2004 Conference Transcript - Sandman (page 4)

The point is, Jack in the Box blamed the supplier. The supplier blamed the supplier. The public blamed Jack in the Box. The supplier was out of the story in two days. My point is that there's a seesaw of blame. And if you understand the seesaw, when you blame yourself more you get blamed less.

 

This happens with public agencies as well. I worked with the CDC during the anthrax attacks. And the biggest thing that went wrong during the anthrax attacks was CDC did not realize that a sealed letter nonetheless is dangerous. That finely-milled anthrax spores can escape even through a sealed letter. Now if any of them had been engineers rather than physicians they would have realized that paper isn't actually a solid. But they weren't and they didn't know that, and they got it wrong, and by the time they realized that they had it wrong, two postal workers were dead, two postal facilities were very badly contaminated. 

 

They messed up. You can make a case that, "How could they have known?" Nobody had ever seen this finely milled anthrax before. You could make a case that they should have known or should have guessed or at least should have been more cautious, less cocksure that a sealed envelope was safe. So you could blame them or you could not blame them and you'd be right either way.

 

Until CDC was saying to the postal workers, "We feel terrible," the postal workers were saying, "you sons of bitches." And those of you who followed this, the dynamic between the postal workers and the CDC was very painful and very bad for public health, because the CDC was trying to persuade postal workers to take their Cipro and to take various appropriate precautions. Eventually it would need to persuade them that things were safe enough that they could go back to work. And its ability to do that was greatly damaged by the mistrust and outrage of the postal workers and the unions at the CDC, which was grounded less in the fact that they had made a deadly mistake than it was in the fact that they hadn't said they had made a deadly mistake aggressively enough.

 

And when CDC started saying, "We feel terrible," – this was Julie Gerberding, who's now the head of CDC, was then the head of the infectious disease branch. When Julie Gerberding started saying, "My God, I feel awful,” as soon as she started saying that postal worker officials were saying, "Okay, let's put it behind us and figure out what to do." When she was saying, "Let's put it behind us and figure out what to do," they were saying, "You son of a bitch, I'm not going to work with you."

 

That make sense to everybody? Okay. So that's a piece of outrage management but the seesaw is true not just in outrage management, it's true very widely.

 

 

There is a page in the handouts called, “Reducing Outrage: Six Principal Strategies.” [See http://www.psandman.com/handouts/sand42.pdf.] And in the few minutes I have left I want to at least name these strategies. These are, in my judgment, the most important things to do when people are upset at you or are likely to become upset with you. When the problem is that you're hated or that you're likely to be hated. And none of these makes any sense at all except under these circumstances. These are not PR strategies. These are not things you do to get loved. These are only things you do to diminish the extent to which you are hated. And let me run through the list quickly. 

 

The first of the six is to stake out the middle rather than the extreme. In any controversy between the position that X is incredibly dangerous and the position that X is perfectly safe, incredibly dangerous always wins. But in a controversy between incredibly dangerous and moderately dangerous, moderately dangerous stands a very good chance of winning. Or, to put it a different way, in a typical risk controversy, let's assume the company is doing a B minus job of managing the problem. Your critics unfairly give you an F. You give yourself an A. And the public, when it finds out, flunks you for cheating. The public does not mind that your critics gave you an unfair F. It minds enormously that you gave yourself an overgenerous A.

 

So what you have to do is fight the F with the B minus. You've got to put out B minus communications, not A communications, as the antidote to their F communications. That is not true in a low outrage environment. In a low outrage environment you sell your virtues. In a high outrage environment, you apologize for your weaknesses and you are very careful not to oversell your virtues. 

 

This gets so bad that you can’t claim virtue even if the virtue is valid, even if you deserve an A. Let's assume a high outrage environment. I'm really, really angry at you, for reasons that make sense to me. And you've done something superbly. And you're proud of it and you're justifiably proud of it and it really is an A job. What happens when you start talking aggressively about how wonderfully you handled this thing. And it's true. You handled it wonderfully. What happens? Anybody? What happens? Where does outrage go when someone you're outraged at aggressively points to their valid virtues? Does it go down or does it go up? It goes up! We've already established that you're a jerk. Now you're a jerk who's right. Those of you who are married are very familiar with this phenomenon.  When there is outrage in the communication environment, the last thing you want to do is choose that moment to point to something that you're good at.

 

If your kid comes home having flunked math, this is not the moment for her to point out that she makes her bed every morning and that she eats her vegetables and she's doing well in English. The topic of conversation is how dare you flunk math? And anything she has to say about her virtues now will only make you angrier about her math grade. She can talk about her virtues some other day. But not when you're really pissed off about her math grade. 

 

So you want to stake out the middle with respect to your problems. You want to not talk about your strengths at all when talking with people who are or who are likely to become outraged. That's a corollary of the very basic principle I started with, that being loved and not being hated are different dimensions. So you don't fight people's hate by making the case for love. You fight people's hate, ironically, by acknowledging the case for hate. By acknowledging, in moderate ways, the things you have done wrong. 

 

Which takes me to the second point, acknowledge your prior misbehavior. This would be an idiotic thing to do in public relations. I mean, if people are hardly paying any attention to you at all, and they know nothing about you except what you tell them, and you have exactly eight seconds to tell them everything they're going to find out about you this year, you should not use your precious eight seconds to acknowledge misbehavior.

 

If you're GE – and I know he's speaking this afternoon – if you're the CEO of GE and you've got eight seconds with a mass public, you don't want to spend it talking about having put PCBs in the Hudson River, and the Housatonic River. That's a bad way to use your eight seconds. But if you're doing outrage management, you're GE and you're in one of the cities on the Housatonic where the contamination is bad and you're talking to an outraged community, that's a terrible time to talk about GE's virtues.  

 

It's a terrible time to talk about GE's corporate citizenship virtues, which are real, and I'm sure he'll talk about them this afternoon. It's an awful time to talk about them. You want to talk about how bad you feel about what you did to the Housatonic. You want to acknowledge your misbehavior; you want to even wallow in your misbehavior – because we think we've acknowledged it when our angry, outraged public has barely noticed that we've acknowledged it. It's not enough to acknowledge it once and then segue to good news. That's what you do in PR. In PR you get it on the record, preferably on Saturday when nobody's watching, so that you can in future prove that you admitted it, and then you don't talk about it. You segue to, you bridge to something that reflects better on your company.

 

And I'm not being critical of that. I hope you're not hearing me as thinking that's the wrong thing to do. That's the right thing to do if you've got an audience that's a certified PR audience, which is to say, they're barely paying attention, they're not skeptical, they're not hostile, they don't know what you did wrong, they're not going to find out, if they find out they're not going to care. You've got eight seconds to sell them on your strengths and that's all you should do. 

 

But if those specs aren't met and you're talking to people who are already angry and suspicious or are likely to become angry and suspicious, then you wallow in your misbehaviors. And obviously you can see the seesaw in that.

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