2008
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Posted: September 20, 2008
Communicators (including risk communicators) almost invariably know too much about their topic – possibly more than their audience is capable of learning, and certainly more than their audience wants to learn. So they have to simplify. This column is a primer on simplification. It offers some tips on how to simplify language and graphics, but its main thrust is how to simplify content. Particularly important is the column’s advice on what you can’t simplify out of your communications without sacrificing credibility and integrity: information that conflicts with your conclusions or casts a bad light on your organization.
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Posted: August 18, 2008
When companies are doing things the public disapproves of, you don’t have to make them stop; all you have to do is make them tell, and the public will make them stop. This is the genius of the right-to-know concept. In the environmental arena, the most important U.S. right-to-know law is Section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986, which requires the Environmental Protection Agency to collect and publish an annual Toxics Release Inventory of the chemicals emitted by thousands of covered facilities. This column, written for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, examines how Section 313 used transparency to force emissions reductions – and how the law fostered the development of risk communication, as companies sought to figure out how best to talk to their neighbors about their emissions.
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Posted: June 5, 2008
When Barack Obama accumulated enough delegate commitments to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, the defeated Hillary Clinton faced a classic risk communication challenge – managing her followers’ outrage (and her own) so as to enable them to transfer their loyalty to Obama. Politicians were of course giving her traditional public relations advice – stress your enthusiasm about Obama; don’t mention your followers’ anger or your own; etc. But her problem wasn’t a public relations problem. So Jody Lanard and I decided to give Sen. Clinton some risk communication advice. This column is the result.
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Rumors: Information Is the Antidote
Posted: April 25, 2008
Everybody’s interested in how to respond to rumors, especially false ones. Do you ignore them? Rebut them? Acknowledge the accurate bits? This short column covers all that, but it also addresses a less sexy but ultimately more important topic: the importance of tracking down rumors that may be true.
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Meeting Management: Where Does Risk Communication Fit in Public Participation?
Posted: March 19, 2008
Whenever I advise clients on how to manage meetings with angry stakeholders, I’m aware that I’m impinging on a kindred field, public participation (also called public consultation). Our goals aren’t incompatible, but they’re certainly different: Public participation professionals want to facilitate a substantively productive meeting, whereas I want to help calm the meeting’s most outraged stakeholders (which can help clear the way for a substantively productive meeting). This column outlines five differences between outrage management and public participation – the value of venting, who you want at the meeting, whose side you’re on, the relative importance of substance and process, and what skills you need. It then tries to assess the proper role of outrage management in public participation.
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Posted: February 17, 2008
Written for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, this short column tries to free the NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) impulse from its pejorative connotations. It distinguishes the literal NIMBY position (“this is okay, but not here”) from closely related positions (such as “this shouldn’t be built anywhere”), and discusses its role in siting controversies. The column argues that managing outrage – either upward or downward – is the key to arousing or diminishing NIMBY, and thus to stopping or siting locally controversial land uses (LULUs).
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Who’s Irrational? When People “Ignore” Risk Data
Posted: January 15, 2008
My clients endlessly claim not just that the risk of X is tiny, but that anybody who thinks otherwise is “irrational.” This short column takes the irrationality claim seriously, and examines some alternative hypotheses. Even assuming your worried stakeholder is wrong about X, he or she may not be irrational – but rather mistrustful, postmodernist, cautious, uninformed, misinformed, intuitive, emotionally upset, motivated by personal or social values, or pursuing a different agenda. When we ignore these possibilities and assume our risk-averse stakeholders are irrational, the column suggests, we raise questions about our own rationality.
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2007
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“Watch Out!” – How to Warn Apathetic People
Posted: November 9, 2007
This column is a primer on precaution advocacy – that is, on high-hazard low-outrage risk communication, where the job is to increase outrage and thus to motivate apathetic people to take precautions (or demand precautions). Apathy isn’t always the problem when people are ignoring a serious risk – they could be in denial, for example, or they could have reasons to dislike the recommended precautions. But when apathy is the problem, this column is a good place to start. It’s a quick rundown on twenty precaution advocacy basic principles.
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Indoor Air Quality Risk Communication: Before You Fix Anything, Talk!
Posted: September 12, 2007
The basic risk communication dilemma in most IAQ controversies is that indoor air quality usually has genuine deficiencies, but if people’s IAQ complaints and symptoms are largely psychogenic – more an outcome of bad process (and the resulting outrage) than of bad air – then just fixing the air quality deficiencies isn’t likely to relieve the symptoms or reduce the controversy. The core of the solution, this short column argues, is to talk – and listen! – before you fix anything.
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Posted: July 30, 2007
Everyone knows risk communicators need to be empathic, but all too often empathy gets operationalized as telling people you know how they feel – or, worse yet, telling them how they feel. This long column argues that the essence of empathy is “sort-of acknowledgment,” finding a middle ground between obliviousness and intrusiveness. The column goes on to discuss ten elements of empathic communication. Some are pretty obvious (listening and echoing, for example); some are easy-to-learn tactics (such as suggesting that “some people” might feel a particular way instead of accusing your stakeholders of feeling that way); some are complicated and counterintuitive. The most complicated and counterintuitive ones are grounded in the work of psychiatrist Leston Havens.
