Communicators’ Corner

Last week I asked a series of questions to determine if exercises actually help us prepare for actual responses. This post, we’ll look at the some of the same questions and discuss possible actions to maximize our exercise utility.

Warning!  This post is almost twice as long at the previous one, but answers are always more complicated than questions!

Did your last exercise utilize a scenario from an actual event?

Here’s a simple truth; communicators don’t get to pick the exercise scenario. Exercise scenarios are chosen to test response capability, usually focused on operational response capability. Hopefully, the scenario is selected to test specific capabilities, and hopefully those capabilities ensure actual success in the chosen scenario. But it isn’t likely that the exercise will test stakeholder communication capacity.  You won’t have a lot of control over the scenario, but you can exercise your stakeholder communication experience to ensure that the exercise prompts response communication activities that resemble the real thing.

Unless you’re involved in actual exercise and inject planning, the stakeholder communication function isn’t going to be tested by ‘truth’: Exercise designers will not have adequate exercise injects to test your capabilities. How do you compensate? With an effective Incident Communications Plan. In an actual event a key initial objective will be to prepare an Incident Communications Plan (you do prepare an Incident Communications Plan, don’t you?). In an exercise setting, this Plan should be developed, using the exercise scenario to determine stakeholder attention, concerns and outrage. You decide what each these measurements will be, just as you would in an actual event. The accuracy of your measurements is dependent on your professional capability, not on the exercise design.

So incorporate an Incident Trigger Worksheet, and a Key Issue Worksheet into your Incident Communications Plan. Set your stakeholder communication priorities and activities by this Plan, not by exercise injects. Test your team against the Incident Communications Plan. ‘Truth’ won’t mind if you do MORE than the objectives specify.

Did your last exercise utilize a scenario that was actually your organization’s fault?

Even though you don’t control the exercise scenario, you can still exercise as if the scenario is your fault. Communicators know that public outrage, blame, accusations and condemnation often aren’t based on actual facts, but on perception, precedent or activism. Blame and accusation will flow naturally in any actual event, so you add it in as an element. Build it into your Incident Communications Plan, and remind your team that in any actual response they will be blamed for what happened. Fault is fungible in the public dialogue about a response. Even if what happens really isn’t your fault, it will be treated as such.  Incorporate this scrutiny and skepticism into every exercise.

This still isn’t the same as responding when the cause of what happened is firmly attached to your own operations, so here’s what you can do for the coup de grâce: Early in the response, as you hold one of your JIC briefings (you do hold JIC briefings, don’t you?) and you’re reviewing stakeholder concerns, stop for a moment and ask how those concerns would change if you had caused the incident. List the impacts and discuss what else the team would have to deal with if it was your fault. Spend a few minutes expanding on the impact of actual fault. Then go back to work with newfound relief that this dynamic wasn’t built in to the exercise.  But don’t forget with it felt like during the moments you discussed it.

Remember that all exercises include ‘learning’ as a sacrosanct goal.  You can always justify an additional time-out for learning.  Don’t feel guilty about exposing your team to a reality of response communication.

A note about natural disasters

Why is it important for a communicator to engage with operators about disaster response? Because while the ‘fault’ is placed differently, the inevitably slowed pace and capacity of response actions can easily cause public sentiment to morph from sympathy to blame. While response challenges caused by the disaster will be tolerated, communicators will have to major in expectation management even while minoring in blame management. You will need to be ready to maintain an open dialogue about response delays to retain public acceptance of the response pace. In a ‘normal’ event you wouldn’t get away with this – any delay is inexcusable. In a disaster, delays are forgiven if the cause is understood.

Communicators will need a clear understanding of the physical hurdles responders are facing, and will have to clearly communicate them to stakeholders. Failure to keep people apprised of damage and destruction in a disaster can lead to increased expectation of response effectiveness and concern when it doesn’t seem to be happening.

Was your last exercise an unannounced exercise?

Unannounced exercises are conducted for specific purposes. By default they must be very focused on specific scenarios and responsibilities. They typically test only initial actions and the scope is limited to key measurements to prove readiness and response capability. Given the short scope and the intense operational focus, it’s unlikely that initial stakeholder communication actions are part of the regular scope of the unannounced exercise.

