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!

The Uncounted Cost of Poor Response Communication

| February 25, 2020
Aircraft Wiring image

How much does bad response communication cost? Is there a penalty for poor performance?

In “Getting a handle on a scandal” the Economist Magazine looked at eight different corporate crises since 2010, to determine if they actually damage shareholder value. The consensus from a review of large crises is that a crisis actually does:

“After their crises struck all these firms suffered an absolute drop in their share prices. At the lowest point the median share price was down by 33%, although it took anywhere from two weeks to two years for different firms to reach this nadir. In most cases the companies have clawed back the absolute losses they suffered. However, what matters is their relative performance compared with a basket of industry peers over the same time period. On this basis the median firm is worth 30% less today than it would have been had the scandals not happened. For the eight the total forfeited value is a chunky $300bn.”

The Economist also offered possible sources of this value loss: “Fines and legal costs explain only a small part of this. A big scandal distracts management, leads to other kinds of painful regulatory scrutiny and, if a firm has a stretched balance-sheet, forces it to shrink.”

One clear trend is that mishaps and mistakes cause loss. Some of the studied companies practiced effective stakeholder communication, some didn’t. In either case a cost was incurred.

So what’s the moral to the story? As one major firm once put it: “Don’t do anything wrong for the next decade.” But what if you do? What if less-than-stellar response communication is part of your mistake?

What if people just don’t trust you anymore?

Communicators talk about ‘license to operate’ and use it as a veiled threat to encourage more investment in effective communication. What does ‘license to operate’ entail? Ultimately, it entails grace, usually conditional grace. Conditional grace is accepting an individual or organization on the basis that you trust that they will do well, at least better than they have in the past. We all receive conditional grace in our manifold imperfect relationships.

What if we lose grace? What if we neglect to build trust? How does mistrust impact future operations? First, let’s accept that none of us is perfect. We all have made mistakes and have had to restore relationships. Since we have failed in the past, we will fail in the future.

If you don’t rebuild your relationship with stakeholders, what happens when you fail again?

Here’s an example: “FAA faces dilemma over 737 MAX wiring flaw that Boeing missed”, published by the Seattle Times on February 14, 2020.

Note that the subject of the article is the Federal Aviation Administration as much as it is Boeing. The issue seems simple; For the new 737 MAX aircraft, Boeing was required to modify previous 737 wiring placement for ‘safe wiring separation’ to prevent possible short circuits that could cause loss of control of the aircraft. Instead all 737 MAX aircraft were wired in keeping with all previous 737s.

What is the risk? “There are 205 million flight hours in the 737 fleet with this wiring type,” a Boeing official said. “There have been 16 failures in service, none of which were applicable to this scenario. We’ve had no hot shorts.”

Zero (0) ‘hot shorts’ in 205,000,000 flight hours (0/205,000,000 probability of failure). That’s pretty safe, demonstrably safe. So safe, that revising the wiring on the already produced aircraft may result in a greater risk than leaving it untouched.

Based on probabilities, it may be best to leave the wiring as-is. But that likely won’t be good enough. Because of a lack of grace caused by a loss of trust, it is extremely unlikely that the FAA can give Boeing a ‘pass’ on this one. Regardless of risk, regardless of safety, the FAA most likely will enforce the wiring change, as they will enforce any additional corrections in the future (remember, since we have failed in the past, we will fail in the future).

Loss of trust leads to loss of grace. Loss of grace leads to additional costs and complications in a myriad of ways. The Economist measured shareholder value, management and revenue impacts to determine the cost of a crisis. But the cost of loss of grace is higher, extending into the future for affected companies as an ever-growing, unnoticed cost.

Communicating poorly removes grace, and opportunity to recover can leave with it. If a 0/25,000,000 probability of failure isn’t enough to buy trust, what is? Effective communication may be our ONLY chance to recover.

If you want to talk about this more, contact me.

I can help you evaluate your current Communication Plan readiness, conduct a formal Plan review or offer strategy suggestions to awaken your leadership to the danger they’re in. Who knows, it might even save money, even a reputation or two!