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The Boss’s Outrage (Part II): Talking with Top Management about Risk Communication The Boss’s Outrage (Part III): Managing Management’s Outrage at Outrage Management
Posted: May 7, 2007
These two closely related columns address why outrage management is a tough sell to most corporate and government executives. It focuses particularly on the fact that when stakeholders are outraged at an organization, that organization’s leaders are almost always outraged right back. So if you want to get the okay to address stakeholder outrage more responsively, you will first need to address your own management’s outrage at the very idea that you’re not proposing to fight back. The columns offer some suggestions, grounded largely in the seesaw concept. I love the title of Part III: “Managing Management’s Outrage at Outrage Management.” That’s it in a nutshell.
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What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five
Posted: March 15, 2007
If and when a serious pandemic arrives, messaging will shift from precaution advocacy (high-hazard, low-outrage) to crisis communication (high-hazard, high-outrage). There will be a transition period between the two, when the pandemic looks imminent and outrage is rising fast. This very long column – split into four parts – identifies 25 “standby messages” for that transition period. It elaborates both the messages and their risk communication rationales. Jody Lanard and I wrote the column with two goals in mind: to help officials prepare their communications for the early days of a pandemic, and to help them decide to be more candid (and thus more alarming) in their pre-pandemic communications now in order to make those early days less of a shock.
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The Boss’s Outrage (Part I): Talking with Top Management about Safety
Posted: January 7, 2007
I have long been interested in why corporate managements reject safety improvements that look eminently cost-effective – in some cases, improvements that have a better return-on-investment than the company’s principal product line. This short column explores some outrage-grounded reasons why senior managers might shy away from sensible safety investments. Among them: guilt/responsibility, ego/stature, hostility/contempt, fear/denial, and performance anxiety. The column suggests some ways safety professionals can break the logjam when factors like these are keeping their companies from making safety progress.
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2006
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Posted: December 12, 2006
Month after month, this is one of the least often read of my major columns. I’m not sure why. It covers an outrage management strategy I consider one of the most important (and most difficult) of any on my list: attributing your desirable behavior not to your saintliness (the “responsibility” claim) but rather to pressure from your stakeholders (the “responsiveness” claim, which is usually much closer to the truth). The column outlines the main reasons for giving away the credit, from the practical (it meets your critics’ ego needs) to the theoretical (it nurtures the public’s understanding of how capitalism works), and it addresses the main reasons why my clients resist giving away the credit. If you’re trying to think through how to reduce stakeholder outrage, this is one you ought to read.
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Media Sensationalism and Risk: Talking to Stakeholders with Reporters in the Room
Posted: September 6, 2006
This short column discusses seven principles for understanding and coping with the media’s entirely appropriate inclination to focus on the most newsworthy things you say – an inclination often labeled sensationalism. Of particular importance is the problem this raises for outrage management. The very same meeting at which you hope to say responsive, apologetic things in order to help reduce the outrage of angry stakeholders will also be attended by journalists, who will naturally convey your revealing admissions to readers and viewers who might otherwise never know. Managing a controversy well, in other words, is in some ways antithetical to managing the news clips well. You have to decide which task is more important. The column recommends managing the controversy.
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“Speak with One Voice” – Why I Disagree
Posted: July 27, 2006
This column dissects an issue – one of the few – on which I disagree with most risk communication and crisis communication professionals: what to do when there are differences of opinion within your organization. The conventional advice is to “speak with one voice” – that is, to paper over the disagreements. I urge my clients to let the disagreements show. The column distinguishes the ways of showing opinion diversity that really do undermine public confidence from the ways that (in my judgment) do not, and identifies many reasons why it is beneficial to let the public know that you’re not all on the same page about every issue. Perhaps most importantly, it details what tends to go wrong when organizations muzzle their staff in order to speak with one voice.
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Bird Flu, Pandemic Flu, and Poultry Markets: Playing Ostrich or Talking Turkey?
Posted: May 29, 2006
When the next influenza pandemic finally arrives, it will be carried by people, not birds. In the meantime, the public is understandably confused about the distinction between the “bird flu” that threatens poultry flocks and the poultry industry (and an occasional unlucky person) right now and the “bird flu” that may someday mutate to facilitate human-to-human transmission and threaten us all. In this column, Jody Lanard and I try to disentangle bird flu from pandemic flu. And then we address the most common risk communication errors committed by government and industry in virtually every country beset by bird flu, when they set out to convince consumers not to worry and not to stop eating poultry.
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How Safe Is Safe Enough: Sharing the Dilemma
Posted: April 20, 2006
This short column has two goals. It introduces readers to the invaluable risk communication strategy of dilemma sharing – telling people you’re torn between options and not sure what to do. This strategy is fundamental to both crisis communication and outrage management, but it is seldom utilized, largely because it threatens management egos. The second goal of the column is to apply the dilemma-sharing approach to the specific problem of “how safe is safe enough.” Risk managers have no choice but to prioritize precautions and decide which ones they can implement. The claim to be taking “every possible precaution” is always a lie. Risk managers who don’t want to lie can use dilemma sharing to explain why they have chosen not to take some possible precautions.
