On-line Readings in Public Relations by Michael Turney
	Maintain some perspective: Don't become a crisis communication hypochondriac
	©2006 Michael Turney	Table of contents	Preparing to Practice PR main page	About the author

A crisis is not inevitable for every PR practitioner.

While it's true that anyone thinking about a public relations career should be prepared psychologically and operationally for the possibility of having to perform public relations during a crisis, it's not a certainty. And, even if you do face a crisis, unless you work for a consulting firm that specializes in crisis management or for an organization involved in a high-risk activity such as aviation, mining, emergency medicine, nuclear power, law enforcement, or the military, those crises won't be a major part of your job and shouldn't be something you'll need to spend a lot of time worrying about.

Regrettably, one of the difficulties in trying to maintain such a calm perspective today is the flood of articles proclaiming the need for more and better crisis planning surging through public relations trade journals and the general business press. Every since 9/11, what had been merely a periodic surge has become a veritable tidal wave.

Many of these articles and similarly focused workshops at various PRSA and IABC conferences are needlessly alarmist and over-filled with gloomy and pessimistic anecdotes of the dire consequences that befell practitioners who failed to adequately and effectively communicate during a crisis. Such stories are true and cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that there may be more failures than successes when it comes to handling crisis communication. However, crisis situations, although numerous, are still the exception rather than the rule of everyday business life.

There are more organizations that do not face crises than do face them. And, even those that do face a crisis will have far more calm and routine days than crisis days.

If/when a crisis occurs, it will undoubtedly turn your world upside down. But, until then, unless you've intentionally chosen to work in a high-risk environment, you needn't and shouldn't let crisis planning dominate your thinking. If you do, you won't have time or be in the right frame of mind to maintain positive, healthy relationships with your organization's key publics.

Pre-crisis fear and over-preparation can be debilitating.

In the earlier online reading entitled Performing Public Relations in a Crisis, I reported hearing Robert Berzok, vice president of corporate communication for Union Carbide, discuss some of the internal management problems that arose in the aftermath of the Bhopal, India chemical discharge. The second-guessing and "if only we had ..." responses of the managers involved weren't surprising. That happens any time something goes awry. What intrigued me was his revelation that a number of middle-level managers who had not been directly involved in Bhopal became obsessed with what might happen the next time a crisis occurred. Berzok said some of them became so preoccupied with preparing for the next possible disaster that they let everyday matters slip through their fingers. They were putting so much of their time into making plans and holding disaster drills that they cut back on the time they usually spent meeting and talking with their customers. This apparently went on for months and didn't became evident to top management until they noticed a dramatic increase in customer complaints and began looking for its cause.

Hearing this was a major "Ah-ha!" moment for me because I had seen something very similar happen when I was working as the director of communications for the Iowa Department of Social Services (DSS) in the early 1980s. But, at that time, I hadn't fully understood what was happening, nor had I realized that similar problems were occurring elsewhere.

Among its other responsibilities DSS operated the state prison system, and I began working there only a few months after a major prison riot had occurred. Both state and federal investigations of the riot's cause and its handling were still in progress, and many people in the agency and in other state departments were obsessed with being better prepared for the next riot than they had been for the last one. Special inter-agency committees had been established to improve the existing "disturbance plans" for quelling any future disturbances and for communicating what was going on to all of the critical publics.

Note 1: For public relations purposes, our agency never used the term "crisis" to describe a plan or an actual situation because it might give the impression of something being out of our control. For the same reason, we never used the term "riot."

• By order of the commissioner, even the most severe situations involving armed prisoners, hostages and fatalities were termed "disturbances;"
• less severe situations were called "incidents."

Note 2: The post-riot investigations eventually resulted in federal court orders to reduce over-crowded conditions in the prison and to implement changes in recreational policies, but they found no significant problems with our riot-control responses or the ways we had communicated information about it. [The wording of this statement reflects the fact that the U.S. Justice Department, while concerned about its own public relations and image, had no qualms about using "riot" to describe Iowa's prison problem.]

In addition to the committees and work groups that had been established to work on improving inter-agency cooperation during emergency situations, our agency had created its own agency-wide committee that included representatives from all of the correctional facilities as well as from the central offices in the state capital, and there were additional review and planning activities going on in each individual institution. Consequently, revised disturbance plans were being developed and circulated almost weekly and mock crisis drills were being conducted at least once a month.

The true impact this had on the agency didn't become apparent until several months later when auditors and program analysts began looking back and reviewing caseloads, productivity, and time records. At the time it was happening, bureau chiefs and other mid-level managers who found themselves unable to keep up with the demands of their jobs without working lots of overtime thought they had been hit with a sudden rise in client caseloads and other extra work requests as well as the post-riot response and planning blitz. Overtime throughout the agency soared, but the backlog of work and clients who needed attention continued to build until it reached the point where several dozen temporary workers were hired to try to keep up. Months later, the auditors and analysts realized there had been no increase in caseloads, no new projects, and no unusual work requests other than those related to developing the new disturbance plan. That planning had become so absorbing and so time-consuming that it began interfering with the agency's ability to perform its primary mission.

Preparing for a crisis creates its own kinds of stress.

It's easy to get caught up in "crisis frenzy" whether you're dealing with an ongoing crisis or trying to plan for one. Both activities are necessary, but they must be done thoughtfully, analytically, and in moderation.

During the period described above when DSS was caught up in and being consumed by crisis planning, it was also holding frequent mock crisis drills. Some involved only our own agency personnel. Others were full-scale, multi-agency simulations that also involved staff from the State Police, the National Guard, the Department of Transportation, the Attorney General's Office, and the Governor's Office. Ironically, many of these drills that involved "tests" of what were supposed to be improved versions of our disturbance response plans actually ran into more problems and shortcomings than had shown up during the actual riot.

The biggest wake-up call came during one of the full-scale drills that involved a half-dozen agencies with staff members at several remote locations in addition to those gathered in a sub-basement of the capitol complex. The participants were still arriving in response to an "emergency notification" that had ordered them to report to the State Emergency Operations Center when a shouting match broke out between three fairly senior-level state officials who were arguing about which of them was supposed to be using a particular work area, phone line and radio link. They were all red-faced, yelling at one another, pounding on the table, and waving the crisis plans in their hands to emphasize their claims to that particular space and equipment. It was clearly on the verge of getting out of hand until the Social Services Commissioner stepped in and asked to look at the disturbance plans the three officials were holding. After a minute or two he somewhat shakenly announced that all three men were accurately quoting what their plans said but each one of them had a different version of what was supposed to be a single plan. Then, since everyone else in the room also had a copy of the disturbance plan in their hands, he asked everyone to check the date and version number on their plans. Scattered among the 20+ people in the room, there were five different versions of the disturbance plan. When he subsequently opened the radio and telephone links to the remote locations around the state and asked the people at those locations to check their plans, several more localized adaptations of the disturbance plan with additional differences were discovered. At that point the commissioner canceled the exercise, saying it was impossible to continue with everyone using different plans.

Immediately afterwards, the commissioner convened an emergency meeting of the key agency directors so they could try to get what he called the "rampant and counterproductive crisis planning" under control. He eventually succeeded in doing that, but the details of how that was accomplished is a story for another time.

The lesson in all of this is that while crisis planning is important, it's also important to keep that planning in perspective and under control so it doesn't become counterproductive.