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By Mark Schannon
For all that’s been written about risk, issue, and crisis management, there’s no evidence that organizations are any more effective at managing them. Most often, it looks like we’re gerbils on a circular treadmill, running like crazy but making no progress. Watching organization after organization making the same mistakes, intensifying outrage, and increasing the cost of resolution leaves one wondering how much value there is in all the theories, models, and training offered by countless experts. (Ironically, many of these problems apply equally well to all aspects of marketing and public relations.)
Why do some companies turn disasters into crises, while others manage to contain the fallout? One can break the problem down into three areas: Flawed theories and models, faulty preparation, and flawed execution. This article is the first in a series of ten that analyze each of these three areas.
Flawed Theories and Models #1: Issues cannot be accurately tracked, evaluated, monitored, and predicted. The world is not linear, and the laws of cause and effect do not apply equally well to people and things.
For years, I’ve watched—and helped—company issue managers try to develop a rational model of issue management and prediction that would provide answers to such questions as: How do we accurately measure level of intensity? At what level of intensity should corporate resources be deployed against an issue? How can we track the evolution of an issue through various audiences with some degree of confidence? Given the number of issues the company faces and that we cannot manage all as well as we would like, how do we assign priorities based on those with the potential to do the most harm? How can we predict which issues are likely to emerge or erupt, and what can we do to prevent the emergence or minimize the eruption?
Millions are spent annually to answer these questions. Sophisticated research, econometric analyses, media analyses, NGO analyses, and past and future trends are scoured. At best, in the end, the company is left with a false sense of security. For example, at one Fortune 50 company, a very senior manager confidently predicted in the early 1990s that environmental justice was going to be the major environmental issue for the rest of the decade.
His prediction was based on excellent research and analysis, discussions with countless experts, and sophisticated models the company had developed. He was wrong, but not because his analysis was bad; he was wrong because his models were based on a faulty understanding of how people take in and process information, how we form opinions, values, judgments, emotions, and even behaviors.
In a June 30, 1998, New York Times article, James Glanz wrote “An atom can be here, there and somewhere else all at once; it can be going both this way and that way; it can be rattling with internal energy and quiet. Such are the quirky freedoms of the quantum microworld that do not apply to automobiles, apples, or people.”
Perhaps the weird world of quantum physics does not apply to automobiles or apples, but there are parallels to the way human systems work. And while one needn’t have a degree in physics to understand these parallels, it is useful to explore how the similarities create a more profound – and humble – understanding of how issues emerge, evolve, erupt into crises, and disappear.
Consider the conventional issues management model used widely by organizations such as the Public Affairs Council as late as 2001.
This model tracks the intensity of audience engagement in an issue over time. It presupposes a rational, linear system that can be measured and predicted. But it fails to capture the reality of the experience.
Consider chlorine crisis of the early 1990s. Greenpeace had launched an international anti-chlorine initiative, “Chlorine Free by 93,” but the issue was not playing with mainstream environmental groups or the national media until mid-1994 when then U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) Administrator Carol Browner called for a study that would lead to the eventual phasing out of the industrial use of chlorine. Browner’s announcement demonstrated how successfully and covertly the environmentalists had infiltrated EPA and dominated their thinking. Suddenly, the chemical industry had an international crisis on its hands.
The feared high point in the crisis was the publishing in May of 1996 of Theo Colborn’s Our Stolen Future, the supposed heir to Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring. Launched with much fanfare and international media with dire warnings of impending doom for the human race, it sank like a stone. It would be reassuring to be able to claim that industry counter-moves undermined the book’s reception, but the reality is that the issue had already fallen off the radar screen of the general public and the mainstream media. There simply was no receptivity.
Within a few months, those of us working on the issue suddenly realized that something bizarre had happened. The crisis had devolved back into an issue, but none of us had anticipated or recognized it until after the fact.
Most senior issue and crisis managers agree that issues can ebb and flow without obvious cause. It is as if the issue jumps more than one level on the traditional chart, bypassing the neat, linear structures so painstakingly created. To me, issues were acting more like quantum events than anyone could have imagined. The old model just didn’t work:
- Issue change does not happen gradually; it is often abrupt and violent, based on having reached certain thresholds. Something happens to an “issue’s system” causing it to instantly leap or fall to a new level of engagement. One can envision adding energy into the system until it reaches a threshold level and intensifies or draining enough energy from the system so that the issue immediately drops to a lower engagement level. This hypothesis is the heart of a new approach to issues management.
- Issue progression is not linear. Awareness does not flow neatly from one target audience to another. It is almost chaotic; issues pop up in the strangest places affecting disparate and unlikely populations, and they can disappear just as quickly.
- Issues do not evolve arithmetically. One plus one does not equal two, but sometimes four, and sometimes zero. Twice the number of activists can cancel each other out or quadruple the awareness about the issue.
The failure of the traditional model has led to a new approach I call The Quantum Theory of Issues Evolution™, which is based on the current model of the atom. Electrons move between energy levels, sometimes disappearing from one level only to appear two or three levels up or down, based on the amount of energy put into or taken out of the system.
If one thinks of the nucleus as the group facing an issue, then the various electron levels represent audiences who might engage. The electron becomes a marker for that engagement. Adversaries want to put energy into the system to drive the electron to a higher level, i.e., to engage a broader, more diverse audience. Companies need to pull energy out of the system to reduce audience engagement. Reducing energy is not easy; it usually requires reducing audience emotional levels and reducing the appearance of conflict or lack of cooperation, all of which require significant effort.
The value of this model is that it explains why and how issues can suddenly and immediately change intensity. As energy is either put into or drained from the system, there is no motion until a threshold level is reached. If the energy introduced or drained is high enough, one might see an issue rise or drop more than one level—virtually instantaneously.
The model also explains the problems with traditional research. According to Dr. Timothy Wilson, psychology professor at the University of Virginia, “[The] the unconscious being excavated by scientists processes data, sets goals, judges people, detects danger, formulates stereotypes and infers causes, all outside our conscious awareness”. Many scientists argue that we have little access to this deeper unconsciousness.
Under this theory, traditional focus groups and quantitative research is not designed to determine the salience of an issue with an audience. Neither their attitudes nor behavior will change until they have already become affected and their behavior changes—sometimes unconsciously.
Further, the theory provides strategic guidance to anticipate and blunt efforts by adversaries to add energy into the system, and, perhaps most important, it demonstrates the non-rational, non-linear aspects of issue evolution, forcing managers to adopt new approaches.
Next: Overly broad and confusing definitions of incidents, issues, and crises make it virtually impossible to determine an appropriate management response.
This article was adapted from an article in Spring 2006 special edition of The Journal of Promotion Management. “Risk, Issue, and Crisis Management: Ten Observations on Impediments to Effectiveness and What Can Be Done About Them.”
Mark Schannon heads Schannon & Associates, a Communications Consulting firm in McLean, VA. ( E-mail: mschannon@cox.net; phone/fax: 703.821.1083; cell: 202.744.2566). Schannon has managed over 75 issues and crises over more than 25 years, helping organizations understand the complex dynamics of high-stress situations that can result in self-defeating behavior. He formerly headed the Washington operations of Ketchum, a global public relations firm. Schannon has written and spoken extensively about issue and crisis management, risk communication, environmental challenges, litigation communications, industry restructuring, and other issues. |