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The Dilemma of Personal Tamiflu Stockpiling
Posted: January 10, 2006
When Jody Lanard and I wrote this long column, there was a shortage of Tamiflu. Officials and physicians argued that the available supply should be saved for current use against the seasonal flu and government stockpiles against a possible pandemic – but should not be stockpiled by individuals. We wrote the column to expose the many illogical, inconsistent, and inaccurate arguments being used against personal Tamiflu stockpiling, but we conceded that the competition with other uses was a valid issue. Now the Tamiflu supply exceeds the demand; “excess” manufacturing capacity has been mothballed. The competition argument is dead in the water. Officials and physicians still oppose personal Tamiflu stockpiling, but the only arguments they have left are the specious ones analyzed in this column.
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2005
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Games Risk Communicators Play: Follow-the-Leader, Echo, Donkey, and Seesaw
Posted: December 13, 2005
This short column considers the four possibilities when you are trying to convince me of X: I could have no prior opinion about X; I could believe X already; I could believe Y instead; or I could be ambivalent, torn between X and Y. Each of these four situations has its own risk communication game, described in the column: follow-the-leader, echo, donkey, and seesaw. Good risk communicators need to master all four games. And they need to know how to decide which game they’re playing – or, if they’re playing several at once, which game is most crucial to their communication goals.
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The Flu Pandemic Preparedness Snowball
Posted: October 10, 2005
I published this column in late 2005, when the U.S. public’s interest in pandemic preparedness was as high as it’s been so far. This was the teachable moment, I wrote. It wouldn’t last, so preparedness advocates needed to make the most of it. The column discusses nine recommendations to improve pandemic preparedness advocacy. Among the highlights: Focus less on the pharmaceutical fix; focus more on worst case scenarios, non-medical preparedness, and non-governmental preparedness; stop implying that a pandemic is imminent. Much of this advice is relevant even in periods of diminished attention, and most of it will still be on-target the next time pandemic preparedness is hot.
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Katrina: Hurricanes, Catastrophes, and Risk Communication
Posted: September 8, 2005
When I wrote this column shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck, I didn’t realize that it would still be an ongoing disaster years later. So the column focuses on risk communication failures before the hurricane reached New Orleans (especially the failure to scare people sufficiently) and immediately after the hurricane reached New Orleans (especially the failure to acknowledge emergency response inadequacies and to communicate with victims desperate for information). I saw these failures not as unique to Katrina but as warnings relevant to the next big earthquake or infectious disease outbreak. This perspective may have led me to go too easy on the specific defects of Katrina response.
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Posted: August 15, 2005
This short column discusses some words that have different meanings to risk professionals than to normal people – and that are therefore likely to be misunderstood when used to explain risk to a nonprofessional audience. Among the words: conservative, significant/insignificant, positive/negative, bias, anecdotal, safe, prepared, confident, and even the word “risk” itself.
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Superb Flu Pandemic Risk Communication: A Role Model from Australia
Posted: July 6, 2005
On May 2, 2005, Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott gave a speech on pandemic preparedness. It wasn’t especially earthshaking; in fact, it attracted fairly little media attention. But Jody Lanard and I thought it was terrific – candid, alarming, tentative, all the things most official pandemic presentations were not (and are not). So we sat down to annotate the speech in terms of 25 crisis communication recommendations we had published previously. If you just read the speech, you’ll discover that good risk communication can sound just as ordinary as bad risk communication. If you read the column’s annotations, you’ll discover how extraordinary this particular speech really was.
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Posted: June 16, 2005
This column argues that western society has a blind spot for bad guys – that our vision of an actionable emergency is an accident, not an attack. It discusses several examples, from the resistance to evidence that the 1984 Bhopal “accident” was probably sabotage to the opposition of the U.S. public health profession to the possibility that smallpox might constitute a weapon of mass destruction that could justify a vaccination program. The best example – detailed in the column – happened in April 2005, when it was learned that an infectious disease testing company had mistakenly sent samples of a potentially pandemic strain of influenza to labs all over the world. So a fax went out to all the labs telling them so, and asking them to destroy the sample – thus converting a small accident risk into a much larger terrorism risk. The facts were public at the time, but a society with a blind spot for bad guys simply ignored their implications.
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When to Release Risk Information: Early – But Expect Criticism Anyway
Posted: April 16, 2005
In February 2005, the New York City health department issued a warning about a possibly disastrous new strain of AIDS. It was widely criticized for alarming people before it had solid evidence that the strain was spreading. Also in February 2005, the United Kingdom’s Food Safety Authority held off announcing that many prepared foods were contaminated with tiny amounts of the banned red dye Sudan 1, because it wanted to prepare a list of affected products first. It was widely criticized for the delay. Obviously, when to release risk information is a tough call. In this column, Jody Lanard and I lay out the pros and cons, and conclude that early is almost always better than late. We also analyze the New York City decision in detail, and offer some ways to reduce the downsides of early release.
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Talking about Dead Bodies: Risk Communication after a Catastrophe
Posted: February 8, 2005
After nearly every natural disaster (earthquake, flood, etc.), the survivors feel an urgent need to bury the dead, often in mass graves that later complicate everything from mourning to inheritance. Yet with some exceptions, the bodies of natural disaster victims are not a significant disease threat to the living, and burying them should therefore have a lower priority than other rescue and recovery tasks. International emergency response agencies do their best to convince local officials and local populations that this is so – but more often than not they fail. In this column, Jody Lanard and I discuss the reasons why the impulse to bury the bodies is so powerful, and offer some empathic ways to counter that impulse, rather than simply explaining the scientific data.