Communicators and responders have a lot to learn from each other.

| January 13, 2020

Communicators and responders have a lot to learn from each other. Notice Jennifer Pearsall’s – from NYC Emergency Management – key points from her post here:

  1. People are the mission
  2. Asking ‘why’ will get you further
  3. Recovery starts with rebuilding a sense of control

Jennifer’s ‘responder truths’ are also ‘communicator truths’:

  1. We’ll all get further if we remember we’re dealing with real people who have been impacted by our problem.
  2. We speak to them better when we listen to them better.
  3. We’ll help people recover when we rebuild their trust.

Stakeholders ‘turn loose’ of a response when they trust the responders. That requires BOTH good decisions AND good communication. Let your responders help you with good communication, while you help them with a good response. Thank you for sharing, Jennifer!

Check out Jennifer Pearsall’s post: here: https://lnkd.in/gFJNpjq

Time to Review Your Crisis Communication?

| December 19, 2019
Picture of decaying railroad bridge

Are you sure you’re ready for effective stakeholder communication in a crisis? We all think we have policies, plans, people and a platform at the ready for crisis use, but how ready are they?

Does your bridge to recovery look like this one? You may be in worse shape than you think. Have you conducted a recent review of your crisis communication process? Are you confident that your organization has the following elements ready for use?

Policies: Do your crisis communication policies reflect current communication realities? Are they ready to help you communicate quickly and comprehensively?

Plans: Are your communication plans up to date? Do they reflect current operating practices, and do they guide communicators to make good decisions and maintain high quality content flow?

People: Are your communicators ready to perform in the chaotic initial hours of a response, then segue to manage an extended and complex response communication process? Are they trained and tested in the specific dynamics of your industry, organization and market?

Platform: Exactly how are you going to deliver information to stakeholders and capture concerns from stakeholders? Do you have a tested platform ready for use at any time?

Time for a Review? When did you last conduct a crisis communication review?

Your Crisis Communication process is the bridge to protecting your reputation, your hope of rebuilding after an incident and the bulwark against the costs and complexity of managing public outrage or disappointment. When a crisis can cost 30% of an organization’s value, is your crisis communication process ready to restore that value?

Contact me to learn more about the benefits of a Crisis Communication Review for your organization.

Best Laid Schemes

| June 13, 2019

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy.“
Robert Burns

Robert Burns was right, clear back in the 1700’s. No matter how well we plan, our plans often go awry. Unfortunately, the result far too often is grief and pain. Time and tides conspire against us, and we need to be ready to deal with both.

A history lesson from two continents.

Some of us have been fortunate enough to spend time enjoying Puget Sound in the Pacific northwest. Amid the islands and waters, three abandoned forts stand as relics from another age. All three share the same history:

In the late 1890’s the entrance to Puget Sound was considered so strategically important that three forts were designed and built to protect it: Fort Worden, Fort Casey and Fort Flagler. The forts were built as state-of-the-art installations, including large guns on retracting carriages, allowing reloading to be performed safely behind massive concrete emplacements. In addition to the rifled guns, mortar installations were built into the hills supporting the forts, again located on wheelable carriages to allow loading under protection of the installations before rolling out into the open to fire at any attaching forces.

The plan was that the three forts, with their guns protected from any sea attack, would render Puget Sound impregnable to attack. In 1901 the guns were put in place and the forts assumed ‘active’ status. Puget Sound was safe, supposedly.

In 1903, only two years later, the airplane was invented. Rapid development of aircraft led to almost immediate decommissioning of the three forts, and during World War I their armament was hauled away for other uses. Three forts, decades in planning and construction, rendered obsolete and unusable within a few short years.

Across the Atlantic, the same type of ‘impregnable’ defenses were being built in France. For almost a decade starting in 1929, France constructed a line of defenses along its borders with Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Luxembourg. This ‘Maginot Line‘, based on lessons learned from World War I, was designed to force invading armies to attack where the French army could easily defend itself. Construction of this secure line of defense was completed in 1938.

Two years later, Germany invaded France. In the same way that the French had based their defensive strategy on lessons learned from World War I, the Germans had learned new offensive strategies. Using new weapons and tactics, Germany simply went around and over the Maginot line, conquering France and neighboring countries in six weeks.

