|
The third of the six recommendations is to acknowledge your current problems and, again, in ways that I think are probably obvious by now, you're only doing that because it's outrage management, you wouldn't do that in PR.
The fourth, and one I do want to talk about for a minute before I quit, is to discuss your achievements with humility, that is to say to give away the credit for having screwed up less than before. Or having accomplished something good. And again, you don't want to give away the credit, normally, in a PR environment. Because you haven't got much attention, you haven't got any skepticism; you want to get as much credit as possible. You only want to get credit you deserve; you don't want to fake it. But if you deserve the credit; you want the credit.
In an outrage environment, on the other hand, you want to give away the credit. You want to essentially say, we stopped polluting the stream because the activists made us. Not, we stopped polluting the stream because we love fish more than profit. Because an outraged public is not prepared to believe that you love fish more than profit. But it is prepared to believe that you stopped polluting the stream if you give a reason for it that's credible. Even if you don't want to say the activists made us, you can say we saw the handwriting on the wall, we realized that we were going to have to, eventually, we wanted to get ahead of the curve instead of being behind the curve.
And what this adds up to is that a word that is extremely popular in this room, is in my judgment a no-no in outrage management. And the word is "responsible." The only time in outrage management you use "responsible" is when you hang your head and admit you're "responsible" for the screw-up. But boasting of being a "responsible" company, even if there are many ways in which you are a responsible company and the boast is deserved, boasting of being a responsible company is an ineffective thing to do when talking to people who are outraged.
What you can do with your virtues to make them useful with an outraged audience is replace "responsible" with "responsive." And, rather than say "we did it because we're a responsible company," if you can say, "we did it because the government was asking us to, and the neighbors were asking us to, and the union was asking us to, and the CSR community was asking us to, and we may not be altruistic but we're not incredibly stupid, and we finally figured out that we'd better do this or we’re going to get into deeper and deeper trouble and so we did it," then I'm willing to believe you did it.
And of course the people you give credit for making you do it have a much harder time attacking you thereafter. So that's a sort of a side benefit. If you're Greenpeace and Dow says, "We've reduced our dioxin emissions. We didn't do it because we wanted to, we did it because Greenpeace made us," what are you going to say if you're Greenpeace? "No, we didn't"? Very hard for Greenpeace to respond when Dow says we reduced dioxin emissions because Greenpeace made us, especially since it's true. And it becomes, essentially, the only way that people are willing to notice that Dow has reduced its dioxin emissions.
Number five is very much the same. Share control and be accountable. Just as I want to replace "responsible" with "responsive," I want to replace "trust" with "accountability." Trust is another word that the CSR community uses more often than it makes sense to use in an outrage environment. I’m not saying don't ever use it. I'm saying don't use it with people who are pissed off. Or are likely to become pissed off. In an environment where outrage is a major issue, trust is the wrong goal. It's not just that you're not trusted. It's that it's a good thing that you're not trusted. And aiming to be trusted, in my judgment, is intrinsically unstable, because what happens when companies are trusted is they abuse the trust.
So what you want, and thank God that there's a word that you use all the time that I'm thoroughly approving of – what you want is accountability and transparency instead of trust. What you want to be able to do is to say to outraged people or skeptical people or even potentially outraged and skeptical people, "Hey, you don't have to trust us. You can check up on us. And you better check up on us because nobody trusts us."
And the paradox, of course, is the more frequently you say that, the less people bother to check up on you. So in an ironic way, trust comes in the back door. If you have a really good transparency/accountability mechanism, people don't bother to implement the mechanism.
I was a college professor for decades, and students were fighting to serve on faculty committees, and faculty were fighting to keep them off. And finally, the students won the right to sit on faculty committees. And they immediately stopped coming. This was not hypocrisy. They never claimed they actually wanted to come. They just wanted to be entitled to come. And once they were entitled to come, that was sufficient. So once we were transparent, they were not interested in following through.
And that's common, but it's not that you do it in order that they won't follow through; you are transparent and accountable in order not to overburden trust. Which is nonexistent in a high outrage environment.
Finally, number six, get the underlying issues on the table. In most controversies, there are usually things that people are upset about that they're not claming to be upset about. In risk controversies, for example, property values may be the underlying issue that nobody's talking about. And people are saying you're killing my children, you're endangering my health because of this controversy, and what they're really feeling is, my property values are going into the toilet because of this controversy. And until you put property values on the table and address the issues that people are really upset about but not claiming to be upset about, you can't manage the outrage.
That's a very quick summary of those six strategies. Those of you who want more on those six strategies, check out the handouts. If you want more than is in the handouts, check out my Website
[ http://www.psandman.com] If you want more than is on my Website, which nobody does any more, because there's a lot of stuff on the Website. But if you want more, give me a call and I will send you still more written materials. And of course if you're absolutely desperate you could actually bring me in.
Bottom line, and then I'm going to stop. I want to come back, first to this map. And instead of outrage and hazard, this obviously can be outrage and performance, and exactly the same map applies. And if your performance is good and outrage is low, you're going to do PR, and that's true for much of corporate social responsibility, where you're doing good things and people aren't interested and you want to do PR on behalf of the good things you're doing so that you get the value for them. I have no quarrel with that.
The main point of the speech is that's only one of the corners of the map, and in the opposite corner of the map, the outrage management corner, people are very upset. You may not have actually done anything very serious, but they're angry, they're frightened, they're distressed, they're upset, and then all your PR skills become irrelevant, you're no longer talking in sounds bites. Instead of having eight seconds, you now have eight hours. They come to a meeting and stay till midnight. You wish they would leave after eight seconds, you have all the attention you want, but it's hostile attention, it's skeptical attention, and outrage management is at that point the name of the game.
