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!

Know Your Enemy

| May 1, 2019

“You just have to learn that shelling isn’t personal….”

More than a decade ago I was having a conversation with a grizzled veteran of oil exploration and production in Africa. We were discussing unusual safety risks when he mentioned his company’s experience with storing of crude oil in tank farms. They were operating in a country with significant rebel activity, and they realized that land-based storage was just at too great of a risk from guerrilla attacks . The decision was made to build an offshore storage platform, which was completed in short order and put to immediate use.

Unfortunately, while this platform minimized the threat of rebels storming the facility, it soon became apparent that it had been built within artillery range of the mainland. The risk of guerrilla attack on land was replaced with the reality of occasional shelling as the rebels attempted to impinge on the flow of oil, and revenue, for the government in power.

Of course I had to ask him how it made him feel when he was aboard the facility while it was under a shelling attack. His laconic reply was simple; “They weren’t very accurate, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.” Then he added an instantly classic phrase to this crisis communicator; “You just have to learn that shelling isn’t personal. They’re not trying to actually hit YOU.”

You’re pretty tough when you consider artillery shells to be a minor disruption!

Why has this phrase stuck in my mind for so long? First, even Chuck Norris isn’t that tough! Mostly, because as a communicator, it’s easy to take stakeholder reactions personally. When something bad has happened and a bunch of people are upset, you get reactions from them that can feel a lot like artillery fire. It’s easy to become disheartened, worn down, overwhelmed or even simply afraid. Your response communication efforts can dwindle to defensiveness instead of taking advantage of all the new interaction opportunities provided by your upset, irate and concerned stakeholders.

You have to remember that shelling isn’t personal. It may feel personal, especially if a round lands close by to you. But they’re not actually aiming at you. They’re aiming at the organization, at the response, at ‘them’. Chances are, if you sat down for lunch with one of these people, it’s likely you could have a relatively normal conversation. You might even leave as friends.

I know, today we have the ‘web mob’, just waiting. Like the undead these apparitions arise at the smell of blood and seek out their victims. But their impact is ephemeral, disappearing in the light of informed and comprehensive engagement.

Regardless of the flying shells, you can engage with your stakeholders. Stand up, reach out, share information. Use the framework of response – Incident Command or Unified Command – to build your response communication platform, safe from hand-to-hand combat.

You do have an enemy. It just isn’t people:

  • It’s not ‘the media’. Traditional media remain a valuable message multiplication platform, one that is very effective at mass distribution. Social media can span the globe quickly, but major newscasts reach far more people rapidly and with the same message. Media self-sorts to match your stakeholder groups; national news escalates to national outlets, local news tends to stay local. There are magnifiers of course – deaths, injuries or lurid graphics often make a local story into a national one. But even then, ongoing local interest supports ongoing local coverage.
  • It’s not ‘the activist’. Activists are actually your friends. They are interested, committed and connected. They have the interest to listen to you, usually the ration to consider your message, and the ability to share it, usually as influencers. Many activist organizations encourage their members to contact you in a response, so you feel the full weight of their outrage. What they’re inadvertently doing is giving you a free mailing list of a bunch of concerned, committed citizens who tend toward reasonableness. They may not send you a Christmas card, but they will read what you send them. Actual response experience demonstrates that many opponents can gain an acceptance and appreciation of what is being done to ensure an effective response and recovery.
  • Believe it or not, it’s not ‘trolls’ either. Trolls are foul, frustrating, sometimes fecal individuals who come out of the shadows to bomb a victim with negative, misleading, obscene or cruel comments. These web versions of restroom walls are disgusting to read and unproductive in content or context, a waste of bits and bytes. But by their very nature they’ll never coalesce into an actual threat. They’re shadows of putrescence (I’ve always wanted to use that word in a blog!), as unappealing to each other as they are to themselves. To deal with them constructively; put their little offerings into the same pile and have someone with a strong stomach go through it to find any actual threats. If the threat is there in a text or a pattern of texts, turn it over to law enforcement. Then forget it.
  • It’s not the ‘negative’ either. By definition, your incident has caused actual or perceived harm to a significant group of people. They are upset, and frankly they have a right to be. That doesn’t make them your enemy. They are, in fact, your friends. These are the people who can be engaged with, to foster understanding and acceptance of the response. They will be upset at the incident, but they’re just waiting to hear how they can trust the response. Their negative comments are simply truth. Answer their concerns or attacks honestly and respectfully and you just might gain allies.
  • It’s not ‘todays polarized society’ either. We may disagree on politics, we may disagree on religion. We might disagree on global warming and who the greatest second baseman was. But time and again, the human experience demonstrates they we come together in crisis. We want to know, we want to help and we want to work together in the face of adversity. No blood drive screener asks you what political party you belong to, or what religion you are. People may not agree with the business model of the Responsible Party, the politics of the lead Agency or the efficacy of regulations brought into play, but they will agree with effective response actions and priorities. The schisms may arise in the recovery and investigation process, but right now virtually everybody wants to see you succeed.