In both cases, emerging technology and strategies rendered state-of-the-art plans useless. In both cases, ‘disruptive technology’ of aircraft proved fatal to established plans. ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics rapidly overcame slow and traditional defenses. It took less than a decade for warfare to change, less than a decade to render once-current strategy and technology useless.

What about us?

What does this have to do with us? What does it have to do with our planning? Likely obvious, but here are a few points:

  • Change comes rapidly, and is often unforeseen
    Designers of American and French defenses planned as well as they could. They simply couldn’t conceive of new technology and tactics that were coming. We all comment on how fast change is occurring today. If it was fast enough to disrupt even in the early 1900’s, how much faster will change disrupt our plans today?
  • Technology changes everything
     Who would imagine that a wood and cloth airplane could put a 125-ton gun out of commission? Who would think that an army could advance so rapidly that defenses couldn’t react? Motor vehicles and aircraft changed warfare in less than a decade. Today’s technology is even more intrusive, and more rapidly intrusive.
  • Strategy changes with technology
     France built an impregnable line of defense. Germany used new technology to develop new strategies of warfare. The result? France surrendered to Germany even while much of the Maginot Line was intact, manned by troops ready to fight.
  • Tactics must adapt
     American forts were immediately useless against attackers. Attacking ships could stand off miles out of range while aircraft rendered American guns useless. Of course this didn’t happen; America has been blessed with the isolation of oceans. But the capability turned the forts into training facilities. The capability of aircraft to defeat sea power was later tested and proven by US forces in World War II.

One common lesson from all this: Even while we need to be ready for responses today, we need to remember that our tools and tactics may be ineffective tomorrow.

What do we do now?

What actions can we take to be sure we’re keeping current?

  • When was your crisis communication plan last reviewed?
    It should have the date right on the front of it. I’ve seen plans last updated a decade ago. Plans should be reviewed annually and updated as frequently as needed. If forts could become worthless within two years in 1903, how much time do we have today?
  • What new technologies are impacting communications?
    What is new today, and how will it affect you tomorrow? What would the capability of Blitzkrieg do to defense plans? What do emerging communication platforms do to your message management?
  • What strategies are changing communication?
    Organizations are monitored and attacked differently today. Crises aren’t all caused by operational events today. Many organizations suffer more damage from issues, activism or victim advocacy than they do from accidents. Like the Maginot Line, we can be ready for the wrong war, and completely equipped when it comes. Are you ready for ‘asymmetrical warfare’ where the threat is dispersed but potent?
  • What’s changing culturally?
    This isn’t the Eisenhower years when businesses were noble and progress was good. Old advertisements featuring conspicuous consumption aren’t driving buying decisions any more. Actions and words considered good and noble a decade ago are seen is insensitive or pandering today. We can’t get away with ‘trust us’ any more.

The bottom line

If your crisis communication plan is a decade old, it desperately needs review and certainly needs extensive revision. If your organization’s leadership aren’t focusing forward on emerging trends, breaking issues and cultural changes, they need awakening. If your strategies and tactics look like they did in 2010, you’re in trouble.

It’s time to find your Plan, brush it off and look it over. While you’re at it, your organization’s physical response plans likely need the same look-over. They most likely reflect Maginot thinking as well.

If you want to talk about this more, contact me.

I can help you evaluate your current Plan readiness, conduct a formal Plan review or offer strategy suggestions to awaken your leadership to the danger they’re in. Who knows, it might even save money, even a reputation or two!

Know Your REAL Enemy

| May 9, 2019

Don’t make shelling personal.

Last post, we spent some time looking at likely candidates for the sobriquet ‘enemy’, only to determine that they are not, in fact our enemy. I ended the post with an encouragement to soldier past the hurdles in communication by recognizing each one as an opportunity instead of an enemy.

If media, activists, trolls, naysayers and a polarized society aren’t our enemies, who are?

