A week doesn’t go by without news of a hospital or health system affected by a cyberattack or some other crisis. Coupled with an always-on news cycle and social media ecosystem, a crisis can destroy reputations. While the incidents themselves aren’t always preventable, organizations that thoughtfully do some advance crisis planning can emerge with their brands intact.
The ability to respond promptly to disasters or damaging reports can build confidence in constituents that the organization is on top of the crisis and a leader in its sector.
One thing to consider is that crisis plans should make very clear who is responsible for what. Here are several recommendations for consideration to help your organization keep pace:
Prepare in advance with inputs from the organization’s functional areas. The time to plan for a crisis is long before it hits. A well thought-out crisis plan is designed to help an organization communicate internally and externally with clear, succinct and timely direction. The goal is to minimize confusion and maintain confidence whatever crisis may occur.
Identify stakeholders. Designing an effective crisis management plan also requires an understanding of stakeholders and their roles. Stakeholders are all those who have an interest in the outcome. For a health system, the list is generally long and can include patients, governments, administrators, board members, clinicians. Each might need slightly different things during a crisis, and they should all be considered as separate audiences.
Identify a communications chain of command. Crisis plans should in advance identify all of those who will be involved with managing a crisis, what areas they are responsible for and who is ultimately responsible for making decisions. Then, all of those involved should receive the training they need to be effective in their roles. For example, specialists from all functional areas of the organization should be available to lend their expertise should the need arise, and executive spokespeople should receive media training.
Create real-world tools that can be modified later. One of the most valuable things to have in a crisis is a head start. Messaging, scripts and spokespeople should be prepared in advance. The communications team can later assist in adapting standard scripts to specific situations the organization encounters.
Ensure that crisis management messaging addresses various aspects of the crisis. When communicating bad news or another type of crisis, it is imperative that the organization’s spokespersons do the following:
Elaborate with the “what” explain what happened with concise language, together with the organization’s position on the issue
Educate with the “how” explain how audiences should respond to the situation and how the organization is responding
Engage with the “why” explain the impact the situation has on operations so that impacts are not blown out of proportion
By giving thoughtful consideration to the development of a crisis management plan, organizations are more likely to be able to recover from bad news. In some cases, they might even exit the crisis with stronger brand relationships.
As we strive to be better communicators and storytellers, it often helps to get out of our comfort zones and read inspirational literature that can teach us new things. We often find those types of books in classical literature, or from the latest fiction and non-fiction books. Sometimes, “How-to” guides also help.
That happened to me recently when I picked up the book, “A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra).” You may be asking yourself, “Why would a PR guy be reading a book about math and science?” Isn’t the reason you pursued journalism and then PR in the first place is that you stunk in those other areas?
Well, as it turns out, author Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., did, too. But through a gradual retraining of her brain, she earned a Ph.D. in systems engineering after completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, respectively. She now teaches engineering at Oakland University in Detroit, and is a leading educator in the area of STEM education.
While her book is primarily geared toward helping high school and college students successfully navigate the aforementioned disciplines, it’s ultimately a guide to improving skills and techniques for learning how to learn. And that can be useful for people in any profession, including PR.
Two modes of thinking
For instance, Oakley describes the two modes of thinking: the focused and diffuse.
The focused mode is like the flashlight setting that casts a bright light in a narrow area. It’s a direct approach to solving problems that requires rational, analytic and sequential ways of thinking. When we’re working intently on a project, like writing a white paper or drafting a PR plan/strategy, we use the focused mode of thinking.
But the diffuse mode also plays an important role in those projects. It taps other parts of the brain and is akin to turning your flashlight setting to casting a wider yet less powerful light. As its name suggests, the diffuse mode is wider and big picture. It’s a resting state in our brains. It works quietly in the background and allows us to form new insights. It kicks in when our minds wander, or when we take a break from a focused task to walk, jog, listen to music, sleep or play video games.
Oakley’s point, backed by the hundreds of research studies that inform her book, is that we must maximize both types of thinking to learn and tackle problems.
If we’re working on a specific assignment, it’s important to step away from that work at intervals to allow the diffuse mode to enter the picture. By pursuing a leisure activity or working on some other job assignment, we allow our diffuse mode of thinking to continue working on the first task at hand and lend new insights. The diffuse mode opens up possibilities that we may not have considered in the focused mode and prevents us from believing that only one approach to a project is the single way of accomplishing it.
Taking a better approach
Here are some other practical tips that I gleaned from the book that we can translate to our own profession and help us do our jobs better:
Avoid procrastination because it prevents the diffuse mode from helping a project or media campaign. While the luxury of time is not always possible in our profession, especially in crisis communication situations, building a timetable of assignments and deadlines, with thoughtful consideration, can help improve the overall response and results.
Don’t cram to memorize a speech or the big PR plan presentation in one day. Rehearse and study over a series of days and/or weeks. Research shows that we retain the material better, avoid reading the screen verbatim, and make more genuine presentations.
Avoid reading literature or meeting notes over and over again to learn the material. Instead, use a technique called “pause and recall,” i.e., turn away from the literature and notes after each page or several pages, and describe the concept in one’s own words; that’s the way we build chunks that form strong neural connections in long-term memory.
Take a 21-minute nap to refresh the brain (but don’t tell the boss). The brain’s neural networks need to be reset from time-to-time, which freshens our outlooks toward problem-solving
“Lady Luck favors those who try.” Sometimes, we feel downtrodden if a media pitch fails to elicit that desired interview, for example. Perhaps it’s time to let the diffuse mode help; alternatively, we could pick up the phone, be persistent (within reason), and converse with that target reporter directly. In my experience, with professionalism and respect for the journalist on the other end, the odds are good.
As in any learning endeavor, Dr. Oakley’s observation rings true: “The better I got (at math), the more I enjoyed what I was doing. And the more I enjoyed what I was doing, the more time I spent on it.”
One of the most important contributors to productivity is outstanding collaboration between business partners. In this brief (3:24) video, Amendola Communications Senior Account Director Philip Anast shares some tips he learned from the book Smarter, Faster, Better that explain how PR agencies and the client teams they work with can create a more collaborative relationship.