There are enemies to an effective response, particularly in the communication sphere.

Your communication foes aren’t people, not even almost-people (sorry, trolls). You will find support from every quarter if you work hard to respond well and to share your story effectively. All effective responses are built around doing the right thing. Are you fearlessly making sure everybody is being told about it? Don’t let fear disrupt your mission; communicate!

Next post, we’ll identify some of the REAL enemies you need to deal with.

Interested in more information? Contact me!

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

Four Weddings and a Funeral

| April 15, 2019

If we’re asked to give a speech at a wedding, not one of us will use the services of a public relations or marketing professional to deliver our speech for us.

Imagine that you’re attending a wedding, a beautiful, impactful time. When the bride’s and groom’s families and friends gather, we all experience a mixture of relationships. Some of us know the bride, some the groom. Some know people on both sides, some know only one individual. But we all know what goes on at a wedding and we all know what to expect. One thing we expect is a lot of words, words from different people. The officiant is there to be sure the legal boxes are checked, usually including some formal presentation featuring an exchange of vows, as well as (often) an homily. The bride and groom have their statements to deliver, their own version of vows. Serious or humorous, the ceremony is planned and conducted in order to deliver the penultimate moment: A declaration of wedded bliss.

Then the reception begins. There’s food, drink, laughter, dancing, music. And there often is… more talking. This talking is different from the ceremony. In the ceremony, a premise for the state of matrimony was given by the officiant, promises were made by the participants. In many cases, the bride’s father utters a short ‘giving away’ phrase. You could say that the ceremony contains the ‘what’ and the ‘how’: What we’re all doing today, and how it is being done.

Reception speeches are very different. They are the personalized ‘why’. Delivered by different people from different families and different life spaces, they still all boil down to ‘why’. Why we’re happy these people are now together. We may poke fun, we may be serious. We might read a poem or quote a philosopher. We might deliver a comedy routine or fumble our way through a words that sound better on paper than they do coming out of our mouth. Regardless, we all still deliver our personal reasons for being there, why we are happy for the couple and why we think they’ll be great together.

There’s only one chance of getting it right

These speeches are a big deal. Like wedding photos and reception food, there’s only one chance to get it right. There are no wedding do-overs, so when we’re called upon to deliver a speech at a wedding, we want to be sure it’s a good one, and that we’re ready to deliver it.

Some quick Google search figures bear this out:

  • ‘Groom’s speech’ = 1,440,000 results
  • ‘Bride’s speech’ = 3,590,000 results
  • ‘Father of the bride’s speech’ = 53,200,000 results
  • ‘Best man speech’ = 1,040,000,000 results

Conclusions? A lot of grooms take their speech very seriously. Three times more brides do. Fathers of the bride are almost desperate in their desire for help in delivering a perfect speech. Best men are practically frantic in their search for help. While I didn’t look at every one of the cumulative 1.1 billion search results to see what tips or techniques were offered, but I’ll wager you one certain finding:

If we’re asked to give a speech at a wedding, not one of us will use the services of a public relations or marketing professional to deliver our speech for us. The idea of having a stand-in give our wedding speech is as unlikely as a bride or groom having a stand-in. The concept is laughable. We’re on our own.

