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!

Put the pieces of your exercise program together

| June 16, 2023

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

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

The result?

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

Failing to prepare, or preparing to fail?

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

What is a communicator to do?

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

Create a JIC Tabletop Exercise

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

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

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

All the pieces of the puzzle

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

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

A great investment

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

What are you waiting for?

Put the pieces of your exercise program together!

Interested in more information? Contact me!

Stopping the Tide

| September 28, 2022
Ocean wave coming ashore

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

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

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

Parents besiege Texas high school after false shooting call

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

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

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

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

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

A perfect response, well coordinated and conducted:

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

What could be better? Congratulations all around!

What was going on with the parents?

Back to the Associated Press story:

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

How did this happen?

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

Again, from the Associated Press article:

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

This incident’s big question for communicators

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

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

Superintendent Aquino said it right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be thankful, reach out, analyze, learn.

Drivers Ed

| August 16, 2022
Photo of an accident site

Modern cars are incredibly capable of evasive driving. On-board stability systems prevent us from losing control, and modern tires and suspensions provide our vehicles far more agility than ever before. And yet with all this design and technology available, studies show that the average American driver will drive straight into a collision instead of using even half of their automobile’s evasive capability.

Why? Three reasons:

  • First, a minuscule percentage of American drivers have been trained in any form of evasive driving. The only evasive training offered in most driver education courses is the admonition to not lock up your tires when braking! This admonition continues even today, when all new cars have anti lock braking technology – incidentally developed to overcome our tendency to ‘lock ’em up’!
  • Second, nobody practices evasive driving. Even if exposed to it, the exposure is in a specialized training program, on a dedicated location with artificial barriers and scenarios. Nobody practices evasive driving on public roads! Even when some hot-shoe tries it, they usually end up in a ditch, around a tree or in someone’s living room. Their escapade then ends up on local TV news, further cementing a societal aversion to practice.
  • Finally, we don’t think we need it. Despite the fact that more than 90% of crashes involve human error, three-quarters (73 percent) of US drivers consider themselves better-than-average drivers. Why worry about getting better at what we do when we’re already so good at it!

So, we don’t even think about our capability to response. We never learn new skills and we don’t practice the ones we have. Any minimal skills we’ve been exposed to atrophy from disuse. And we keep driving straight into collisions, in blissful ignorance of our own inability.

What does this have to do with crisis communication?

Think of an incident as a collision between your reputation and public outrage. Are you ready to respond? Do you have the core skills to avoid reputational ruin? Have you practiced your immediate response actions? Do you know how to ‘steer around’ the pitfalls of response public information?

Most likely not. Here’s what will probably happen to you in an incident:

  • An incident occurs and you’re not even notified
    This is your reputational ‘should have seen it coming‘ moment. You can’t avoid what you don’t see.
  • You’re notified but you don’t know the extent of the damage
    This is your reputational ‘should have called the police‘ mistake, when the damage to your vehicle (or reputation) is much greater than you thought, but you discovered it too late.
  • You don’t have messaging ready to use
    This is your ‘license and registration please‘ moment, the reputational equivalent of not having your license, registration and insurance card with you. You’d be OK if only you’d had the information the police (or your public) need.
  • You can’t get draft content approved and out to stakeholders
    This is your ‘waiting for a tow truck‘ moment (or hour, or longer) when everyone else moves along and you’re sitting in a damaged car in the dark, waiting for ‘Jiffy Towing’ to show up… hours later.
  • You report the accident too late, and lose the ‘coverage sprint’
    The other driver reports damage and injuries before you do and settlement actions swing in their favor. This is your ‘should have spoken sooner‘ moments when you realize that public opinion is solidifying….against you.

So how do you avoid these moments?

  • “Should have seen it coming”
    Be sure you’re notified immediately, and that you have access to the same response information that is being shared in required notifications.
  • “Should have called the police!”
    Be ready to assess incident severity from a reputational viewpoint. Use incident and issue assessment forms to quickly identify severity of the incident and potency of related issues.
  • “Sorry, I don’t have my license and registration”
    Have draft and pre-approved content ready for modification and use.
  • “Waiting for a tow truck”
    Streamline approval processes so you can keep up with your public, and ensure you have rapid dissemination capability so they actually get it.
  • “Should have spoken sooner”
    All of the above: Quickly determine what you must say. Have your statement templates and key messages ready for use. Streamline your approval process and get information out to your key stakeholders.

Don’t let lack of preparation or assumption of competency jeopardize your communication capability. Be ready to avoid reputation damage and the associated expense and disruption.

Start fast! Be prepared! For more information, read my ‘Gaining Traction‘ blog.

I welcome your Questions or Comments

Time the Waves

| August 4, 2022

Can you identify this photo? A schematic of your Unified Command News Release approval process? No, though it sometimes feels like it!

It’s a photo of exhaust headers from a performance car, carefully designed to maximize the flow of exhaust out of the car’s engine. A properly tuned exhaust can actually help “supercharge” an engine by harnessing the wave action in the exhaust. When an engine’s exhaust valve opens, the high pressure in the cylinder following combustion creates a pressure ‘wave’ that travels down the exhaust primary tube. Effective design ensures that that pressure wave is properly directed to actually increase engine efficiency. This process is known as exhaust scavenging.  The trick is to properly time the waves.

Exhaust headers aren’t a topic that keeps us up at night, nor are they the pressing issue of our day. But they are critically important to an engine’s efficiency. When auto manufacturers are looking for every additional mile per gallon, or mile per hour, they include well designed headers in their quest. Plus, there are those times when we’re glad our car has some extra ‘oomph’ to merge safely onto a busy freeway.

While communicators don’t have to know how to ensure smooth exhaust flow for our vehicles, we should know how to ensure the efficiency of our communication flow. There will be times when a maximized communication flow becomes critically important. Particularly in a crisis situation, you’ll be glad your communication process can have its own extra ‘oomph’!

How do you make sure your communication efforts in a crisis will be effective? You have to perform your own version of ‘timing the waves’, looking for the smoothest possible workflow for your critically important function of sharing response information with a concerned public.

Where do you start?

Start with good design: A process and structure for creating and sharing response information that ensures a smooth flow of information. In the world of incident command or unified command, that process and structure is encapsulated in the Joint Information System (JIS) and Joint Information Center (JIC). The JIS and the JIC provide a structure and workflow tested over decades of actual use in scores of incident responses.

Make sure you know how to use it: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides multiple independent study training courses for response communicators, including comprehensive training in JIS and JIC usage. Most of them are online and free, so take advantage of this valuable resource.

Make sure your information flow functions effectively: There are impediments to effective response communication flow ‘built into’ many plans and processes. As communicators we need to look for these ‘traps’ that slow down effective response communication.

Identify and correct barriers to good information flow: One of the biggest impediments in engine performance is inefficiency that should have been identified and corrected. It’s an even bigger impediment to response communication. Many of these impediments are hiding in plain sight in our current response plans and communication plans. There’s an obvious reason for this: Most planners aren’t communicators, and most communicators aren’t planners. So effective communication isn’t ensured by a well written response plan, it isn’t supported by a rapid response guide for communicators, and it isn’t proven through targeted training and equipping of communicators.

How do you do this?

Read your organization’s emergency response plans: They tell you what physical actions will be taken, by whom and how. They also ensure effective initial notifications, often required by law. They’re your guarantee that an effective response will be conducted, and their capability is regularly tested in tabletops, drills or exercises.

They let leadership sleep at night.… unless leaders are concerned with effective stakeholder communication. While carefully written, tested and implemented emergency response plans ensure an effective physical response, they don’t ensure effective public communications. It’s up to communicators to read the response plan to know what communication issues should be addressed in it or with it.

An example: One key Response Plan function that communicators need to be aware of is the Initial Notification process. This is a list of notifications that must be performed at the onset of an incident by responders requiring immediate contacting of multiple pre-identified public or private entities: Response agencies, elected officials, critical infrastructure, vulnerable populations, regulators and other key public people or entities. Most of these notifications will result in the recipients taking public actions or sharing information with their stakeholders. Do you as a response communicator know who these contacts are, when they will be notified and what will be said to them? Your initial public message is being shaped, timed and delivered, but not by you. You need to know what information is being shared, and whom it is being shared with, so you can plan your communication around it.

Get to the top! But it can be worse: Some notification lists won’t even include you as an individual to be notified – or you’ll be listed last, after all the ‘important’ calls are made. Some calls are assigned to an internal call out list, and you may not be near the top of that list either.

Public awareness and concern about an incident escalates much more rapidly than any physical response actions can, so communication with your stakeholders is the first and most effective response action your organization can take. As the creator of this information you need to be notified immediately, as a primary resource and not as an afterthought. If you’re not one of the first people notified, your messaging is in trouble and your organization’s reputation is too. Get to the top of the list!

Ideally a communicator already holds a corporate leadership position, but that’s another post….

Where’s your rapid response guide? Can you develop public messages quickly and accurately from the information you’ll be provided when you are called about the incident? Do you have a formalized review and approval initial information flow that will quickly provide response information to affected (and notified) stakeholders? Has it been tested? (easier to do than you may think)

A good rapid response guide includes content that addresses the following questions:

  • How bad is it? Incident evaluation tools that help you communicate incident severity from a communication perspective to response leadership, and helps communicators plan and conduct communication activities.
  • What can you say? Statement templates and key messages that can be used as rapidly as possible.
  • Who has to approve content? An effective approval process that ensures rapic publication of content
  • Who do you share information with? Key stakeholder lists and guidance for accessing dissemination platforms
  • Who can help? A list of response communicators who can help you as the inicdent grows, including mobilization, capability assessment and effective placement within a response communication structure.
  • How do you engage? Guidance for effective inquiry management with concerned stakeholders.

