in an actual event.
• Follow up to actually get ‘approval’ from each person, so they become aware of the actual approval workflow.
• Prepare a stakeholder map for the selected scenario, including key concerns and questions.
• Formulate three key messages to address the identified concerns and three inquiry responses for the identified questions.
• Identify information needed for your second release.

After your mini-drill, evaluate what happened

• Was the template adequate for use in your selected scenario, or does it need editing? If so, edit it now.
• Did you receive a quick response from your approvers? Did they recognize the urgency and response appropriately? Did you have to make edits to your release? Do you have to work on the approval process? If so, do it now.
• Were you able to quickly create a stakeholder map and write key messages and inquiry answers? If so, save the inquiry answers for later use.

Congratulations, you just increased your capability to be really ready to communicate in an actual response!

Today’s ‘Citizen Journalist’ and ‘Instant News’ communication environment is a ‘weather maker’ that can easily turn a squall into a tempest, a tempest into a cyclone. There is no time margin when communicating an incident response. Your organization will go from back burner to front pages in minutes. Its time to do something about the weather instead of merely complaining about it.

Polish your policies, socialize them and practice against them! If you don’t do this now when you have the luxury of time and training, when it is time to communicate in an actual response, you can’t and you won’t.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Even if you are ready to communicate, it’s likely your organization isn’t.

Let’s assume for a moment that you’re actually prepared to communicate. You have your risk assessment, your stakeholder map and a current distribution list. You’ve maintained updated statement templates and you’ve tested the process regularly.  Is your organization ready for crisis communication as well?

‘The call’ comes, you capture the key facts, you plug them into a statement template and you send it up the ladder for approval. Time is precious but you’re confident you’ll get the green light immediately.

Instead, you get one, more or all of the following responses:

• No response – approvers are too busy to get back to you
• The Legal morass – the dreaded “You’re going to have to run this by legal”
• An interminable approval process – additional layers of approval, these could be corporate, investor relations, legal, or some other newly identified entity
• Statement edits – from everybody, independently
• Additions – “You have to add this (new or note new information) before you send it”

Any and every one of these responses delays communications. None should apply, but often all are applied. You are back into the approval morass, back to delay and possible defeat.

What happened?

Simple really – the stakes went up. Your organization is under stress from an unplanned event. Everybody is surprised, everybody is reacting, and everybody is busy. The possibility of delay and failure has escalated at every level.

I’ve come to understand that organizations usually act like people, because they’re made up of people making decisions for the organization. The greater the immediate risk, the greater the likelihood that policy and practice goes out the window, replaced by very human reactions.

Everybody wants crisis communication output to be perfect. Everybody wants to weigh in, everybody would like someone else to make the final decision, and everybody is afraid they will personally be blamed. All the team building, supportive policies, cooperation and consultative values evaporate. And the process stops at the worst possible time.

And time is precious. Stakes do go up, and delay rapidly ratchets them even higher. But at this very moment when speed is of the essence, the capability for rapid crisis communication is constricted.

In virtually every actual crisis I’ve been a participant in I’ve seen courageous individuals make key decisions that break this vicious cycle of delay, usually at the risk of their own careers. As a communications professional and as a person of integrity, you need to be ready to pull the trigger when nobody else will.  Frightening, yes.  Necessary, likely.

Let’s not stop here; what can you do to provide protection for yourself?

Sanitize your initial statement

Your initial statement should be an action statement, with minimal facts and maximum intent. Acknowledge the event, state your intentions and promise more information. By minimizing facts, you minimize risk of misstatement. Maximizing intent promotes fast approval.

Minimize your initial distribution

Prepare a short list of contacts for your initial distribution. Key media, key elected officials, key agencies and key internal stakeholders.

• Use the list of required response notifications. By regulation your organization is already notifying key response agencies. Use this list to match to key contacts for your initial statement.
• Add the top local media.
• Add key elected officials and known community leadership. Use your government-relations cohorts to identify this list.
• Add an HR contact for additional distribution to corporate leaders. Note: Most crisis planning includes notifications to employees from the operational side. Have HR map this for their distribution, and add their distribution responsibility as a preparedness requirement. DO NOT neglect to plan ongoing, continuous distribution of updates to employees via HR tools. Employees are a greatly neglected stakeholder group throughout a response

Solidify the pre-approval process

Request approval to use key facts, scrubbed templates and distribution lists for the initial statement, based on your receipt of the original call. Leadership must understand that this initial statement will be released as surely as agency notifications are made, and as automatically. Move the approval fight to subsequent releases, not the first one.

Mobilize your leadership

Remind your leadership that establishing immediate initial crisis communication opens the door to ongoing communication. Remind them that fast communication opens doors for additional information sharing. Immediate crisis communication is frightening when we’re under stress, but it is the best action to take. Help doubters to personalize this process: If they have bad news that impacts their families, is it better to share it or hide it? Will their family trust more if they share it or if they hide it? Does bad news get better with age, or worse?

You have minutes to establish your organization as a reliable, trusted provider of response information.  If you don’t succeed, other sources will step in to provide their version of the truth.  Remember that many sources can complete the ‘what+why=truth’ equation – with misstated ‘what’ and misspoken ‘why’. And you will have lost your opportunity to communicate.

Plan now to make sure your organization is ready for crisis communication.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Does your organization have a vision for effective crisis communication?

How would you rate your organization’s readiness for effective crisis communication? Like the old Wendy’s advertisement, do you see any beef, or is it all hot air? Let’s take some quick measurements:

• Do you have the staff resources you need to do communicate in a crisis?
• Do you have an adequate training budget to support readiness?
• Can you invest in new technology that helps you communicate better?