What about funerals? A Google search for ‘funeral speech’ delivers 137,000,000 results. Of course, a wedding speech is, or at least should be, significantly different from a eulogy! But still, many of us implicitly understand that in either event we have a responsibility to deliver an effective presentation regardless of the stress or emotional duress of the moment.

In both weddings and funerals, we have one chance to make our best impression. So we plan and prepare, step to the microphone and do our best. Life’s most important moments require this of us.

What does this all have to do with crisis communication?

Weddings and funerals impact a specific audience. People closest to the situation are in the room, for better or for worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. What we say at these events is important to them, so we step up and deliver to the best of our ability. We do not shirk, and we seek no substitutes.

When your organization is in a crisis, the event has already impacted a specific number of people. They are interested in hearing what you have to say. They are as ‘in the room’ as a wedding or funeral audience. But they have ALL been negatively impacted by the event. Nobody is happy.

If your organization has impacted people’s lives due to an incident or issue, consider who they want to hear from. They don’t want a stand-in any more than a wedding party wants to hear from a professional speaker. They want to hear truth from someone who matters, and that person is the leader of your organization. When you’re deciding who should speak for your organization, let your default selection be the top person.

Remember, in any of life’s most important moments, we have one chance to make our best impression. So we plan and prepare, step to the microphone and do our best. Life’s important moments require this of us.

So, who should be your company spokesperson in a crisis?

This is an eternal debate, with some siding with a tiered approach in providing access to the top person in an organization. Some advocate for restricted access, saving the top person for the most escalated response. Many encourage use of company spokespersons rather than ‘line’ leadership. Some advocate for immediate top-level involvement and exposure.

Communication professionals tend to advocate for a careful measurement of incident impact to help determine if it’s time to’ bring in the CEO’. We plan on spokesperson escalation to match the incident escalation. We use an internal sliding scale to determine how escalated the incident is. And we miss a key point. We use internal escalation metrics. We measure the impact as dispassionately as possible and we come up with different levels of incident impact, so we can assign different levels of leadership availability.

We miss the point

We don’t get to define our incident’s impact: The people impacted get to do this. And to those impacted by an incident, the incident is already escalated! Affected stakeholders have an on/off switch for impact, not our internal sliding scale. Affected stakeholders will always consider your incident to already be fully escalated.

If you want to make the best impression, you can’t go wrong going to the top. That’s what your stakeholders expect.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Locked, Loaded and Out of Luck

| April 3, 2019

Imagine that you’re a major manufacturer of an ubiquitous product used globally. You have an incredible safety record in your facilities and your product itself is safer than sleeping in your own bed. On top of your safety record you’ve developed an incredible crisis communication culture that supports not only your own operations but the operations of all your customers. You rightly recognize that one customer’s crisis affects all your customers and that the effects can ripple back to you.

You’ve crafted response communication plans that address every possible incident. You aggressively monitor minor incidents and related issues to be sure your brand is protected. You’re successful every day and highly regarded in your industry and across all industries. Communications alumni leave your company and extend their success and value wherever they go.

What makes you so good?

  1. A clear focus on the big picture: Retaining public trust in your product and its users. You know that an incident with one customer impacts all customers as well as the industry your company thrives in.
  2. Solid and comprehensive planning: You utilize high-performing, experienced individuals to build your plans and processes, and you aggressively incorporate new communication methods. You embraced social media before other companies knew what a post or a tweet was. Your plans are built around exhaustive analysis of previous industry incidents and subsequent media scrutiny and public reactions.
  3. Practice: Your team regularly engages in exercises and scenario reviews to be sure they’ll be able to respond in accordance with plans and strategies.
  4. Depth and experience: While major incidents in your industry are rare, you keep people around who have responded before. Your cadre of communicators includes veterans ‘who smell like smoke,’ mid-career experts who are on top of their game and new hires who bring greater awareness of the most current changes of today’s instant news world.

A formidable lineup, well versed in using excellent plans built with a clear focus on the most important things. What can go wrong? You’re locked and loaded!

The unthinkable happens; an incident involving your product.

