Exactly one month ago, I hosted a poll at the tail end of a blog post on the importance of building elite crisis management teams and not relying solely on plans.
Pollsters were faced with a Solomon-like choice*: if you could choose only one, would you rather have a super crisis plan with no trained team? Or the opposite?
As of this evening, 95 percent favored team over plan.
Unfortunately, I would say that ratio is THE MIRROR OPPOSITE of the way organizations focus on crisis preparedness.
I have my reasons why I refrain from giving thumbs up/down opinions on specific crisis situations. However, I try not to miss opportunities when current lessons can be applied to the profession of crisis management. A recent Advertising Age article provides such a case, through its rare in-the-moment account of strategic planning and execution that takes place in a crisis “war room.” Here’s a link to the article.
In this case, Procter & Gamble assembled a crisis team to help protect the Pampers brand of diapers when critics began to question whether its new Dry Max formulation was creating “chemical burns.”
Although the situation is ongoing and a quick scan of the brand’s Facebook page suggests the situation is far from over, the article does provide insights to some very good crisis management practices:
B. Turner sent me a basket of questions to consider for this first “Ask the Communications Coach” post:
B. Turner: We both mentioned Pecha Kucha on the HBR blog today, one of my questions is (besides 20×20) what are other tools and methods for communicating complex ideas in limited time? What tools or tricks do you employ? A rhetorical question I have is why do we ask people who cannot present — whether they be engineers or human resources — to make presentations? Does the owner of the content have to be the presenter?
Nice series of questions here, B. Turner. Allow me to respond in two parts:
Organizations are wise to adapt to the unstoppable force that is social networking. At this point, if you don’t agree please refer to the myriad perspectives that advocate this point, right after you crawl out from under your rock.
Yes, there are reputational risks for companies/brands that engage through social media. These have been well documented with ample perspectives on how to prepare against such risks. (Ahem. Cough, cough.)
In addition, there are technological risks. Being “social” on these networks inherently implies that people are casual with information and, at times, complacent about how widespread that information is being shared. When (un)official company networks sprout, it’s the candid banter of employees or alumni typically reveals more than an untrained eye can see.
Like mosquitoes to standing water, hackers love social networks. The casual banter provides the information from which they can plan attacks against company infrastructures. If you have the stomach for it, you should read the play-by-play account of how a team of hackers used information pilfered from Facebook to infiltrate the entire infrastructure of an organization:
Continue reading What’s good about networking is great for hackers
Pick a team sport. Any sport. Your team gathers to prepare for the upcoming season. In your first meeting, your coach hands each of you a highly detailed playbook. He reads aloud each page to your team. The playbook details: