By Paul Furiga
After 30 years in journalism and public relations, I’ve had my fair share of exposure to crisis situations. Some would argue that one person’s news is another person’s crisis. Others might suggest that news is just another word for crisis.
Regardless of your definition of crisis or news, one secret I have learned from covering and later managing crises for my clients is that, like Bill Murray in the film, Groundhog Day, some truths about crisis communications are repeated over and over again, but no one seems to learn from them. We’re seeing this yet again with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
So let’s just call these The Crisis Rules Everyone Should Know But No One Remembers. Trust me. Print this off. Bookmark it. It’ll come in handy. Sooner or later, you or someone you work with will be in a true, full-blown crisis. And having this handy will help you address the very first of the Rules, which is:
1. More than 95 percent of all crises can be predicted in advance. Think about that for a moment. Numerous scholarly studies and plenty of anecdotal evidence from recent events bears this out. Isn’t an oil spill perhaps the most likely crisis scenario that could happen to BP? And yet the company wasn’t adequately prepared to deal with it? Carry the logic out and measure the preparedness of your own organization or those you work with: If you’re not prepared for an outbreak of illness in a school, food poisoning in a restaurant, defects in a manufactured product, then how good can your crisis preparation be?
2. Crisis planning should be done on a “sunny day,” not when you’re under cloud cover with a flood descending upon you. It’s logical: If you can predict, to a better than 95 percent degree of certainty, what sort of crisis might befall you, then why wouldn’t you plan to deal with it on a “sunny day,” when you aren’t distracted by gales of water cascading down on you? You don’t drive without auto insurance, most businesses wouldn’t open their doors without some form of insurance, tax or legal advice, yet so few plan for a potential crisis that violation of this rule is most like my Groundhog Day analogy.
3. There are only four types of crises. This is not rocket science. Again, think about it. There are man-made crises (BP) and there are natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina). Then there are natural disasters made worse by man (Hurricane Katrina, perhaps, with the failure of the levees) and man-made disasters made worse by nature (we may unfortunately see this one in the Gulf of Mexico if we have any massive hurricanes that propel the oil-stained currents of the Gulf in new directions).
4. Crisis communications is about transparency, not control. This is a rule so often violated that it stuns the imagination. If it wasn’t a crisis, you could control it! So if it’s a crisis, then . . . you can’t control it! Duh! Again, think about the BP spill. If the oil giant had said “we don’t know” or “we’re working on it” a few more times early on in the situation, how would that have improved the situation for the company in terms of public perception? Instead, officials made declarative statements that later proved to be wrong. That made them look like liars. It doesn’t matter if they were being truthful and were just wrong because of events beyond their control or if they indeed did lie. The point is, it looks like they lied. In the same vein, if the company had immediately turned on the live feed of the oil gusher while being open about what they knew and what they could do, would that really have worsened the public’s view of them? Case study after case study of successful crisis communication shows it would have improved the situation. Which leads to my last Rule,
5. When you can’t communicate content, communicate process. This is just as fundamental, and as important, as being transparent. If the BP folks didn’t know what they could achieve and when (because frankly, while a spill is somewhat predictable in the oil business, this kind of spill has never happened before), then why not let people know how you will address the process rather than promising you will cap the well by a specific date, or making some other statement that it later turns out you could not back up? Research in human psychology and crisis case studies have shown that even when us humans don’t know where we are going, if we have confidence in the process, our heart rates drop, physical stress is reduced and emotional upset is calmed. Yet far too many organizations, when in crisis mode, prefer to say “no comment” rather than focus on the one thing they absolutely can influence in a crisis, and that’s how well they communicate what they are doing to end the situation.
Are these the only crisis rules in the world? Of course not — and I’d love for you to add to the list. After three decades in and around local, national and international crises as part of my life’s work, these are five that have most benefited my clients in our crisis counseling work. When a crisis finds you — or an organization you work with — may you be so prepared as to have this list (or your own) close at hand so you can manage through the situation with the best results.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