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Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication Traducción en Español: Reacciones de ajuste: el momento enseñable en la comunicación de Crisis
Posted: January 17, 2005
When people first learn about a new risk, they go through a temporary over-reaction that is natural, healthy, and useful. Psychiatrists call this the “adjustment reaction.” Having one is virtually a prerequisite to crisis preparedness. This short column outlines the characteristics of adjustment reactions. It advises crisis communicators to guide the public through its pre-crisis or early-crisis adjustment reaction, rather than trying to persuade people to skip this essential step toward being ready to cope.
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Tsunami Risk Communication: Warnings and the Myth of Panic
Posted: January 6, 2005
One of the reasons the Thai government neglected to warn its people in advance of the devastating December 2004 tsunami was a fear of panicking them. As if to prove this deadly decision right, a few days later there were warnings that aftershocks might produce another tsunami. Thousands of seaside residents fled to higher ground – and when it turned out there was no second tsunami, media reports said they had panicked. Jody Lanard and I had written before about the tendency of officials and journalists to misdiagnose caution as panic, but the tsunami impelled us to revisit the issue. This time we focused more narrowly on how rare panic is in response to natural disasters – or to warnings about natural disasters.
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2004
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Pandemic Influenza Risk Communication: The Teachable Moment
Posted: December 4, 2004
This is the first column Jody Lanard and I wrote about pandemic preparedness. We wrote it when many experts believed a devastating H5N1 flu pandemic might be just around the corner – and so we thought so too. (We still think the risk is serious, but there’s much less sense of imminence as I write this blurb in mid-2008.) The thrust of this long column is how to sound the alarm. After a primer on why H5N1 is “not your garden variety flu,” the column proposes a list of pre-crisis pandemic talking points. Then it assesses how well experts and officials were addressing those points as of late 2004. The experts, we wrote, were doing their best to arouse the public. But governments and international agencies were undermining the sense of urgency with grossly over-optimistic claims about pharmaceutical solutions.
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Posted: November 11, 2004
This column is in two parts. Part One lists some basic tips for overcoming the universal temptation to sound overconfident; it’s a primer on how to sound uncertain instead. Part Two goes into detail on the toughest part of acknowledging uncertainty: deciding just how uncertain you ought to sound, and then coming up with words (or numbers) that capture the right level of uncertainty. It assesses five biases that tend to distort our judgments about how uncertain to sound, even after we have accepted the principle that we should acknowledge our uncertainty. Compare “I can’t guarantee that it’s safe” with “I don’t know if it’s safe.” Both acknowledge uncertainty – but very different levels of uncertainty. Which of the two is likelier to get said when the other would have been closer to the truth?
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Flu Vaccine Shortage: Segmenting the Audience
Posted: October 22, 2004
Because of manufacturing problems, the U.S. had less vaccine for the 2004–05 flu season than it expected to need. The shortfall actually increased the demand, as people who don’t usually get vaccinated decided that this year they would. Jody Lanard and I were critical of what officials were telling the American public about the situation. We were especially critical of the failure to segment the audience – both according to the medical importance of vaccinating each segment and according to whether members of that segment bother to get vaccinated in a normal year. Since audience segmentation is a basic principle of risk communication (and all communication), we decided to show how it’s done by developing different flu vaccination messages for each segment. This column is the result.
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Posted: August 28, 2004
Most of this long column is addressed to risk communicators whose goal is to keep their audience unconcerned. So naturally they’d rather not talk about awful but unlikely worst case scenarios. The column details their reluctance even to mention worst case scenarios, and their tendency when they finally get around to discussing them to do so over-reassuringly. It explains why this is unwise – why people (especially outraged people) tend to overreact to worst case scenarios when the available information is scanty or over-reassuring. Then the column lists 25 guidelines for explaining worst case scenarios properly. Finally, a post-script addresses the opposite problem. Suppose you’re not trying to reassure people about worst case scenarios; you’re trying to warn them. How can you do that more effectively?
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When People Are “Under-Reacting” to Risk
Posted: July 14, 2004
When you think people are under-reacting to a risk, the usual diagnosis is “apathy” and the usual prescription is some sort of precaution advocacy: “This could kill you! Here’s how to protect yourself.” This short column is a checklist of questions to consider – in sequence – before jumping to the conclusion that apathy is the right diagnosis and precaution advocacy is the right prescription. Some of the alternatives (not paying attention, for example) are very familiar to safety professionals. Others (such as problems with self-efficacy and fatalism) are often missed.
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Sharing and Bearing Dilemmas: The USDA’s Transparent Mad Cow Risk Communication
Posted: July 2, 2004
Jody Lanard and I had already written a critique of how the U.S. Department of Agriculture handled the discovery of the first known case of mad cow disease in the U.S. So when the USDA did an excellent job a few months later with two inconclusive screening test positives for possible mad cow disease, we felt we ought to write about it. This short column covers the agency’s wise (and courageous) decision to announce the screening test results without waiting for follow-up testing, and to do so with candor about the dilemma of whether to report preliminary findings.
