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What I want you to see is that these skills are diametrically opposed.
This corner up here is high outrage, high hazard. That’s crisis communication, and I'm not going to talk about it except to identify it as existing. That's when people are very upset and they're right to be very upset. Because they are genuinely endangered. And whereas the goal of outrage management is presumably to reduce the outrage and the goal of PR is presumably to increase the outrage, the goal of crisis communication is to help people bear it and there's no arrow to draw. You don't want them calmed down because they are right to be upset. You need them to be vigilant; you need them to tolerate inconvenience.
I've done more and more work since 9/11 on terrorism. You can't treat terrorism like a trivial Superfund site, where there's nobody going to get killed, because terrorism is a serious hazard as well as being a high outrage. So are some Superfund sites, of course. So the task is to help people bear their feelings rather than to try to persuade them to abandon their feelings. Very difficult task.
I haven't figured out how to earn a living down here in the low outrage, low hazard venue. If anybody has an idea for a business in that area, see me after and we'll see if we can't figure out how to do that. But in the other three I earn a living and again, the point to emphasize here, or the point I want to emphasize here, is the difference between outrage management and public relations.
Now I want to go back to the first thing I said, about being loved versus not being hated. Being loved is a public relations task. All the good, lovable things your corporation has done are much more interesting to you than they are to your publics. That's why all those spectacular pieces of literature out there, you know, you could put them in Grand Central Station and they would not get taken. And you all know that. It's not like that's a surprising piece of information but it's an important fact to bear in mind, that when you are talking about how good you are, you are talking down here in essence. You are talking to an audience that is very uninterested in something that you would like them to know.
On the other hand, when you're talking about how you screwed up and how badly you handled something and how angry they are, you're up here. You wish you didn't have to talk about it at all. But you do. Because they're very interested. Being loved is PR. Not being hated is outrage management. And those skills are completely different.
The Seesaw of Risk Communication
I want to say one more general thing and then I'm going to start my speech, with 10 minutes to go.
The last general thing I want to say about this kind of communication is to introduce to you the concept of the seesaw. Raise your hand if you know what a seesaw is. Oh, good. Every once in a while I talk about the seesaw and I see a forest of blank faces and I realize I have ventured into teeter-totter territory, where people don't know what a seesaw is. But I am glad to know that you are good, sound, American seesaw stock!
Here's the rule of the seesaw. Whenever people are ambivalent or undecided or confused – and people are not always ambivalent, undecided or confused -- but whenever they are, communication happens on a seesaw. That is, if you believe X and Y at the same time, which is a good working definition of ambivalence, then if the people talking to you say "X," your response will be "Y." If the people talking to you say "Y," your response will be "X."
Those of you who have raised teenagers are very familiar with this phenomenon because teenagers spend several years living on a seesaw. For a few years, if the parents say "Breathing is good for you," the kid will hold his breath. And then they outgrow that. But all of us are on seesaws sometimes. And outrage management is a situation where the seesaw is extremely common.
There are seesaws sometimes in public relations also. There can be seesaws anywhere on the risk communication map I drew you, but I think they're probably most common in outrage management. Now I want to give you a couple of examples. Let me give you a risk example first and then let me give you a non-risk example.
The risk example I want to give you is the traditional low probability, high magnitude risk. It is very unlikely to happen but if it happens it's going to be a disaster. Now that's a setup for ambivalence, isn't it? Right? There are two things that are true. It's bloody unlikely and it would be awful if it happened. And what I'm suggesting is that, in that situation, with most audiences, they're going to be on the side of the seesaw you're not on.
Now, we know this, we had it proved in kind of a living experiment, because the Environmental Protection Agency, a decade ago, passed something called the Risk Management Plan. And under EPA RMP rules, companies that use dangerous chemicals – or not even companies, facilities, that use dangerous chemicals are required to figure out how they could kill the largest number of people and then invite their neighbors in to explain it to them.
This law applies to tens of thousands of facilities. It's been around for about a decade. So we have many, many thousands of instances of people invited to coffee to talk about how we might kill you.
And here's what we've learned. Risk communicators already knew it but the companies were very surprised. Here's what we learned. If you walk into that situation and you say, "Look, if this happens and this happens and this happens and this happens, look how many people we could kill." And you pass out plume maps. And the plume maps have LD-50s on them. LD-50 is the area within which half the people would die. If you do that, it's not easy to make yourself do that, but if you do that, within 30 seconds, somebody raises their hand and says, "Well, yeah, but isn't that really unlikely?" And then, if you're well trained, you say, "Well, yeah, it is. It's really unlikely. But look how many people we could kill."
And if you do it right, within an hour, the entire room has united behind the premise that you should grow up. And stop wasting our time on these exceedingly unlikely worst-case scenarios. And you spend the rest of your life talking to the community about lower magnitude, higher probability alternative scenarios. Which is what you want to talk about.