So what can a communicator do to test those first frantic moments? You have two options: You can enforce communication response in an existing no-notice exercise, or you can create your own unannounced exercise.

For the former, if your organization is subject to unannounced exercises by regulators or by choice, ask if you can ‘shadow’ the next one with your team. While there will likely be minimal or non-existent stakeholder communication requirements in the formal exercise, you can again add the ones you know you will face. Since communicators don’t have to be involved in the actual moving pieces of an exercise, you can very adequately test your own response communication plan in parallel to an operational no-notice exercise. Pull out your Incident Communication Quick Guide (you do have one, right?) and use it with your team against the next no-notice exercise. And enjoy the pace and panic!

For the latter, you can conduct a communication-specific no-notice exercise that is completely disassociated from an actual no-notice exercise. Prepare injects against a scenario that you know will occur (you do know what would actually occur in an emerging incident, right?) Use the Incident Trigger Worksheet and Key Issue worksheet to determine what needs to be released, and when. Test the approval process and see if your team can engage in the communication process as quickly as you know they will need to. All of this can be performed by your own people, at a time of your choosing.

In either case, be sure to debrief afterwards, and address the immediate challenges you faced .

Did your last exercise use real-time conditions in the scenario?

You can’t do much about this, because you don’t have super powers: You can’t change time and space. But you can match your planned response communication actions to the timetable set in the exercise. As an example, many exercises start a number of hours into the response, typically to ‘explain’ the presence of everyone in the room. You never have 100+ people in the Command Post in the first minutes of a real response. Sometimes you don’t even have a command post! So exercises start 12 hours in, or some such construct.

The challenge for communicators is that you would have had significant content and stakeholder interactions in place by that time. At least you should identify what you would have published and what stakeholder interactions would have occurred by ‘drill time’. If possible, create appropriate content to reflect what you would have done. There is usually an extended ‘start’ to an exercise, with introductions, reviews, objectives, etc. covered. Mobilize the experienced members of your team to write all previous content as quickly as possible. Then review it with the emerging JIC staff in the initial briefing. Work with the PIO to establish this previous content as valid. A helpful hint: most drill scenarios include some actions performed prior to exercise start, so you will have ‘facts’ to work with. While this activity may impinge on the time your team normally uses to catch up on emails or track down a latte, this ‘pre-content’ can be a huge help in gaining the initial traction you need to succeed in the JIC.

In every exercise, it takes a certain amount of time and effort just to get working together; a frequent comment is that ‘the JIC is still getting traction’. Expending time and effort to supercharge the JIC up front with prepared initial content can actually minimize the impact and extent of ‘traction time’. This delay happens in actual responses; formation of the JIC inevitably causes a delay in information flow as new roles are assigned, new approval processes are instituted, new branding and boilerplate is implemented and a new schedule is set.

Did your last exercise have measurable objectives?

How do you make your exercise investment worthwhile? By linking your own response communication objectives to any exercise. Have you conducted a gap analysis against your response communication process? Do you have an improvement plan? When you walk into an exercise, add your own objectives in addition to the actual exercise objectives. Again, nobody will complain if you accomplish more than the set goals. And you can take advantage of exercise bodies and budget to test your response capability.

What is a measurable objective? An action that can be recorded and evaluated. In detail, and against an expected outcome. Most exercise communication objectives are really goals; expected outcomes. As an example, in an exercise “hold a press conference’ may be stated as a goal, and measured yes/no as such.

Conversely, ‘Objectives’ for a press conference could include the following:

• Schedule conference time and prep time with Unified Command
• Set location based on media interest
• Determine security requirements and media check-in process
• Invite media to attend at least four hours in advance
• Identify Subject Matter Experts and prepare collateral material
• Prepare ‘Press Kit’ for attendees
• Determine release time of all prepared statements for non-attending media
• Draft prepared statements, FAQs and key messages for approval 2 hours prior
• Review agenda and coach participants 1 hour prior
• Assign recorders for all questions and replies
• Conduct press conference
• Debrief and identify additional issues and follow up.

