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Communicate in a Crisis: Address Threatened Groups Appropriately at Every Stage, with David Ropeik, Author, How Risky Is It, Really?
So any crisis or disaster or big breaking event that threatens some group has stages. The first is the immediate: “Oh my God it’s happening.” And at that point the threatened group, whether it’s members of a company or a member of a public where there’s something spreading that could kill him and stuff, is actually a huge opportunity to be honest and direct and open and build trust. Because at that point they’re most ready to say, “Hey you’re the person in charge, what’s the deal? What’s the deal? How can I be safe? Can you protect me? Can you keep me safe? Are you finding out? Do you control the valves? How much can you forestall the stock going down and so forth? Demonstrate that you’re on top of this, or be honest if you aren’t.”
Depending on how that goes, a day or two in it’s, “Why did you screw up?” But we’ve now calmed down from the immediate threat, we’re still walking around, we’re still breathing, we’re still alive, and we turn to a second phase of, “How are you going to handle it?” Regret the mistake if you made a mistake. Don’t just say, “I’m sorry.” Demonstrate what you’re going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Demonstrate. So that’s the second phase.
And the third phase is the long tail if you will, which is, “Were you honest?” So we’re in the post-disaster phase of Fukushima or the stock thing or whatever so the banks are now trying to behave in ways that don’t look like they were behaving. You’ve raised the bar by the initial incident. And so you stay in that long tail for a long time where people are taking the measure of were you honest? Did you demonstrate competence? “How vulnerable do I feel to this risk going forward?” And that still requires attention because that boogie man or any other boogie man is going to jump at people with more fear the next one that comes along because the bar has been raised, the sensitivity has been raised. So there are these three stages and they require somewhat unique handling in each case.