Is it better to ask forgiveness or permission?
If you’re the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), the answer is to ask permission. As we’ve seen during the last several weeks, the BSA decision to end a national ban on gay membership, allowing local councils to decide whether to admit gays, was made without input from key stakeholders. As a result, the BSA’s subsequent about-face has turned its decision into a debacle.
I’ve been involved in enough crises in my public relations career to know that, despite what seems to be exhaustive media coverage of issues like this one, rarely does the outside world know all the players, politics and hand-wringing involved. My understanding and knowledge of the BSA crisis is the same as anyone else’s who read last week’s solid summary of the story on A1 of the Wall Street Journal. But I don’t need to be inside the organization to see the major missteps along the way.
Take BSA’s failure to communicate. Not informing and involving key stakeholders – whether they are business leaders, members, shareholders or, in the BSA case, religious and community leaders – in major plans or decisions is a sure sign of impending crisis.
A little more than three weeks ago, BSA CEO Wayne Brock visited the Nashville offices of the General Commission on United Methodist Men to share the decision BSA had made. The church organization charters more than 11,000 scouting units, second only to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to the WSJ.
The Methodist group’s response: “We never had the opportunity to say whether the policy should end. It was ‘This is what we are going to do, and does that match the policy of your church?’ ”
Several years ago, I worked for a health system whose visionary CEO charged his leadership team with moving forward on plans to identify a site on which a new hospital could be built without “clearing” his plans with the small community’s influential leaders. As with the BSA issue, there were so many moving parts, players and politics involved that pinpointing one reason as the downfall of the hospital’s initial plans – and ultimately the end of the CEO’s tenure there – is folly.
In both cases, it’s clear to me that a better developed plan to communicate with key stakeholders could have prevented a momentous domino effect that will be difficult to stop, let alone reverse. Crisis communications can be as much about communicating to avoid a crisis before it happens as it is communicating to fix a crisis after it’s begun.
What other crisis communications hallmarks do you see in the BSA issue? Do you agree that one of its biggest mistakes was its initial approach?
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Jason Snyder is a senior vice president for WordWrite Communications.