Just as it’s nice to know that your car has a little extra oomph to merge onto a busy freeway, it’s nice to know your response communication can happen as quickly and effectively as possible. Does it?

If you aren’t sure, contact me. I can help!

Survival

| July 15, 2020
Stack of papers on a desk

2020 continues coming at us relentlessly. The fabrics of our lives, our businesses and our society continue to fray with no end in sight. We watch our organization wrestle with the challenges, we work to do our part to preserve output, services or products. Then we have to commiserate with coworkers as they head out the door as victims of layoffs, cost saving measures or the dreaded reduction in force.

Then we look around and realize that, for now, we are the survivors. We still have our jobs. Then the reality begins to loom: We don’t just have our jobs, we have the responsibilities of those no longer with us. We have more to do than before, we’re more stressed than before and we have less budget than before. We’re survivors living in an environment where our responsibilities have grown and our support system has dwindled.

At these times, we all tend to revert to the tyranny of the urgent. Our lack of time and attention leads to multiple mini-crises where the squeakiest wheel gets the grease. We spin from crisis to crisis in a frenetic effort to get ahead a little bit, long enough to think. But that moment never comes. We are understaffed and overworked.

The monster under the bed

But what about the real crises, the reputation-challenging, resource chewing events that are always looming in the background, the real monsters under the bed? Response planning has always been one of the important tasks in every organization. We know it must be done, we know it’s far more effective to practice preparation instead of response, yet we all desperately wish that for right now, it would just wait. We’re just too busy with our daily roar and rumble.

But by definition, crises don’t wait. They happen, always at the worst possible time. Guess what? Our current operating environments ARE the worst possible time. Staff reductions, changing job responsibilities, stress and social upheaval all contribute to an increasing probability that someone, somewhere will do something wrong, a maintenance delay will cause equipment failure or someone’s overt actions will lead to a genuine crisis. It’s more likely now than ever.

Are you ready?

You’re not as ready as you were before 2020. You don’t have staff, you don’t have budget and you don’t have the attention span. You’re stretched and stressed, and any plans you had in place are steadily going out of date. They may even be on the wrong shelf in the closed office, accessible only by a terminated employee. The bad news is that 2020 has made crises more likely to occur, while also removing the resources to be properly prepared or to respond properly.

What can you do?

Focus on actions that give the greatest benefit for the smallest outlay. Here’s a list of economical but impactful actions you can take:

  • Conduct a Crisis Communication Plan review to determine if your plan is ready. Look for outdated names, contact numbers, resources or protocols. A good review will identify the most important shortfalls that must be addressed to ensure that you can even activate the plan. A quality review will provide a list of issues that must be addressed and specific suggestion for how to resolve each one.
  • Conduct needed Plan revisions. As a general rule, people who know something is broken also know how to fix it. A good Plan reviewer will also be able to effectively address all identified issues. Let them do so. You don’t have the expertise or the time to do this.
  • Coordinate Plans. You don’t have to wait until an incident occurs to be more ready for it. Your organization holds one or more Facility Response Plans/Emergency Response Plans/Emergency Action Plans … multiple names for response plans that direct the actual physical response to a range of possible incidents. These plans represent the most likely events, and they include a great amount of detail that will assist communicators as much as it will responders. Have your expert integrate your organization’s response plans with your response communication plans. All the data is there, what you need is the brain that connects the dots. Your brain is busy, so have your Plan reviewer perform this role.
  • Create a Response Communicators’ Quick Guide. Your training horizon is smaller now, your attention span is shorter. You’ll have a hard time maintaining or retaining knowledge and readiness. Bolster your response capability with an effective Quick Guide that will walk you through the initial critical hours of response communication. Guess who can make this for you? That’s right, the same communication professional who conducted Plan review, revisions and coordination.
  • Take training that matches your time and budget. The Response Communicator Quick Guide is a training tool as much as a response tool. Since the Quick Guide is designed to help you perform critical communication functions in the first hours of an incident, it can also be used in a training session of the same time span. Virtually. A communication professional can lead you through the Quick Guide and a practice scenario. Train at your desk, with your tools, on responses likely to occur with your organization. Do it in as little as two hours.

Do it.

You can build and retain critical response capability in a time-effective and cost-effective manner. These are all starting points for effective crisis communications. Each action can be tightly budgeted and each action builds on previous actions. Take the work off your plate by giving it to a trusted, professional communicator. Spend what time you have to focus on crisis communication by focusing on the outcome of this process.

Interested in more information? Contact me!