People are killed. The industry using your products recoils, as do their customers. And your team swings into action, with both physical response plans and response communication plans. You follow the process, use the plan and the people. And it begins working. Your customers, and their customers, settle down, willing to wait for final investigation results (there are always investigations). This does not minimize the accident and the loss of life; your company and your communicators feel the horror and loss as much as anyone else. But the world seems to understand and accept the work that is being done and the actions that are being taken. Your response communication efforts aren’t finished, they’ve only begun, and you know this. But everyone in the company is hunkered down, working through a terrible incident. Is it possible that there is light at the end of the tunnel?

The unthinkable happens, again.

Another incident, more fatalities, another even larger industry and consumer recoil. What do you do now? Your physical responders are already engaged in the first incident. Your communicators are already deployed as well. Your team has been tightly focused on an effective initial response, you’re locked in. Now you have an even greater challenge: This time, you’re not starting from zero, you’re having to change direction when you’re already going full speed ahead.

You’re out of luck.

One vanishingly rare accident is a challenge to our capability; a second one simply overwhelms it. Our effective response to one accident often actually reduces response capacity for the second. Our singular focus on the first accident makes it much harder to pivot to the second. Even if we manage a quick pivot, we pivot to the wrong point. We’re tired, stretched, overwhelmed, outnumbered… and we’re fighting the wrong battle. Why?

We plan and prepare for single incidents, since probability suggests that even one major incident is extremely unlikely. Good planning advice encourages us to be most prepared for the most likely possibilities. So our planning reflects this, and the tools we use to define strategies do as well. We become adept at developing single-event message maps. Our communication response plan reflect our operational response plans. All good, until the unthinkable happens.

With a recurrence of an accident, physical response activity often replicates itself. There are only so many ways to fight a fire, stop a spill, conduct an investigation. But the communication challenge escalates exponentially. Recurring events lead to entirely new issues. Stakeholder concerns escalate and change. Concerns about safety expand to become concerns about safety culture. Concerns about investigation results turn into speculation of cover up. Measured reactions to maintain industry and consumer calm become evidence of callousness or arrogance. And our carefully prepared communication plans and products suddenly make us look flat-footed, incompetent, dishonest. Our previously effective strategies suddenly miss their moving target and our misplaced activities seem to move us in the wrong direction.

There are two levels of this malaise, physical response actions and response communication actions. Both depend on an agile communication strategy.

Physical response plans and strategies

Physical responders are trained to perform certain actions to minimize and mitigate an accident. These actions seldom change. Corporate decisions often reflect operational decisions; do what is working, keep doing it, do more of it. These decisions reflect a focus on the existing incident response strategy. If A happens, do B. If C happens, do D. But responders often aren’t prepared for both A and C to happen at the same time, nor for A and C to be entwined.

Repeating events always escalate stakeholder concerns. Communicators know this. As a communicator, make sure corporate leadership understand this. There must be an equal escalation in response plans and strategies: No halfway steps, no delays. If your product has failed, stop distributing it. If you were considering a recall, conduct it. If you have expressed regret and commitment, double it. If you’re participating in an investigation, throw it open. At the highest level, corporate officials must understand that double incidents entwined by circumstances threaten the survival of the product or operations if not the company itself.

Stop and refocus

Stop what you’re doing. Pull up from the response grindstone and consider the new implications of the new incident. Stop and refocus. Every action you continue from the initial response is wasted time and energy until you’ve developed a new Plan that addresses your new, much more dangerous communication environment.

Repeating events always escalate stakeholder concerns. Communicators know this. Stakeholders multiply along with their concerns. Issues escalate or are replaced by new, deeper ones. Refocus your resources. Integrate messages. You may not see the accidents as integrated, but the rest of the world does.

  • Maximize shared messages while clearly communicating response differences.
  • Don’t argue about the cause. Speculation on this issue just increased exponentially. Commit to the outcome of the incident investigation, and move on.
  • Focus on the status of each response. Identify shared concerns and messages and migrate them to a unified response process.
  • Every key message you’ve been using for one response will have to be strengthened, expanded or abandoned for use in the entwined responses.

Develop and coordinate response plans

Develop an ‘Incident A’ communications plan focusing on Incident A response activity. Develop an ‘Incident B’ communications plan focusing on Incident B response activity. Develop a combined Incident Issues Plan to deal with the integrated response actions.

  • This plan will deal with all shared concerns and issues.
  • This plan purview and priorities will be shared with, and supported by, corporate leadership.