Every objective should be measurable, and every measurement should include an evaluation statement. Needless to say, your list of objectives can grow beyond your capability to complete, track or evaluate. You need to be strategic in deciding what to take on. But every additional objective you test yourself and your team against yields a greater return on your organization’s (considerable) investment in the exercise, as well as a greater and more measurable return on your communication investment.

Were exercise objectives based on identified performance shortfalls?

Only you can answer this. Nobody else is as concerned about your capabilities as you are. Only you as a skilled and trained practitioner know that which of your actions provide effective public communication in the face of all the assumed challenges in stakeholder communicating in a crisis. You know what you need to test to be sure you are prepared to handle antagonistic media, irate stakeholders, activated activists or presumptive Pulitzer Prize winners. Create objectives that test what you know needs to be tested.

Did you participate in an exercise hot-wash?

Prove it. Ask for the final report and check to see what carried forward from the hot-wash. Don’t expect details in the report. It is a summary of all exercise activities, and a broad set of evaluations for the next exercise. Final reports are often more like pass-fails, as this is the major objective of most qualifying exercises.

Ask for the report, and dig through it for any details you can find. If the report doesn’t have details or recommendations about response communication, add your own recommendations from your unit hot-wash. Use those details to determine what you need to do better, and incorporate it into your future exercise planning.

Be aware that in these actions you will be fighting the ‘I wanna go home’ syndrome that strikes real responses as well; the supreme goal of any response is to go home. Put it out, clean it up, put it back: Put your toys away and go home. All hot-washes occur during the ‘go home’ phase of an exercise or actual response. It is challenging to maintain interest and focus. But the better you take apart the exercise/response, the more prepared you will be. Every major exercise should incur at least one post-exercise conference call with your team; to lock in evaluation points, review lessons learned and set improvement plans. This final small investment leverages your organization’s exercise’s investment to multiply the return of better preparation.

Were you asked to justify performance against objectives?

The unexamined life is not worth living, and the unexamined exercise is barely worth doing. You won’t be asked this question unless you ask it yourself. Remember that for all the fuss and fury, an exercise is a precious practice opportunity you’ll never get in real life. Your overall goal for any exercise is not to DO, it is to LEARN. Take your performance apart. Ask the question WHY you did what you did. Identify error and root it out. Capture excellence and incorporate it.

Did you wonder how you really did afterward? Did you come home with your own ‘lessons learned’?

If you perform the steps outlined above, you will KNOW how you did. You will have identified all lessons learned, and rooted out the cause of each one. Now apply what you have learned personally. We are each bundle of personal and professional strengths, issues, successes and failures. We are each learning units and growing units. Effective goals, careful observation, review of actions and thorough examination will help our organizations become more effective, and more prepared for ‘the big one’.

Now turn the lens inward. Go beyond the group actions and ask yourself; ‘How did I do? What did I do well, and what do I need to do better?’ Get personal. Did you have a lack of empathy for affected stakeholders? Were you difficult to work with because you were stressed? Were you resistant to correction or dismissive of other people’s ideas? Did you hide from your responsibilities? Were you gracious under pressure?

Exercises expose our daily work life to stress, so they are great opportunities to determine what happens to our personal ‘human unit’ when we have to work in such an environment. We each have much to learn. Gather personal lessons learned as well as professional ones.  In an actual event, stress is handed out for free, but grace is under lock and key. Learn how to be better both professionally and personally based on what you learn in each exercise.

Did you make revisions to your Crisis Communication Plan after the exercise?

Communication Plans are roadmaps for our next crisis. They are the repository of knowledge and wisdom. They should be living, breathing documents that are frequently reviewed and changed. After you have fully reviewed, analyzed, strategized and prioritized from each exercise, be sure to update procedures and practices in your crisis communication plan.

Your Plan revision schedule should look like an exercise archeology dig, with a layer of revisions from each major exercise; A Crisis Communication Plan with no revisions from Exercises is as dangerous as one with no scheduled annual updates. If you give me your plan, I can tell you in two minutes if you’ve been serious about exercising, just from the revision schedule.