In contrast to that, if you weren't trained, or you didn't accept the training, you walk into the room and you do what feels intuitively right. You say something like, "Look, we're going to explain our worst-case scenario to you this evening because the law requires us to and we're a law-abiding company, we obey all laws, even stupid ones. But I gotta tell you, this is a very stupid law. We are required to tell you about a worst-case scenario that is so vanishingly unlikely it is not worth talking about. It is not worth worrying about. Don't give it a second thought. We certainly don't."
That sounds funny but several thousand companies tried that strategy. It feels right, you know. Your scientists are telling you, “This is so low-probability it's not worth worrying about. Why are we bringing people in to say if there's an invasion from Mars we're in trouble?” And what happens is, if you do that, everybody in the room gets on the other side of the seesaw and you spend the next decade fighting with your community about how to reduce a one in a million risk to one in ten million or down to zero.
Everybody understand what's going on? If you're focused on how bad it is, they're focused on how unlikely it is. If you're focused on how unlikely it is, they're focused on how bad it is. And that only happens if they're ambivalent. If you talk to an audience of fans, they're going to think it's unlikely no matter what you do. They're going to be on your side even if you're not. And even if you are. If you talk to an audience that's already plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against you and they're looking for ammunition to hang you with, they're going to focus on magnitude no matter what you focus on.
So if they're not ambivalent, if they're already for you or against you, there's no seesaw. If there's a seesaw then you have to notice that the game you're playing is seesaw, not follow-the-leader. Or you'll screw it up; you will pre-empt the seat that you meant to lead them to.
That make sense to everybody? A kind of weird sense? This is not just about risk. There are lots of seesaws in outrage management. And the second example I want to give you, that's not a risk example, is blame. Blame is a seesaw. That is, in the average situation where something has gone wrong, there is a case to be made that it's your fault, and there is a case to be made that it is not your fault. And your audience is ambivalent. Again, your fans aren't and your critics aren't, but the huge audience in the middle is ambivalent. And, in that situation, the more you blame yourself, the less we blame you. The less you blame yourself, the more we blame you.
Now, you're looking like you don't believe me, so let me give you an example. Let me give you a non-professional example. And then maybe I'll give you a professional one.
Okay, your child got into a fight at school and the teacher caught him and sent him to the principal's office, and now he's got to tell you about the fight. We're going to make this a male child because it was a really bad fight. Okay, two scenarios. Scenario one: "Mom, Dad, I really messed up in school today." "Well. What happened?" "Well, I hit Johnny and the teacher had to send me to the principal's office." "Why did you hit Johnny?" "Well, that's not the point. He called me a dirty name and I lost my temper and I hit him. But it's my fault, I shouldn't have lost my temper." You're laughing because your kid hasn't been trained in risk communication. Just you wait; I’m going to take this training to the junior high schools and you're going to hear these things. At this point you are secretly proud of your child for hitting Johnny. You're also glad your child got caught and punished, but everything's working fine.
Now, scenario two. "You won't believe what that idiot teacher did to me today! Johnny called me a dirty name so of course I slugged him and the teacher had the nerve to send me to the principal's office." Now what's your response? Your kid's got an attitude problem, doesn't he? And he's going to get an attitude adjustment at home, on top of the attitude adjustment he already got at school.
Now, what I want you to notice is, it's the same data! In both cases your child is telling you that Johnny insulted his honor and he defended his honor with his fists. And if your child is attentive to the sense in which he was right to do that, you are attentive to the sense in which he needs to learn self control. If he's attentive to the sense in which he needs to learn self control, you're attentive to the sense in which he was provoked and right to respond.
You're on a seesaw with your kid. We are on that seesaw with respect to corporate malfeasance almost always. If you blame yourself more, we blame you less. I worked on the 0157:H7 Jack in the Box food poisoning. Remember that? You probably don't remember it as 0157:H7 unless you're into this stuff. It was E. coli, a particular kind of E. coli. Two kids died, hundreds of kids were hospitalized. Very serious outbreak. And there were two things that went wrong during this outbreak. One of the things that went wrong is the supplier delivered to Jack in the Box meat that was extremely contaminated with this very virulent strain of E. coli. The other thing that went wrong was Jack in the Box didn't cook the hamburgers hot enough to kill the E. coli. If the hamburgers hadn't been contaminated it wouldn't matter that they were half raw. If they hadn't been half raw it wouldn't have mattered that they were contaminated.
Everybody understand the situation? There's a case for blaming either the supplier or Jack in the Box or both. There's a case for forgiving them on the grounds that it's the other one's fault. And here's what happened. Jack in the Box blamed the supplier. Jack in the Box put out communications saying "Look, we're as much the victim here as these kids are. We're supposed to be delivered hamburger that's safe to eat. It says so right here in our contract. The hamburger must be fit for human consumption. They gave us hamburger that was not fit for human consumption, and we're going to sue the bastards." And a few days after the Jack in the Box outbreak, kids are still in the hospital and not knowing who's going to live and who's going to die, Jack in the Box filed a multi-million dollar suit against the supplier.
Continued...
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