Our enemies aren’t people, or circumstances. They’re not objects or coincidences. They’re not bad luck or fate. They’re our own attitudes and actions. In all areas of our lives, we’re better served when we recognize that we are usually the authors of our own misfortune. Circumstances we face may not be attributable to us, but our attitudes, responses and reactions always are. And these attitudes, responses and reactions get us into trouble. Our most pernicious foe is ourselves.

Consider the following foes

Here are some examples of our propensity to cause ourselves trouble or heartache in a response.

  • Complacency: The most unfortunate hindrance to our success is our own complacency. We know what could happen in our market, operations or infrastructure. It’s no mystery that every human activity incurs risk. Yet we don’t plan or prepare for it. We avoid taking on the important task of preparation and planning. Something more important always comes up, we rationalize. But what really happens is that we defer, delay and minimize. We accede to the urgent and postpone the important.
  • Resistance: This is the inertia we all face to bad news. We don’t want to hear it. We feel flat-footed, and our responses are delayed. Yes, this is natural. Surprises do this to us. Most drivers can steer away from a potential crash slightly faster than they can avoid it by bringing their vehicle to a stop. But most drivers don’t. By the time their brains remind them what to do, it’s too late; they’ve lost precious seconds, and the opportunity to minimize the situation. So you hear the bad news of an incident, accident or issue and your first response is… no response. Our untrained response to unwelcome data is to freeze. People don’t step out of the way, we don’t swerve to the other lane, we don’t duck. In a response, seconds and minutes go by before we respond.
  • Delay: Introducing resistance’s cousin. Delay is inherent on our daily activities. We pace ourselves, practice good time management techniques, wait for elevators, meetings, phone calls, emails, traffic lights, dinner. We don’t want to be ‘that guy’ who is always rushing, always pushy, frenetic. We don’t want to be Patricia. So in the comfort of our speed-governed world we craft policies and plans that reinforce delay. Our time targets are way off, far too slow. We build multi-layered procedures and approval processes. We institutionalize slowness.
  • Blame: The hardest thing to do when something goes wrong is to accept that it just might be your fault. This is true in virtually every setting. We all have an aversion to accepting blame for anything. It marks us as deficient, less than adequate. We bleat about vulnerability, but we’re all Fonzie at heart. I know from personal experience how hard it is to face people when the organization you’re involved with is blamed for something. Add a corporate aversion to any admission of legal fault to our natural hesitancy to face up to a situation and communication efforts can freeze up. This is ironic since every other element of a response is designed and encouraged to go full speed ahead. In the absence of rapid empathy with stakeholders affected by the incident, we hunker down in defensiveness and lose their trust.
  • Minimizing: As with life itself, we all tend to minimize any bad occurrence. We somehow think that we can kind of sneak up on how bad something really is. Part of this is our own wishful thinking, part is an unwillingness to accept the full impact, part is an attempt to minimize blame. Some of it is simple ignorance; we really don’t know how bad it is. But the bottom line is that when we under report or minimize the impact of our incident to the public, we lose credibility. As credibility flies out the window it takes trust with it, and our communication challenge gets worse and worse. Who cares if you’re sharing accurate information if they don’t trust you?
  • Fatigue: It’s true, fatigue makes cowards of us all. We leap into action filled with commitment and energy. We initially prevail and see success. But our enemy keeps coming, and like a boxer we realize that while we’re landing some good punches, our arms are getting tired. There’s a basic truth when packing to respond to an incident; always take more shirts than you think you’ll need. Any significant response is going to take longer than you think. A major response may go on for months. You will experience fatigue, and your capabilities will wane. In the worst case, you’ll run out of people before you run out of response.
  • Short-term thinking: Any significant response is going to take longer than you think. You will need more shirts than you think. Incidents and their responses aren’t static; they grow and shrink, settle down and flare up. Even when the physical response is over, stakeholder communication isn’t. If you don’t plan for long-term response communication, you run the risk of losing your organization’s voice and reputation. I’ve seen opportunities to cement good relationships with stakeholder squandered by short-term communication planning. Any response is a huge investment, so why do we squander it by leaving the field early?

What can we do to defeat these enemies?

What practical steps can we take to neutralize them?