We tend to look at plans as a repository of past responses and exercises. They are this. But they are also the only resource for the next person, the ‘newbie’ who hasn’t been in a major crisis, who is sitting up at the edge of their bed on their first 2:00am call. If you’re not keeping them plan current and improving it with lessons learned from every drill, you’re not helping that person at all. Which mean you’re not helping your organization, and ultimately you are shortchanging yourself. Practice. Evaluate. Learn. Improve.

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Practice makes perfect, right?

So we exercise, or drill, or run tabletops. By practicing, we build ‘muscle memory’ that ensures our capability of responding under stress. This ensures that we will take the right actions at the right time, and by doing so we will always be ready to leap into action to defend our organization’s virtue in a crisis.

Sounds good! But repetition in training often lacks quality control. What if we are practicing the wrong actions? What if all our training is actually teaching us to do the wrong thing? What if our investment is yielding a negative return?

How does an exercise help us?

For the vast majority of us, we plan and prepare for what never actually happens. That’s the reality of response planning; if the events we plan and prepare for happened frequently, our organization would either suspend risky operations, or be driven out of existence. Preparation is prevalent. Responses are rare. So we depend on some form of training and exercising to maintain our edge.

Let’s look at a series of questions to determine if we’re really accomplishing our preparedness goal in our exercise regime:

1. Did your last exercise utilize a scenario from an actual event?

Most exercises feature generalized scenarios created as accretions of real or legendary previous incidents. They usually are not specific to your organization or product. They often feature external causes of the event you must respond to. In oil spill responses, we seem to always deal with a runaway barge, usually named ‘Lucky Lady’ or some such fabrication.

We prepare for OUR organization’s welfare, and any actual response will be due to something happening to OUR organization. At the least we should exercise against what will actually happen to US, not what could have happened to anyone else.

When we fail to make our exercises as specific to our own operations as possible, we’re wasting our exercise investment on hypothetical, unrelated responses. We’re not practicing how we will have to play. The argument is made that ‘we’re getting ready for anything’, but we’re missing the opportunity to practice specific steps in the specific response environment we will have to actually perform in.

2. Did your last exercise utilize a scenario that was actually your organization’s fault?

This seldom happens. There seems to be an aversion to fault in the exercise world; a fear that having something go wrong that was our fault will be too hard to bear, or will include unnecessary stress on the players. So we end up with the runaway barge striking our good and noble wharf, or tanker, or bridge. We have an activist blow something up, a Navy ship striking our tanker. We have a contractor tip something over, a storage tank suddenly rupture, an asteroid hitting our distribution dock, a vampire attack.

Why? Pretty much by definition, any actual response you participate in will involve your own operations, most likely due to human error or poor maintenance, or mismanagement. It won’t be due to a runaway barge, an asteroid impact or vampires. It will be your fault.

The practice of avoiding fault in exercising is actually a disservice to all of us. In an actual event we will be under stress from the event and it’s impact, as well duress from the level of public attention and outrage. But we will also be reeling from our recognition that it shouldn’t have happened, that we caused it, that it was our fault. This is particularly challenging if there are injuries or fatalities. Nobody wants to go there. But there we will be. Would you rather practice with discomfort, or response without readiness?

Exercising seems to value the ‘kumbayah’ dynamic – it “ … does not examine the issues or is revelatory of cockeyed optimism.” We gather around an exercise campfire to respond to an imaginary scenario with above-average skill. Then we proclaim to ourselves that we are ‘ready for the real thing’. But if we’re not exercising in an environment of fault, we’re missing valuable exposure to all the stress, blame and upset that comes at us in a real response.

Of course, we also need to exercise against natural disasters, where the dynamic changes – ironically easier for communicators, but much more difficult for responders. As communicators, we get a hall pass since we didn’t cause it. But our responder cohorts still have to stop it and clean it up, often in a much more resource-constrained environment.

Side note, communicators: Spend some time talking with your operators about the challenges they face in a natural disaster. It will help you prepare better external messaging when you know what they’re going through.

3. Was your last exercise an unannounced exercise?

When was the last real crisis that gave you advance notice? The closest a communicator gets to advance notice is in issue management: Sometimes an emerging issue will give us advance warning that a crisis is about to break out. Sometimes that margin of notice is vanishingly small.

