Changing gears a bit, reading this story today about the response to the ongoing E. coli situation in Germany highlights the dangers waffling poses to organizations charged with managing crises.
One of the most important intangibles that an organization has in a crisis is authority. That is, their ability to speak to a situation and have people:
- Listen
- Believe what they’re being told
- Take whatever actions they’re being asked to take
Authority is crucial in a crisis, particularly in true life-or-death situations. If your organization is charged with issuing evacuation orders, for instance, the last thing you want (or have time for) is trying to convince people that they need to listen to you. You want them to pack up and go right away with no arguments.
The article outlines how German jealth officials are now starting to face a crisis of confidence. In the face of multiple instances of backtracking from previous statements of possible sources of the outbreak people are starting to doubt officials’ very competence:
“All this wishy-washy back-and-forth, it’s just incompetence,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
While the article is primarily focused on the science and methodology being pursued, I would argue that the critical elements here are actually centered around a key principle of crisis communications. You have to view your authoritative capital as a finite resource and one that you spend cautiously. In highly complex, technical situations like this, there is a lot of messy work that happens to understand the problem. While experts and those familiar with that world may understand and accept that reality (and indeed may view too much simplicity and clarity with suspicion), lay people don’t. What they look for and expect is a simple, clear and accurate statement of the cause.
Until the technical experts can say that they are positive that they’ve accurately identified the issue, it’s critical to preserving authority that organizations stick to a line that says “we have a process, we’re working the process and as soon as we know for certain what it is, we will say so”. This isn’t just for situations around food-borne illness: this applies to any highly complex, technical situation that requires research and investigation.
In the midst of a crisis this approach can be frustrating to people who want more information. And yes, it can sometimes open a door for third parties to come in and speculate. But those third parties lack authority and can afford to be wrong with little to no consequence. But for organizations that have and need to retain authority in a crisis, the key lesson we’ve seen over the years is that frustration will generally dissipate once the crisis has past. Lost authority because of conflicting, inaccurate answers however stays for good and is hard to get back.
Unfortunately, I suspect that any future incidents that German health officials have to manage will be hampered now by their need to re-establish and retain their increasingly lost authority.
Overresponding: A Lesson
November 28, 2011 3 Comments
Say this about Twitter, it certainly is a treasure trove of incident mishandling for analysis.
Today’s lesson comes to us from the Topeka Kansas Home Office and is about the danger of overresponding to an issue. Overresponding means you respond to the issue with more force than is appropriate and in so doing your response creates more problems than it solves. Overresponse is actually a very common pitfall in crisis communications and is typically a panic move made by people who aren’t experienced in this arena.
The lesson comes from Kansas governor Sam Brownback, or more accurately his director of communication Sherriene Jones-Sontag. This Associated Press story has all the important details, but the key points are that a high school student joking tweeted something negative about the governor on Friday. His director of communications spotted it and complained to the school, who promptly brought the student in and told her she had to write an apology.
Setting aside the ways this incident from the outset has clear incendiary qualities because of the way it looks (and frankly is) the governor and the school system bringing their coercive force to bear on an expression of speech, this is a classic example of overresponding to a negative comment.
The fact is that this critic had a mere 65 followers. If there had been no response from the governor’s office, the only people that would have even seen this criticism are maybe 100 people at most. It’s a simple bet that well over 100 people have seen that original remark now after the governor’s response. From that standpoint alone, the handling represents overresponse: their response drove more eyeballs to the negative news than would have seen it if they just left it alone.
Add to that then the nature of the response and how broadly negative the response to that response is. On the first business day after the story broke the governor and school district have had to retreat and apologize. That tells us that both the governor and the school district were coming out strongly on the losing end of public opinion. A retraction that quickly is essentially saying “uncle”.
Worse yet, this response has spiraled now beyond the original issue and is prompting broader questions that may linger and be more damaging than this incident was. This opinion piece by Dean Obeidallah on CNN (a high profile site) raises a number of questions that I’m sure the governor’s office would prefer never have been raised, particularly the question about tax payer funding of social media monitoring and the likening of the governor’s actions to Nixon’s enemies list.
What this illustrates is what can go wrong if you overrespond to an issue. What people should take away from this is the importance of understanding that not every negative comment deserves a response. Sometimes your response can make an issue bigger than it would be otherwise. And sometimes your response can take on a life of its own and become more of a negative issue than the original thing that prompted the response. Finally, this also highlights how freedom of speech issues are very hot button and organizations should always try to never look like they’re on the wrong side of that issue.
In the end, sometimes the right thing to do is the less obvious thing: leave the issue alone. And this is where people who are experienced in crisis communications can help, because we understand these risks and can help make an informed assessment on whether it makes sense to respond at all.
Filed under Analysis and Commentary, Crisis Communications Tagged with Crisis Communication, Freedom of Speech, Issue Management, Kansas, Politics, Twitter