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Between Required and Forbidden: The Value of Voluntary Precautions
Posted: May 30, 2004
Risk isn’t dichotomous. It is always possible to take more or fewer precautions and end up with a higher or lower risk. Since such decisions are matters of judgment, this column argues, people should be allowed to make their own judgments. Of course in many situations some (minimum) precautions may need to be required, and some (excessive) precautions may need to be forbidden. But between required and forbidden is a fruitful space for voluntary precautions. The column focuses especially on three examples: supplied air for cleanup workers (should the employer ever leave it up to the worker?); boiling water that might be contaminated (should the authorities ever leave it up to consumers?); and testing beef cattle for mad cow disease (should the government ever leave it up to the slaughterhouses?).
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Crisis Communication: A Very Quick Introduction Traducción en Español: Comunicación de crisis: una introducción muy rápida
Posted: April 15, 2004
This short column is made up of two lists. First comes a list of six “focus areas” of crisis communication – including the one I consider most in need of improvement: metamessaging. (This jargony word is the best I can come up with to describe all the content of crisis communications other than information content: how reassuring to be, how confident to sound, how to address emotion, etc.) The rest of the column is a list of 25 crisis communication recommendations – most of them about metamessaging. The 25 recommendations are discussed in more detail in my crisis communication handouts. But this column lists them all conveniently on one page.
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Posted: March 18, 2004
Mad cow disease has never been a serious threat to human health in the United States. When it tries to convince people of this truth, the U.S. Department of Agriculture often says things that aren’t quite true. In this long column, Jody Lanard and I painstakingly dissect nine instances of misleading USDA mad cow risk communication in the wake of the December 2003 discovery of the first known mad cow in the U.S. Not that the USDA was unusually dishonest. This sort of dishonesty is routine in risk communication, especially when its perpetrators know they are in the right. This column introduces the phrase “misleading toward the truth” to describe the well-intentioned – but ultimately ineffective – dishonesty of information sources who are convinced the unvarnished facts might themselves be misleading.
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When People Are “Over-Reacting” to Risk
Posted: February 6, 2004
This short column offers a checklist of 15 possibilities to consider when you believe people are over-reacting to a risk you consider small. The #1 possibility – mentioned but not discussed in the column – is that outrage at some aspect of the situation might be clouding their judgment. That’s the core of my “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula and my approach to risk communication when hazard is low and outrage is high. But the column identifies 14 other possibilities that ought to be considered before jumping to the conclusion that people are outraged … including #15, the possibility that they might be right and you might be under-reacting to a serious hazard.
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Scientists and the Public: Barriers to Cross-Species Risk Communication
Posted: January 4, 2004
Scientists are from Mars and everyone else is from Venus. In this column, Jody Lanard and I focus on ten systematic differences between scientists and the public that make things difficult when scientists try to do risk communication. Among them: Many scientists don’t approve of communicating with nonscientists; many scientists overvalue rationality, and mistrust – and even disdain – emotion; many scientists fail to allow for the public’s mistrust; many scientists do not trust the public. Understanding these differences can help scientist-communicators overcome them and find common ground with their audience. And understanding these differences can help members of the public make allowances when scientists mishandle their risk communication efforts.
2003
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Practicing for The Big One: Pennsylvania’s Hepatitis A Outbreak and Risk Communication
Posted: December 4, 2003
In late 2003, an outbreak of hepatitis A in Western Pennsylvania provided a neat case study of pretty good risk communication (not perfect, but not bad) about a pretty serious problem (not huge, but not tiny). In this column, Jody Lanard and I use Pennsylvania’s hepatitis outbreak to illustrate four basic dilemmas in crisis communication – dilemmas that are sure to come up in bigger emergencies: preoccupation with panic; trust and secrecy; over-reassurance; and anticipatory guidance.
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What’s Different about Employees?
Posted: October 29, 2003
Most of my risk communication consulting focuses on external stakeholders – neighbors, activists, customers, etc. But sometimes I’m asked to address a controversy between a company (or a government agency) and its own employees. Outrage is outrage, and for the most part labor-management controversies play out the same way external controversies do. But there are a few ways employee outrage is different. This short column discusses five differences.
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It Is Never Too Soon to Speculate
Posted: September 17, 2003
Risk communication and crisis communication professionals sometimes urge their clients not to speculate. But they can’t mean it literally. Speculation is talking about things you’re not sure about … and that’s pretty much what risk communication is. In this short column, Jody Lanard and I make the case on behalf of responsible speculation – that is, speculation that sounds suitably speculative (that isn’t overconfident); speculation that pays sufficient attention to dire scenarios (that isn’t over-optimistic); and speculation that explicitly addresses the difficult question of which precautions are appropriate even while the information is still uncertain and which precautions should await less speculative knowledge.
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Fear of Fear: The Role of Fear in Preparedness ... and Why It Terrifies Officials
Posted: September 8, 2003
My government clients often tell me they want to persuade the public to take precautions against some risk … but not if they have to frighten anybody. Jody Lanard and I wrote this long column not just to argue the necessity for warnings to be frightening, but also to analyze the widespread official “fear of fear.” We explore its origins in officials’ justified concern that they will be criticized for frightening people, and in their unjustified concern that the people they frighten will find the experience permanent and unbearable. We also investigate a closely allied phenomenon, “panic panic” – the panicky feelings officials experience when they wrongly judge that the public is about to panic, and the unwise crisis management strategies they typically attempt in order to “allay” the public’s panic.