Unannounced large-scale exercises are almost impossible to conduct. No organization can endure business disruptions that aren’t due to real events. Exercise planners simply can’t create a large, spontaneous event that instantly occupies organization-wide resources without advance notice (this is actually a good description of an actual crisis). At the same time, this reality inevitably foster unreality. You can participate in every exercise your organization conducts throughout your career, and never be ready for the 2:00 a.m. call that we all dread.

4. Did your last exercise use real-time conditions in the scenario?

Most exercise scenarios proscribe all relevant conditions – so tide, precipitation, temperature, even time are all controlled for accurate measurements. While understandable to control complexities of planning the exercise, this is again completely unrealistic for preparation. We never get to pick the weather, times or tides in an actual event. So we’re not tested against the vagaries of time and chance.

5. Did your last exercise have measurable objectives?

Here’s a test; what were they? If you don’t remember, you may not have had any. It’s still common for communicators to be tested by one requirement, conducting a press conference. Sometimes a number of stakeholder calls are supposed to be answered. Occasionally a social media simulator will be used to ‘test’ response capability.

As a communicator, you know that these objectives aren’t adequate for actual preparation. Plus, how were they measured? My experience is that communications product is measured by checkbox; yes or no. No review or qualification of content or competency. So you end up with a ‘pass’ grade that doesn’t reflect real world capability or competence.

6. Were exercise objectives based on identified performance shortfalls?

Why were you tested on what you were tested? Did a previous exercise expose shortfalls in capabilities? Not if the previous exercise was graded ‘pass/fail’ How would an exercise planner know what a communication shortfall looked like? During exercise planning, were you asked to share what you knew you should be tested on? If exercise objectives aren’t based on measurable performance or identified improvement needs, what are you learning, or proving for capability?

7. Did you participate in an exercise hot-wash?

Of course you did! Every exercise ends with a hot-wash. Then what?  Have you ever received a report afterward that identified successes and failures, with specific recommendations to incorporate successes in best practices and address failures in future exercises? If not, what benefit have you gained from the exercise?

8. Were you asked to justify your exercise performance against set objectives?

No you weren’t. The objectives were likely neither detailed nor demanding enough to accurately assess performance, so how could you be challenged on your success? Of course in the hot-wash you discussed what didn’t work, likely attributing it to some external or drill-only cause, even excused it as ‘part of the drill dynamics’. But without specific objectives that are measurable and specific injects to test against, you likely have never been challenged specifically with what you should have done better. So you’ve never actually been stress-tested.

9. Did you wonder how you really did afterward?

Have you ever left an exercise with the gnawing conviction that you blew it? Have you wondered how you would have done if it had been real? The hot-wash we all participate in often serves as a safety valve, where we can express our concerns and then forget them, secure in the knowledge that someone else is keeping track. But they aren’t. If communicators in the room don’t note and record issues, challenges and failures, they will disappear into the mists of time. And that is where they usually end up.

10. Did you come home with your own ‘lessons learned’?

Most of us come home with memories of the river cruise or dinner, the awards session, the buffet line. We might remember the view from our hotel room or the taxi ride to the conference center. We might even remember the skimmer demo, or the new social media tracking tool we saw. But do we come home with personal lessons learned? Do we decide to figure out how to do something better?

11. Did you make revisions to your Crisis Communication Plan after the exercise?

Was any evaluation or lesson learned so compelling that you revised your Crisis Communication Plan afterward? What did you learn that forced you to reconsider training, or policy or preparation? If you didn’t, was the investment in attending the exercise worth it?

What was your exercise success?

All of these are challenging questions, and if you were able to answer ‘yes’ to several of these questions, you’re doing well!  Most likely, many of your answers are ‘No’. You are in fact, inadvertently and with good will, exercising in futility.

Good news!

Yes, there is good news! Every one of these questions can be turned to a ‘Yes’ for communicators! You hold a unique role in responses that gives you much more flexibility to thoroughly test yourselves.  There are exercise actions you can take to ensure your response communication capability.

These will be the topic of my next post.  Stay tuned!

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