This is really only a variation of incident command structure for a large, dispersed incident. But it will be the communicator’s charge to identify issues that belong to each team.

Pivot!

Don’t get stuck. Fight against the momentum you’ve built in your first successful response communication. Stop, look and change your strategies to reflect your new and more dangerous communication environment. Doing more of the same isn’t going to work. Stop, refocus and re-assign resources to your newer, smarter plan. Pivot away from what you’ve done well and create a new, coordinated path forward.

Plan!

Plan on not getting stuck. Instead of practicing against a single scenario, practice against two of the same incidents happening together, or two separate incidents occurring at the same time. Practice development of both incident specific impact and messaging, but also the combined impact and messaging needs.

Just do it!

We all tend to dismiss the possibility of simultaneous or consecutive incidents. Regulations and safety advances have made single incidents remarkably rare, but they still happen. But probability is not your friend: Suffering one incident does not minimize the possibility of another occurring. A probability of 1:100,000 does not mean that if one incident occurs you’ve just bought 99,999 ‘get out of jail free’ cards. Probability is all long term, always measured with the occurrence in the middle. At any given moment, it is just as likely that your organization will experience a major incident after one has occurred as it would be if one had not just occurred. If you have to plan for one, you might as well plan for two! So do it.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

Three Questions That Will Shape Your Strategy

| March 19, 2019

There’s an adage for all responses: Incidents never happen at headquarters, and they never happen during work hours.

This is patently not accurate, but it is prevalent. Your entire operation may be located next to, even around your headquarters facility, or you may hold several far flung facilities. Your operations may run nine-to-five, or around the clock. And while classic ‘property damage incidents’ are what we most prepare for, today’s fast moving ‘issue incidents’ can escalate a virtually non-physical issue into a reputation-challenging incident.

It’s still good to plan for the unexpected, to happen off-hours and in a remote location. We need to be ready to land in a strange location, at an odd hour and with nothing familiar around us. And we’re supposed to communicate effectively at that instant, and plan an ongoing communication response that reflects WHAT happened, WHERE it happened and WHO it happened to. How do we to this?

Here are three questions to start with:

What has happened?

How bad CAN it be?

Who is my local expert?

We’ll look at each of these to see how they help us prepare, plan and publish effective communication products.

What has happened?

This is the ‘facts’ question: As nearly as responders can tell, what has happened? Sounds simple, but it isn’t. This simple question can quickly lead to complicated answers, particularly with responders.We need to be clear as to what we need to know. Our question is really a minimalist query to responders. Responders are trying to figure out exactly what happened, why it happened, what the likely outcomes are, how long it will last, if the incident location can be accessed, if it is safe for responders to be nearby; a plethora of questions and concerns. Communicators need a simpler, publicly consumable version; assume that everyone can see the event, and now explain what they are seeing. Is it a fire, an explosion, an accident? Is it still releasing product? What observable physical actions are being taken?

Note that this does NOT include cause of the event. ‘Cause’ won’t be known for some time, until an investigation is completed. We need to leave ’cause’ out of our event descriptions. Any explanation of cause is speculative and uses up words that are needed for a better definition of what actually happened.

It also doesn’t need to be long, in fact the shorter the better. This is only our first exposure to the event; much more information will come. We need to get information from responders that helps us quickly, simply and effectively communicate what happened. Here’s an example: “We’ve experienced a fire in our tank farm that is currently involving three tanks. We’ve dispatched early responders who are determining the safest way to battle the fire. We’re aware of air safety concerns and are setting up air monitoring systems to keep our responders and the public safe.”

How bad can it be?

Here you want to know the worst case scenario. Remember that Facility Response Plans, Emergency Action Plans (or whatever they’re called) always include a worst-case scenario. Regulators want to know what you’ll do on the worst day, not the best day. Every responder can provide you with a worst-case evaluation.

Why worst case? Can’t we trust our responders to get control of the situation before it gets worse? Unfortunately not. Until the incident is fully contained, basically over, we need to assume it will get worse. This is particularly important to us communicators, as we usually hope for the best outcome. Our job is to make things better, to make people happier, to help people keep perspective so they won’t be too mad at us. We’re the clown in ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ always hopeful that everything will work out. We need to be more pessimistic. We need to firmly understand how bad it could be. We need to root and ground our stakeholders with effective expectation management.