  • Complacency: Remember a basic economic theory; the price of any object is determined by the supply of, and demand for, that object. When an incident occurs, you will have enormous demands on your capabilities, expressed as a function of time. But you’ll have less time available. This combination, of high demand and low availability, makes your time a precious asset; important and urgent are one and you’ll wish you had used more time to prepare. Prepare, now! Don’t deny known data – incidents do occur. Don’t defer known activities. You know what you need to do to be ready. Do it now. The cost of complacency is high; the cost of unpreparedness is extreme. Plan!
  • Resistance: If you want to learn to use your steering wheel correctly, you sign up for a defensive driving course where you learn how to steer around obstacles. If you want to respond quickly in an issue, incident or crisis, make sure your planning and preparation includes the element of immediacy. Identify possible triggers and practice your response to them. Test for speed and quickness. How quickly do you begin to respond, how fast do you get going?
  • Delay: If procedures take too long, simplify them. If approvals build in delays, lighten them. Build speed in. Lotus Cars’ Colin Chapman was famous for his design esthetic; ‘”Simplify and add lightness”. A good model for crisis communication! Less known was his supporting truth statement; “Adding power makes you faster on the straights; subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere”. Subtract the weight of conscious or unconsciousness resistance everywhere you can.
  • Blame: Legal fault is a huge issue with any organization, justifiably. Remember that acknowledging an incident has occurred is not the same as admitting fault. Say you’re sorry. Saying you’re sorry for the impact isn’t admitting fault, it’s empathizing with the affected stakeholders. Even in obvious circumstances, fault is allocated after thorough investigation long after the initial response is over, sometimes years later. In the meantime all the amazing, sometimes heroic, efforts of responders are shrouded in poor communication. Communicate quickly. Share all you can while constantly reminding stakeholders that you’re doing so regardless of final fault. Don’t give up the reputation of the response in an effort to protect your own organization’s. Remember that affected stakeholders need a source of truth to make their own response decisions. Don’t lose the opportunity to gain their trust and acceptance. Finally, remember that good engagement with affected stakeholders is one of your only hopes if fault is ultimately assigned to you. After fault come penalties, when your care and attention to affected stakeholders becomes an asset.
  • Minimizing: Ask responders two questions; ‘How bad is it now?’ and ‘How bad will it be?’ Communicate on the basis of their answers. The US Coast Guard enforces a ‘worst-case’ determination to any spill that can’t be accurately measured. While this can seem extreme, nobody is upset when reported spill amounts go down instead of up. Same with other impacts. Better to reduce reported impact than increase it. We all cite Aesop’s ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,‘ to justify under-reporting, but we forget that the shepherd boy had done so multiple times, and we only get to do it once. Minimizing an incident affects other response decisions, so just don’t do it.
  • Fatigue: Pack extra shirts. Plan for the long term. Create a response communication plan that includes a realistic timeline (from your Planning Section). Make sure you identify how many people you need to meet Plan objectives. Assign your communicators effectively. Put your people in the right places. Request more resources, from the very beginning. Don’t wait until your team is exhausted before securing replacements. Stagger your team’s involvement so you never have to replace all of them at once. Don’t be a hero and work non-stop. Take breaks. Schedule shifts that allow down time AND sleep time.
  • Short-term thinking: Remember that the incident isn’t over until the affected stakeholders think it is. Responders want to go home, and they will as quickly as possible. Affected stakeholders ARE home, and they expect to keep hearing from you until they aren’t interested. Of course this affects your response communication plan. Keep your focus on stakeholders. Encourage your organization to maintain a local presence until you determine stakeholder interest has waned. Don’t throw away a reputation for caring by leaving too early.

Now here’s a question for each of us

Where else in our lives do these dynamics work to our detriment? Is there someone we need to go to and make amends for how our attitudes, responses or reactions have caused harm? The process of acknowledging, apologizing and making amends is an intimate, personal application of good practice in a crisis: acknowledge, apologize, make amends and rebuild your relationship.

Interested in more information? Contact me!

My mission is to help clients communicate better in a crisis, both in preparation and in performance. If this post raises questions about your crisis communication capacity, let me help.