Washing the Black Swan

98% of the events I get called in on are entirely predictable.

Take, for example, product recalls.  Anyone who manufactures anything should, if they are prudent, be prepared for a  recall.  That announcement doesn’t have to be a crisis.  Any reasonable manufacturer will have had a spokesperson, key messages and contingency plans already in place.

Why? It’s a fundamental fact – if you make something, it stands to common sense and logic that eventually, something will go wrong.  That doesn’t make you a corporate villain.  It makes you entirely normal.

But what does an organization do in the event of a ‘true’ crisis?  A ‘true’ crisis is an event that no one could reasonably foresee, and has tremendously damaging consequences.  The term “Black Swan Theory” comes to mind.

Volcanic ash clouds shutting down European airports? That’s a black swan.  Terrorists bombing the World Trade Centre?  Black swan.  On a smaller level, discovering your business partner and supplier had a factory explosion, or that your accountant was secretly Russian mafia could qualify.  It doesn’t matter WHAT it is, it matters THAT it is both unexpected and catastrophic.

What’s the key to communicating through a black swan? I call it the shampoo model:  Lather, Rinse, and Repeat.

Lather:
Figure out who you need to talk to. Cast a wide net, and figure out how to reach them.

There are obvious target audiences.  Customers are a given.  Mainstream media.  Shareholders.  But don’t forget regulatory authorities, next door neighbours, or even your competitors.  Leave no stone unturned, and no stakeholder uninformed, especially if that stakeholder has access to a microphone.  Three days after Toyota announced massive, unprecedented recalls, there wasn’t a single word from Toyota with key messages available for the 81,000 fans on their Facebook page.  That’s 81,000 potential spokespeople who were ignored.

Different audiences require different tools. A mass email may work for one group, a dedicated website for another, one-on-one phone calls for a third.  The important point is to figure out who, and how.

Rinse
Often times in the midst of a true crisis, reliable information is hard to ascertain.  Use this fact as a help, not a hindrance.

In the days immediately following 9-11, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had a simple but brutally effective communications model.  “Here is what we know, here is what we don’t know, and here is where you can go for more information.”

By acknowledging both the facts and the unknowns, Giuliani established himself as the ‘go to’ source for information and reassurance in the event of a crisis.  Acknowledging you don’t know something establishes yourself as even more credible in the eyes of an audience which reasonably doesn’t expect you to have information in the first place.

Repeat
There is no such thing as a news cycle anymore. You’re reading this online.  Chances are good that most of you will have read at least one piece of online news in the 6 hours before or after reading this note.

Online news doesn’t have deadlines. Cable news doesn’t have deadlines.  News radio doesn’t have deadlines.  And if your black swan is news worthy to the public at large, even normal media outlets will cut into an episode of “The Brady Bunch” to bring news about a major news story.

News is constantly changing. So should your key message.  Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good – get out there and start communicating.

Remember – if they’re talking about you, you can leave the corporate spokesperson job to one of two people – someone whom you’ve picked, or someone whom the media picks.  Do you really need to guess which one is better?

Ultimately, this is all about living to communicate another day.  Delivering information on your own terms leaves you alive and in a position to build trust and credibility later.  Get the information out poorly, and you may discover that the swan is only black because of the tar in its feathers.