What is worse than a bad event? An event that keeps getting worse.

We need to be careful we don’t fall into the trap of minimizing an event or its impact. There’s no better news than that something isn’t a bad as we thought. There’s nothing worse than a steady drip of bad, ever-worse news. Use worst-case until you KNOW it isn’t.

Remember too that we don’t have to wait for an incident to review what the worst-case outcome is; it’s already in our organizations’ response plans. As communicators, we need to be reading these bedtime horror stories now, when they aren’t really happening. We need to identify any instance where ‘worst-case’ is actually too bad to survive. Remember that responders rate impact and survivability on a physical scale, where communicators see a virtual scale of impact, including reputation and right-to-operate. If we do see something in our FRPs that will likely result in irreparable public harm, we need to flag it and strongly suggest that our responders come up with strategies to provide a ‘better-worst case’ outcome.

Who is my local expert?

We each need to accept the fact that there is a high probability we’ll be called on to provide fast, effective and sensitive information to people we don’t know. In many responses, the most affected public may be completely new to us. We don’t know their history with our facility, we don’t know their most cherished values, we don’t know their greatest concerns and we don’t know who we should talk to first, or most.

Every community has its own influence chart. Who has the power to make change happen? Who spreads the word around town? Who casts the community’s attitude? Who creates conflict, and who mitigates it? Coming from the outside, we might be able to quickly identify local media and we might be able to find out who the elected people are. We might even look at our FRP/EAPs and find out who our fence-line neighbors are or who is notified locally. But we don’t know the relational warp and woof of the community. So we plan and communicate at our peril.

Our first assignment is to develop trust with the most affected stakeholders, always the local population. Who works at the facility? Who delivers products? Who caters food? Who lives downstream? How has our facility interacted with the community before? Do they trust outsiders? What is their relationship with State or regional agencies? We need to recognize that we simply don’t know this, yet it is the most important information we can have.

What do we do?

First, don’t over-assume your ability to read a community! In times of crisis, we have only one chance at most to make a good impression. We simply need to do it right.

Second, find the person or people who truly know their community. Good news! They are likely to already be in the room, or available to join us. Look for the Local Expert, who is usually working with the Local On-Scene Coordinator, the ranking local Agency in the response. Find this person, bring them into the communication sphere and pick their brain. They know the locals, so we need to ask them to help us communicate effectively.

Why should they want to help us? They may wonder about this. We need to remind them that their reputation is riding on the effectiveness of response communication as much or more as on the response itself. The truth is that most physical responses go well: Responders work together effectively, fires get stopped, product stops leaking and everything is pretty well cleaned up. Unfortunately, a successful response isn’t the same as a successful recovery; recovery is complete when everyone trusts each other again. Poor response communication can break this trust apart, sometimes permanently. And our local person is the one at risk. For their own career and for their own day-to-day relationships, they need to help us communicate well.

Assume for a moment that we’re responding to an event away from our day-to-day location. We will parachute in, provide effective strategy and product, then go home when the rest of the response team goes home. We’ll go back to where we live, where nobody know what we do or who we work for. Local response people stay in town, where the incident occurred, wearing the same name-tags and holding the same positions. The most affected people know where they live.

Finding these resources, recruiting them and persuading them to help us communicate effectively and using their counsel and advice to meet the greatest needs of the closest stakeholders will also help them the most. It just happens to help us too. Our goal is acceptance and trust. Then we can go back to business. Their best outcome is the same.

A note on employment security: It isn’t greater in the public sector than in the private sector. Look at past incidents and see who ends up losing their jobs afterward. As many agency or government employees end up pillaged publicly as any private citizens do. In the court of public opinion a public employee is much more vulnerable. This is a case where our relationship with local experts is truly symbiotic. They need us as much as we need them. Find them, support them, use them and protect them.

To summarize:

What happened? Develop the best capsule summary of what happened, one that people looking over the fence line can understand, and relate to what they’re seeing.

How bad CAN it be? Assume worst-case, know worst case and build your stakeholder concern map from it. Don’t succumb to wishful thinking and above all, don’t get caught having to explain why things are getting worse!

Who’s my local expert? Find and utilize the people who know the affected Community the best. Help them help you, and protect their reputation along the way.

Questions? Did you see ideas in this post that you’ve never heard of before? Contact me!

Comments?  Leave them below.

Keeping Your Communication Rights

| March 12, 2019

How do you maintain your voice with changing stakeholders and changing response environments?

old-friends-resizeIncidents and their responses aren’t static; they grow and shrink, settle down and flare up. Each change threatens your ability to maintain a conversation with your stakeholders. An understanding of an incident’s life-cycle can help you understand how your communication process and products will have to shift to keep up with these changes.

First, let’s lay a foundation of facts to operate from:

Responsibility: If you caused an incident or if you are responding to an incident, you have more than a ‘right’ to communicate with affected stakeholders; you have a responsibility to. In no event can you justify a halt in communicating important information. You never get to take your ball and go home.

Effect: It’s not up to you to decide if people are affected, it’s up to them. People don’t have to be directly affected by an incident to feel it’s affect. Your roster of concerned/fearful/outraged stakeholders will grow. Any perceived ‘failure to communicate’ will escalate their angst, often more greatly than actual physical developments will.

All incidents start locally. Something happened that affected somebody, and no matter if the fuss and fury escalate to larger and larger populations, you will always have a most-affected group of people, usually defined by geography or by direct impact:

  • Geography: An incident occurs at a specific location, so the most affected stakeholders are the people closest to the affected facility.

  • Direct impact: A product is polluted or poisoned, and spreads to dispersed customers. While not necessarily geographically related, these stakeholders are related by impact.

These are your most-impacted stakeholders. They’ve borne the brunt of the incident. They are your ‘local’ by impact and interest. They must be the first people you talk to.

Incidents end locally. As the response winds down, the quantity of concerned stakeholders diminishes too. Some depart because they’re satisfied with the response. Some get bored. Some are dazzled by a newer, more spectacular developments. Media leave to chase other breaking news. Activist groups move on to the next funding opportunity. Politicians find another podium. Emergency vehicles and their flashing lights go back to dispatch. In all this, there remains a potent stakeholder group with enduring concerns, the same group that were there from the beginning; your ‘locals’, those most impacted and most interested. They will be the people you talk to the longest.

YOU are ‘local’ too! The incident occurred on your property, affected your facility, implicated or was spread from your product; one or more of these is true. You are as ‘locally’ impacted and involved as anyone else who suffered direct impact or exposure.

How do these rules and truisms fold into an incident life-cycle? Why is a changing strategy important? As a response moves through its ‘natural’ phases, a communication strategy must accommodate those changes.

Phase 1: Initial response

This could be an explosion, a leak, sudden illness from your product. It happens in a specific place, or to a specific population. Ideally, your organization is the first to know. Not always true, but let’s start here. You are the first to know what has happened and the first to respond.

What should you do?

Be the first to communicate. By plan, your first communication should be to those most directly affected. Facility Response Plans list local populations, product hazards spread through distribution channels. In both cases you likely have names and addresses of your first ‘victims’. Talk to them, immediately. Share all you can; incident updates, FAQs, Fact Sheets, maps and graphics, images. Establish an early conversation with your most affected stakeholders.

Don’t let someone else become the de-facto spokesperson for the event. Don’t let someone else become the ‘truth’.

Phase 2: Response escalation

Some incidents start small and stay small, with minimal escalation into a significant response phase. Most escalate. Additional response organizations arrive, regulatory agencies show up, local government bodies respond. This process can escalate clear up to state and federal agency responders arriving on scene.

Such escalation usually leads to some form of Unified Command, where multiple jurisdictions come together under a single unifying structure — hence ‘unified’ command. With Unified Command comes the Joint Information Center (JIC), the ‘voice of the response’. When a JIC is formed, all response communication is created by and channeled through it. As the ‘Responsible Party,’ your voice is subsumed into the JIC. You no longer speak for the response.

What should you do?