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Posted: June 12, 2003
This column covers everything I think my clients need to know about stakeholders, especially hostile stakeholders – the difference between stakeholders and publics; the kinds of stakeholders, depending mostly on their level of arousal and the actual hazard they face; the key guidelines for stakeholder involvement, grounded in the distinction among “fanatics,” “attentives,” “browsers,” and “inattentives”; and the complications caused by the presence of stakeholders who aren’t hostile (supporters, involved neutrals, and uninvolved neutrals). The column ends with this wrap-up: “Managing risk communication requires analyzing your stakeholders.… Which analytic scheme works best depends on the situation. Somewhere in this column I hope you can find a scheme (or several) that helps make sense of the situation you’re facing at the moment.”
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“Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS” – And So It Should!
Posted: April 28, 2003
Until it turned out less contagious than initially thought, SARS looked to many experts like it might very well be the devastating pandemic they had spent decades fearfully awaiting. When Jody Lanard and I wrote this column in April 2003, that was still an open question. The public’s SARS fears were entirely justifiable – yet many governments, experts, and even journalists were working overtime to dampen those fears. The column describes this “soft cover-up” of SARS over-optimism, tries to explain why so many officials were seduced by it, and offers both good examples of guiding the public’s fear and bad examples of trying to allay that fear. The column concludes with a list of 18 specific risk communication recommendations for talking about SARS.
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Four Kinds of Risk Communication Traducción en Español: Cuatro clases de comunicación de riesgos
Posted: April 11, 2003
This short column was an early attempt to lay out what I see as the four kinds of risk communication. Some of my labels have changed since 2003. When hazard is high and outrage is low, the job is warning apathetic people about serious risks. I now call that precaution advocacy; the column called it public relations. When hazard is low and outrage is high, the job is calming upset people about small risks. I called that outrage management in the column, and that’s still what I call it. When hazard and outrage are both high, the job is helping rightly upset people bear a dangerous situation. No change in that label either; it’s crisis communication. Finally, when hazard and outrage are both intermediate, the job is chatting with interested people about a real but not urgent risk. The column called that stakeholder relations; I now call it “the sweet spot.”
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Posted: February 20, 2003
One of the things the U.S. government got wrong after 9/11 was its failure to offer people things to do. So when it started listing some steps ordinary people could take to help prepare for the possibility of more terrorist attacks, Jody Lanard and I noted with interest the widespread disdainful response, most of it linked to the inclusion of duct tape on the government’s list of items a prepared citizen ought to have on hand. In this column, we analyze the reasons for this weird response, which we liken to a similar cynicism about anti-nuclear precautions in the 1950s. The column ends with suggestions for improving the U.S. government’s post-9/11 risk communication, starting with the need to ask more of people.
This article is categorized as:
2002
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Smallpox Vaccination: Some Risk Communication Linchpins Public Health Outrage and Smallpox Vaccination: An Afterthought
Posted: December 30, 2002 and January 12, 2003
In December 2002, I was asked to help plan and run a meeting on risk communication recommendations for the U.S. program to vaccinate healthcare workers and emergency responders against smallpox. The first column is an edited version of my introductory remarks. It addresses some familiar “risk communication linchpins” – paying attention to outrage, doing anticipatory guidance, expressing wishes and feelings, tolerating uncertainty, sharing dilemmas, riding the seesaw, etc. – all customized for the controversies I thought likeliest to emerge over smallpox vaccination. What I learned from the meeting was that most of the public health professionals implementing the smallpox vaccination program were themselves outraged that it even existed. So I wrote an “afterthought” on the sources of that outrage, and the need to deal with it lest it undermine the program … which, in my judgment, it later did.
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Posted: October 28, 2002
One of the core outrage management recommendations on my shortlist is accountability. I see it both as a replacement for trust and as a step in the direction of sharing control. This column covers everything I want my clients to know about accountability, especially its relationship to trust and control, to “being small,” to giving away credit, and to contractual agreements. The last section of the column addresses the question of “accountability to whom.” The short answer: Everybody – but especially the “extremists” you least want to be accountable to. “Remember,” the column concludes, “the purpose of accountability is to reduce stakeholder outrage…. If you really hate it there’s a good chance you’re doing it right.”
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Posted: August 15, 2002
This column was inspired by the Enron debacle, and the lesson (re)learned from that debacle that corporate financial audits can be pretty slippery. (In case you’ve forgotten, Arthur Andersen audited Enron’s books and said everything was hunky-dory; it wasn’t, and the accounting firm went down with its client.) The column asserts that corporate environmental audits can be similarly slippery, and asks whether there are any lessons companies can learn from Enron about their environmental auditing. It offers six ways to make environmental audits more reliable and more credible, focusing especially on the virtues of picking not just an auditor who doesn’t rely on the company for other business, but also an auditor whose natural biases are more activist than corporate.
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Lawyers and Outrage Management
Posted: July 11, 2002
I almost entitled this column “Lawyers v. Outrage Management,” because it’s mostly about the conflicts between what I advise my clients and what their attorneys advise them. The column starts by acknowledging that a legally ill-advised outrage management strategy can have disastrous legal repercussions. That said, it addresses a variety of reasons why most lawyers dislike outrage management even in situations where there are unlikely to be any legal ill effects. After a section on what outrage management can offer the legal process – that is, how lawyers might actually benefit from paying attention to outrage issues – the column zeros in on five genuine areas of conflict between law and outrage management: ignorance, silence, candor, apology, and tone. These are the areas where wise clients force their legal and communication advisors to find a middle path.
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Yellow Flags: The Acid Test of Transparency
Posted: April 10, 2002
When things go badly wrong for a company or government agency, there were usually precursors, and the failure to heed these warnings is a familiar feature of post-disaster recriminations. I call the precursors/warnings “yellow flags” – yellow, not red, because in real time it’s usually impossible to tell whether they’ll turn out to be a minor wrinkle or a major flaw. This column addresses the choices companies and agencies face with regard to yellow flags: whether to let yourself know about them at all; whether to investigate the ones you know about; whether to stop what you’re doing while you await the results; and whether to tell the rest of us what’s up. The column focuses on the last of these choices, arguing that transparency about yellow flags is not just the best way to get them investigated properly; it is also the only way to prevent people from imagining afterwards that they were red flags.
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Laundry List of 50 Outrage Reducers
Posted: February 21, 2002
My shortlist of principal strategies for reducing stakeholder outrage lists six recommendations; in seminars it takes me a half-day or more just to cover these six. I wrote this column for clients who thought that six wasn’t enough. I stopped (pretty arbitrarily) at 50, and invited readers to send me more. But so far I’ve received only one suggestion. So maybe 50 was enough, even if six wasn’t.
This article is categorized as:
2001
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Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action
Posted: December 29, 2001
Accustomed to naturally occurring diseases, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had a difficult time coping with the anthrax bioattacks of late 2001. Since risk communication was one of its core problems, it asked me to come to Atlanta and help. This four-part “column” grew out of my Atlanta notes. If the CDC was adjusting to bioterrorism, so was I. I put aside my usual outrage management recommendations and developed 26 recommendations specifically on the anthrax crisis. These became the basis for my (sadly) expanding work in crisis communication, and for the crisis communication CD-ROM and DVD Jody Lanard and I ultimately put out in 2004. This column was my first extended discussion of most of these crisis communication recommendations, and it is my only published assessment of the CDC’s anthrax communication efforts.
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Risk Communication and the War Against Terrorism: High Hazard, High Outrage
Posted: October 22, 2001
It took more than a month after the 9/11 attacks for me to decide that I had relevant expertise to offer. (This column was first posted on October 22, 2001, revised and reposted on November 10.) My wife Jody Lanard crystallized it for me when she said, “You’ve been doing high-hazard, low-outrage risk communication and low-hazard, high-outrage risk communication for years. This time it’s high-hazard, high-outrage risk communication.” But this column isn’t my first crack at a list of generic recommendations for communicating in high-hazard, high-outrage situations; that didn’t come till my anthrax column a couple of months later. This one is more a meditation on the risk communication significance of 9/11, a very tentative first effort to consider how best to talk to people in the wake of that still-shocking event.
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Posted: September 5, 2001
The term “sound science” is almost always a way of pulling rank, of harnessing the high stature of science on behalf of one side in a policy debate – usually the side less protective of health or the environment. This column exposes some of the pretenses that typically underlie the term: the pretense that your scientific support is stronger than it is; the pretense that your actions are grounded in science when they are grounded mostly in other considerations; and the pretense that your disputes with critics are about science when they are mostly about trans-scientific issues. The column is also about my clients’ tendency to believe their own pretenses – to forget that they are using or even misusing science to achieve their goals and imagine instead that they are science’s virtuous handmaidens.
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Advice for President Bartlet: Riding the Seesaw
Posted: July 14, 2001
Readers who were never fans of the “West Wing” television series may not remember when U.S. President Jed Bartlet finally decided to come clean about his multiple sclerosis. The tough question: How to address his desire to run for reelection, despite his illness and despite his having kept it secret. I used this setup as an excuse to write a column about a crucial risk communication strategy for coping with audience ambivalence: the seesaw. When people are ambivalent about X versus Y – for example, when they approve of your presidency and want you back for a second term, but worry that your MS and your dishonesty about it might disqualify you – they tend to go to the side of their ambivalence that is neglected elsewhere in their communication environment. The column outlines the various locations on the seesaw a risk communicator can decide to occupy, and the pros and cons of each. It offers plenty of nonfictional examples as well.
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Posted: May 4, 2001
If you want to know how apology and forgiveness work, ask a Catholic. The secular process, outlined in this column, closely tracks the Catholic process: admit you did it; then say you’re sorry; then correct the problem and compensate your victims; then do a penance. (There’s an extra step in the secular process that I left out of the column. After you admit you did it but before you say you’re sorry, you have to shut up and let your victims yell at you.) The evidence that going through this process reduces people’s outrage is even stronger than when I wrote the column. Today, even medical malpractice lawyers routinely urge their clients to apologize. But mostly for ego reasons, companies and government agencies still resist admitting they did it, letting themselves get yelled at, saying they’re sorry, or doing a penance. They are comfortable correcting the problem and compensating the victims – which rarely does much good without the other, more humiliating steps.
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Posted: March 17, 2001
I wrote this column after doing a radio talk show with Sheldon Rampton, in which he argued that corporate experts misuse their scientific expertise to defend corporate misbehavior. The column doesn’t really disagree with Rampton’s claim that many company experts can’t be trusted. But it does dispute his view that anti-company experts can; ideology, I think, distorts science as much as avarice. And the column also disputes Rampton’s conviction that one-sided science is working stunningly well for evil corporations. It argues to the contrary that companies sacrifice credibility when they employ experts who reliably favor their position regardless of the data. Activists can get away with that kind of one-sidedness, the column suggests, but companies are better off hiring activist-leaning experts, who will be hugely credible when they reluctantly admit the company is actually right about something.
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Posted: January 29, 2001
Whenever a company does something wrong, the public wants to know why. The two contending explanations are stupidity and evil – you made a dumb mistake or you did it on purpose. Since most people imagine that corporate evil is far more common than corporate stupidity, the “evil” explanation is the default. (Government agencies are different; people believe governments make stupid mistakes all the time.) Of course the “evil” explanation also does more harm to corporate reputation than the “stupid” explanation. What follows from this reasoning is what I call the stupidity defense. As this column argues, when a company makes a stupid mistake, it needs to say so – early, often, and penitently. That’s its only shot at avoiding the assumption of evil.
This article is categorized as:
2000
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Risk Communication and the Palm Beach Presidency
Posted: November 9, 2000
I wrote my first website column at the very start of the Bush-Gore cliffhanger in Florida, when the key issue still looked to be thousands of Gore voters in Palm Beach who had been misled by a confusing ballot to vote for Pat Buchanan instead. For the most part, this column notes, risk communication is for dealing with stakeholders – small groups of highly involved people – whereas traditional public relations is the right toolkit when addressing the wider public. But not in a crisis like Palm Beach. Since the whole country is highly involved, the column asserts, both candidates need to put aside their PR toolkits and work at managing the other side’s outrage. The column’s specific outrage-sensitive talking points were irrelevant within hours, lost in a forest of hanging chads. But the principle that in crisis situations politicians need to switch from public relations to outrage management remains sound.
Pandemic Flu Preparedness Columns from
CIDRAP Business Source Weekly Briefing
In late 2006, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota launched a dedicated pandemic preparedness website for business called CIDRAP Business Source, and an associated newsletter called CIDRAP Business Source Weekly Briefing. I agreed to serve as Deputy Editor, and to write a short column on pandemic risk communication for every other issue of the Briefing. It was agreed that I could post the columns on my website after a three-month lag.
In mid-2007 the newsletter was reconfigured as the Osterholm Briefing, written by Editor-in-Chief (and infectious diseases expert) Michael Osterholm. I remained Deputy Editor of CIDRAP Business Source.
Many of the Briefing columns listed below cover content that is elsewhere on this website in greater detail. (See the “Pandemic Flu and Other Infectious Diseases Index.”) Others are new, and all are recast for the business continuity audience.
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Read “FAFfing About” if you need some motivation
July 2007
Whenever my commitment to pandemic preparedness starts to flag, I read something wrongheaded by an opponent of preparedness. Here’s my take on an example from a major medical journal.
The bird flu / pandemic flu confusion
(not yet published by CIDRAP)
We have told people to worry about a “bird flu pandemic.” No wonder they think the danger comes from birds.
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June 2007
Far from being fatigued by pandemic warnings, the public is just beginning to hear the message. As planners, we’re the ones at risk of pandemic fatigue, as we slog our way forward.
Why talk now: The case for communicating with employees before the pandemic arrives
June 2007
Your company is preparing for a pandemic, but your employees aren’t. Can that possibly make sense?
Corporate pandemic precaution advocacy: The time is now
May 2007
Business continuity planners say they’re talking to their employees and other stakeholders about pandemic preparedness. Is it really happening?
What kind of risk communication does pandemic preparedness require?
May 2007
When the virus hits the fan, it’ll be crisis communication. But what it is now depends on your opinions and your audience.
Start thinking in phases – risk communication phases
April 2007
You have a few crucial moments for talking about pandemic preparedness. Use them well.
Riding the many pandemic seesaws
April 2007
Because most people feel ambivalent about possible future pandemics, communicating effectively with them requires skillful balance on a wide range of communication “seesaws.”
Seesaw your way through ambivalence
March 2007
Most people think about possible future pandemics – when they think about them at all – with a good deal of ambivalence. To communicate with ambivalent people, you need to understand the “risk communication seesaw.”
Talking about a flu pandemic worst case scenario
March 2007
The pandemic worst case is: (a) Truly horrific, (b) Truly unlikely, (c) Truly worth planning for, (d) All of the above. The right answer: (d) All of the above.
A severe pandemic is not overdue – it’s not when but if
February 2007
We have no grounds for confidence that a severe pandemic is imminent. Our communications shouldn’t imply otherwise.
“Might help a lot, might help a little, might not help at all – and worth trying!”
February 2007
There are no perfect pandemic precautions. We need to say so – and push hard for imperfect precautions.
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January 2007
Bird flu is four problems, not one. Keeping them straight is a prerequisite to sensible risk communication – and sensible preparedness.
Get your slice of the ‘fearfulness’ pie
January 2007
Fear is like a pie (or money): There’s usually not enough to go around. If you want people to take precautions, you have to compete for your share.
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December 2006
We are all likeliest to take precautions when we’re frightened. But “fear of fear” is widespread – and a major barrier to pandemic communication.
How’s Your Business Discontinuity Program?
November 2006
More and more companies are starting to integrate pandemic preparedness into their business continuity programs. That’s good news – and helping to facilitate it is one of the reasons this newsletter was launched.