Your response to each of the above is likely; “Not as much as I want and not as much as I need”. Crisis communicators often face the reality that in their organization’s budget battles, response communication seems to rank slightly below fresh ground coffee.

Have you ever asked yourself why? Do you need a better cost-benefit analysis? Perhaps you need to use better measurements of effectiveness. Maybe you need to subscribe to better analytics – except of course you don’t have the budget.

Or maybe you have to ask yourself why crisis communication doesn’t seem to be very important to your organization.

Financial counselors know that the best way to determine a person’s spending priorities is to look at their checkbook, where dollars and cents represent desires and convictions. In your organization, if you don’t have funding for needed staff, tools or initiatives, the core issue is likely a lack of conviction regarding the importance of effective crisis communication and a lack of a vision to do better.

You’re trapped in this lack of vision for effective crisis communication. Your organization’s decision makers have weighed the risk of poor stakeholder communication in an incident against the cost of being prepared and you have come up short. They think that current funding is enough for effective stakeholder communication should something happen, but given that communication is actually the most critical element of any public-touching activity, they are actually betting on nothing happening.

This may seem a valid decision in corporate or organizational crisis planning, but it isn’t applied anywhere else. Consider the following day-to-day realities of life in a world where we recognize the value of preparation:

• Your organization is either insured or self-insured, and has reserves for multiple contingencies.
• It provides health insurance for employees, likely life insurance for executives.
• At a personal level, corporate decision-makers fasten their seat belts, lock their houses and frequently check on their children.

All of these actions reflect reasonable and responsible preparation in response to conscious or unconscious risk assessment. Each is evidence that decision makers know that things can and will go wrong. They just aren’t applying this reasonable and responsible thinking to crisis communication planning.

Virtually every organization in existence has a much more complex mix of variables, risk and exposure than any family unit. Greater complexity leads to greater risk, and greater consequences. An incident’s impact is multiplied by risk; consequences are multiplied by the impact.

As a communicator, you know that today’s increased ability to share information has dramatically elevated the reputation risk to your organization. ‘Citizen Journalism’ has given birth to faster but not better information, with the constant specter of fake news or real outrage. A ‘connected’ world instantly connects accidents to reputation, response to remuneration. A single misstep can decimate your leadership staff, stock price, reputation or all of the above.

How do you help decision makers value effective crisis communication?

How will you communicate this to your decision-makers? What have you been missing? You won’t have the budget you need until you’ve established the primacy and priority of effective crisis communication today.

Understand the risk: Work to generate a Corporate-level understanding of the criticality of prepared, equipped and mobilized communication staff and strategies to protect your Organization’s reputation and right to operate.

Identify the cost of poor communication: Help your corporate leadership understand that, in today’s real-time communication environment, bad communication strategy carries real costs and consequences:

• Project delays and legal challenges cost your organization, in market share, time and money.
• Cleanup costs from a demonstration can cost money and reputation.
• The extra time needed to respond to increased public attention and due diligence impact staff resources, delay other communication initiatives and impact reputation.

Point out the risk of wasted investment: Point out that poor crisis communication multiplies bad-will, and quickly neutralize or negate all the benefits of ongoing, usually considerably higher, marketing and public affairs budgeting. A common phrase from crisis-affected stakeholders is: ‘I will never buy your product again”.

Effective crisis communication planning minimizes these costs, saving your organization time, money and reputational goodwill. It’s worth the investment.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

What Crisis Communicators do

When you’re in a social setting and someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you answer? How do they react to your answer? It’s ironic that communicators often have difficulty explaining what we do. Our words always seem to end up interpreted as ‘You’re a flack’, or ‘You’re a spin doctor’.

But that’s not what crisis communicators do.

Webster defines a communicator as ‘one who conveys knowledge of, or information about: makes known’. It’s pretty simple, really. We make knowledge or information known. That’s our role every day, and that’s our role in crises.

The core question is: Why do we do what we do? I suggest we do it because it is important to us. We have an urgent desire for people to know, to have information and to use it. With today’s fractured communication world devolving to smaller and smaller bursts of data, we believe people should have access to information and understanding. And we believe they should be able to use it for the mutual good.

This is what crisis communicators do.

Communication is more than sharing facts. Communication is the exchange of ideas as well as information, for the purpose of shared knowing. When we describe a sunset, we want people to feel the colors. When we share a story, we want people to laugh or weep. When we write, we want people to understand, to assimilate and share. We’re not just talking; we’re asking to be listened to. We’re not just putting information ‘out there’; we’re hoping it will be used well.

This is important to understand for crisis communication. We’re not trying to make people like us, we’re not trying to cover up mistakes, and we’re not trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We want people to know and understand important information, and we want them to use it for mutual good.

• Response communication is first and foremost focused on safety.  The safety of those affected, safety of responders, safety of the public. Before anything else, we want to provide information people need for their personal safety and for public safety. Our natural desire for understanding is supercharged by this need for safety.
• Response communication is focused on understanding. Will our stakeholders understand what is happening? Will they believe we’re doing all we can? Incident Command and Unified Command are both built on the principle of applying the greatest resources against a given problem for the greatest outcome.  Our communication goal is that people understand this.
• Finally, communication is about reputation.  Not our own reputation but the reputation of the response organization. Do people understand and respect the decisions, actions and results of response organization?

There is no effective crisis response without effective crisis communication. Only communicators understand this, and it often seems that only communicators care about it. At the core, we want people to know and use the information we provide. We want this both for our craft and for their consequences. Effective public communication places stakeholders in the greatest safety and responders in the best light. It is what we do. It drives us.

As communicators, we have the capability and desire to integrate response actions with stakeholder concerns in a way that brings understanding and acceptance to the complex functions of response. Done well, we all benefit. Done poorly and all our lives are harder.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!