Be the first to cooperate. Join Unified Command and report to the JIC. Bring your initial stakeholders, initial updates and all the information you’ve already provided and join with the rest of the response communicators in the JIC.

Clearly express commitment and cooperation, so all response partners AND all affected stakeholders know you are continuing to communicate through the response megaphone of the JIC.

Activate your parallel communication plan. Identify all stakeholder issues and determine who will respond to each. As an example, the JIC won’t respond to inquiries about the impact on your stock price; it’s not a part of the response. Likewise, your organization won’t answer inquiries about which agencies are involved; that is part of the response.

Reinforce a key Unified Command rule in your Parallel Communication Plan: Participating organizations can speak for themselves, but they cannot speak for Unified Command. How does this fit in your plan? Feature organization-specific actions or announcements that will interest or engage some or all of your incident stakeholders. Dedicate a space on your website to JIC updates. Welcome comments or concerns while clearly specifying that you will route Unified Command-specific information to the JIC. Keep engaged in the conversation, both within the JIC and from outside the JIC.

Phase 3: Response deactivation

All good things must come to an end, including response activity. This is actually a really big deal and a major success. Whatever happened, the situation is under control enough so that everyone can go home, back to their lives and back to their day jobs.

Unified Command is deactivated, resources are ‘demobilized’ and sent back to where they came from. Functionally for the communicator, this means that the JIC will be disbanded. All the communication product should be copied and shared with all response partners, so you should receive some digital form of everything created and shared from the JIC. This should include contact information and concerns from stakeholders who contacted the JIC.

Here’s the shortest known definition of the Unified Command mission: Go home! Responses cost money, time and opportunity. Everyone in a response is missing out on their ‘day job’. Everything costs more. Everyone is losing days, weeks even months of their ‘real life’. It’s no surprise responses wrap up as quickly as possible; everyone involved wants them to.

Why is this important? Because the ‘start local, end local’ truisms rear their heads now. Just because Unified Command thinks the response is over doesn’t mean that the affected stakeholders agree. (See ‘I Want to go home’)

Affected stakeholders often expect more from Unified Command than they get, and this can significantly impact the long-term perception of response effectiveness. In turn this will impact the Responsible Party more than other response partners. This moment of celebrating the success of a response can carry the greatest reputation risk for the Responsible Party.

What should you do?

Keep on talking: Capture all the stakeholders from JIC activities and continue communication with them. Conduct a smooth, public handoff from Unified Command back to your organization. Translate the response’s communication curve to an ongoing process.

Expand on your Parallel Communication Plan to include this deactivation period. Maintain ongoing communication throughout the final phase of the response, which is…

Phase 4: Recovery

Recovery is the longest phase of any response. As we all know from childhood, it takes longer to pick up our toys than it does to take them out. While physical recovery plans may have specified milestones and ‘finish dates’, recovery communication continues to an amorphous end; when your stakeholders aren’t interested any more. Recovery communication often has a long ‘tail’, the length of time people remain interested. It can also exist as a sporadic phenomena, dormant for much of the time but jolted back to life by specific external events. Recovery communication has to account for all this ambiguity.

What should you do?

Expand your Plan:  Expand (again) your Parallel Communication Plan to include Recovery communication. Plan on a longer-term, usually lower intensity engagement. Be sure to include significant dates and to target related events for communication attention. As an example, anniversary dates resurrect interest, as do investigation releases, lawsuit settlements, or related events. Be ready for your incident to be referred to in subsequent similar events.

Most significantly, remember that media hold long memories. Any stakeholder angst you have had to deal with (successfully or not) will be remembered, and those people will be asked for their opinion in the next similar event. And your ‘locals’ will again be important! Keep a communication curve for as long as you need to ensure that your most affected stakeholders are satisfied.

Hope

It may seem tiring, may even ‘make your head explode’ as one colleague has expressed it, but you’re far better served by planning as much as you can for all the phases of response.

  • Any Unified Command response will require an extensive communication plan that incorporates strategies and tools for immediately effective communication, parallel communication through the response, then assumption of the mantle for response and recovery communication.
  • And above all, you’ll need perseverance. All incidents that reach public awareness have a long ‘tail’ of communication needs. Be ready to keep talking.

Resource Material: I Want to go Home

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