And then to come back to what was the first point I made, and in my judgment the most fundamental point that I made, reputation is two completely different tasks. Working to be loved is one of them. Working to be less hated is the other. See them as equally important. See them as unconnected. And see your job as both. Let me stop there and see if there are any comments or questions. Thank you.
Question: All of what you say makes sense, certainly when you're still in the talking environment. I imagine you in a board room or a meeting room with about 30 to 35 people, two thirds of whom have law degrees, all of them hanging on the corporate counsel's every reaction to what you’re saying. And I'm guessing that when the corporate counsel finally speaks up, he says something like, "You can say anything you want as long as you don't admit anything." How do you deal with that?
PETER SANDMAN: Okay. There are several answers. One is, of course, you're absolutely right. Most attorneys – there are exceptions – there are attorneys who are into ADR and even attorneys who like outrage management, but most attorneys find outrage management to be anathema. If your corporate attorney had his or her way, you would not acknowledge your corporate name. You would be the "alleged XYZ Corporation." Why admit you're the XYZ Corporation when you can force the plaintiffs to prove it.
So attorneys are not into acknowledging things, most of them. And what I usually try to do in a consulting environment is get the attorneys in the room. Because if the attorneys aren't in the room, I will be there all day and I'll say "you ought to do this," and "you ought to do this," and this is unattractive advice, it's counterintuitive advice. The senior managers I'm talking to aren't happy to be told they need to wallow in their misbehavior, they need to say they're sorry, they need to build in accountability mechanisms. This is not stuff they like hearing. But it makes sense. Reluctantly they agree that it might be the thing to do.
And then I go home and the lawyer comes and they say, "We can't do that. Right, Shirley?" And Shirley says "Right, you can't do that," and the CEO says, thank God. Now, that's not the lawyer’s fault. The lawyer in this case is Shirley. That's not the lawyer's fault. It's much more management's fault for treating the lawyer like a guru than it is the lawyer's fault.
But if the lawyer is in the room when I give my advice, then we have a chance. Because what I will work toward is the following agreement, and I recommend this to you, those of you who are doing this kind of work. I will say to the attorney, look, anything that you are planning to deny in court, I will not admit before you get to court. Because I don't want to screw up your strategy. If you're going to claim you didn't do it, I don't want to be out there saying "We're sorry we did it," because that will make it harder for you to say you didn't do it.
But if you have already decided that eventually you're going to have to admit whatever it is, you're going to have to admit X, and you're going to have to admit Y, but you're going to deny Z. And you can already tell that because X and Y are clearly true and X and Y are clearly discoverable, and there's just no, you know, it doesn't pass the smell test. There's just no way, even for a lawyer that you can imagine denying X and Y.
Then the question is not whether you're going to admit it in court – you are. The question is what are the advantages of admitting it before you get to court? And you're entitled to your opinion on that, but it's in my field. Is it clear what I'm saying? So whether we say it in court is your decision. And if you're not going to say it in court, nobody can say it at any other time. If you're going to say it in court, whether we ought to admit it apologetically and wallow in it in advance is not a legal question, because you're already – legally the strategy is already set, you're going to admit it. It's a communication question and I'm – you're welcome to your communication opinion, but after that I'll give you my legal opinion. If we want to trade fields for a while that will be fun.
And then you have a chance. And what comes out of that dialogue, if the lawyer and the communicator are in the room, what comes out of that dialogue ideally is a compromise that the lawyer can live with if only just barely, and the communicator can also live with. Let me give an example; a famous example.
BP had an oil spill in Huntington Beach, California. And it was shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill, so there was a lot of media interest, and Huntington Beach is a lot easier to get to than Valdez, so there was a lot of media coverage, a lot of media access. And importantly, it was a contract carrier. That is, it was not BP's tanker; it was a tanker company that BP had hired to carry its oil.
So BP's attorney, as the CEO was flying to the scene of the spill, BP's attorney was saying, "Look. We have a defense here." I think of this as the Jack in the Box defense. "We are the victim. The son of a bitch spilled our oil. And under no circumstances should we say we're sorry we spilled the oil because we didn't spill the oil. We hired him to carry the oil without spilling it and he screwed up."
The communicators on the plane were saying to the CEO, at the same time, "All right, that's fine, but nonetheless, it was our oil. It was on its way from our oil well to our oil refinery. If we hide behind the fact that it was a contract carrier, that it wasn't our tanker, to pretend that we are not, in some moral sense, responsible for this spill, the outrage is going to go out of control. The outrage will multiply vastly."
So what the CEO was being told is "Under no circumstances are you to take legal responsibility, because we are going to make a legal claim that this is not our spill." And he was also being told, "You must take moral responsibility or you're going to be in deep, deep trouble." And it turned out that wasn't hard. The answer was crafted on the airplane. The CEO got off the plane, was holding a news conference, and 80 million people saw this sound bite on TV that night, and he was asked by a reporter the key question. He was asked, "Do you consider this spill your company's fault?"
Here's his answer: "Our lawyers tell us it's not our fault. But we feel like it's our fault. And we're going to act like it's our fault." Spectacular answer! The lawyers went home saying, "Thank God he said it's not our fault." He preserved his defense, which didn't work. It was laughed out of court. But he preserved his defense. But 80 million people saw that sound bite on television that night and said to themselves, "I can't believe the CEO of an oil company has taken moral responsibility for a spill."
They did a survey six months after the spill and BP had a better reputation six months after the spill than it did six months before the spill, even in Huntington Beach. And it wasn't because they handled the spill well. Exxon handled the spill well. It was because they handled the apology well – and they did it without any increase in liability.
So if you corral your lawyer and you corral your risk communicator, and you make them negotiate with each other, they can come up with something both sides are willing to live with. It won't be what either side would have crafted on their own.
Thank you.
|
|
