The Human Element of Crisis Management in PR

Doug Downs (00:08):

In 2003, David Reich was a cardiac anesthesiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He was in the middle of performing a high risk heart surgery. When the unthinkable happened, the power went out, the hospital's backup generators kicked in, but there was a risk that even those could fail due to the sudden demand for power. In fact, the power had gone out for more than 50 million people in the northeast United States and Canada. It was one of the largest power outages in history. Commuters were suddenly trapped in stranded subway trains, people stuck in stalled elevators, and in a New York surgical theater, Dr. Reich and his team, it was a technical failure that caused the blackout. But what emerged later was how communities, emergency responders, people, and yes medical specialists like Dr. David Reich responded. Despite the technology's limitations, Dr. Reich and his team remained calm and focused. They continued the operation under intense pressure, manually operating some of the equipment, monitoring the patient closely and successfully completing the surgery. We live in an ever increasing technological world, but that dependence could well be creating a new abnormal state of constant crisis. Today on stories and strategies, perhaps the real operation we need is to shift our focus from technical hardware to the human hearts.

(01:59):

My name is Doug Downs. My guest this week is Rod Cartwright, joining today from London. Hey, Rod.

Rod Cartwright (02:05):

Hey, Doug. How are you doing?

Doug Downs (02:06):

How are Things in jolly old London?

Rod Cartwright (02:10):

weirdly sunny for late October, I have to say, it's not very typically British.

Doug Downs (02:15):

Yeah, you're paying an advanced price for some system that's going to be moving in. I'm convinced that we can't be this lucky and get away with it. Roger, the principal at Rod Cartwright Consulting. You bring 30 years experience now as of a few days ago, you hit your 30 year mark. How are you feeling about

Rod Cartwright (02:32):

That? 30 years and five years since I went independent on the same day. It was very strange. I feel great. I feel more in my skin professionally than perhaps I ever have in my career.

Doug Downs (02:44):

Amen. That's like a whole episode you and I could do separately on that. Hit my,

Rod Cartwright (02:48):

There's a whole ageism episode to be done, right?

Doug Downs (02:51):

Yeah. And I've hit my 30 year, which is amazing. I'm only 32 years old, and so started when I was a baby. You have experienced working for agencies like Ketchum and Helen Nolton and clients like KFC, Toyota, ikea, Proctor and Gamble, and Pfizer. You're a visiting fellow at Cardiff University Center for Media and Public Communication, a -P-R-C-A fellow and former board member. And you were deputy chair of the PRCA, ICCO global COVID-19 task force, as well as a special advisor to the CPRS Crisis Communications Network. So you've developed this report, it's called Reputation, risk and Resilience, and within it you're summarizing and analyzing eight different global communication strategy report reputation reports from the last year on the current and emerging state of trust, risk, resilience, employee engagement, security, and business continuity. So you're like the concierge to all the data that's in here. The reports include the Gallup State of the global workplace, the Edelman Trust Barometer and Ipsos Reputation Council Report. Now, as you went through these, and of course you're looking for the common threads, the common themes, what stood out to you?

Rod Cartwright (04:13):

Absolutely. And I've been called many things before. Concierge is not one of them, so I'll take it today. Is a first, many of them worse than that? So yes. So in a way, there were two sets of red threads of common denominators that I pulled out. The first is what I called unsurprisingly, the 10 key themes, and I won't obviously go through every single one, but they were things like the looming shadow of geopolitics, as I called it. There's the interplay of mis and disinformation and polarization. I called that the terrible twins. I think we're increasingly seeing polarization, fueling miss and disinformation and miss and disinformation compounding polarization, cybersecurity or rather cyber, excuse me, cyber insecurity, climate catastrophe, real concerns about the trajectory of the global and local economy. One that perhaps surprised me was the idea that we've kind of pretended that the COVID-19 pandemic never happened, but it was the number one business disruptor in the last 12 months in the form of stress, anxiety, see depression and absenteeism.

(05:29):

So what I call the long human tail of the COVID-19 pandemic. So that's just a flavor of some of the main themes. And then what I did at the backend of the report, having summarized each of the eight constituent reports, is I pulled out 10 key challenges to address. So whether you are a professional communicator or another business leader, some of the challenges, but also the opportunities that I think fall out of the analysis in the report, and again, they're things alike, the power of sense-making, which I call communications hidden superpower, the idea of resilience being a cultural outcome rather than just a job title, a department or a process, an increasing focus on internal culture and behavior, as I said, that can eat operations and external threats for breakfast. So if you like the 10 challenges and opportunities that result from the key themes and the analysis,

Doug Downs (06:39):

It's a lot to unpack there. Something that really stood out to me as I read your report is you talk about in terms of reputation and crisis, but I suppose communications on the whole is that technology is replacing so many things, and perhaps rightfully our attention is becoming more and more devoted to those technologies, including generative ai, but that there's a very human element here and maybe we're missing some pieces that are extremely impactful related to that human element. What do you mean by that?

Rod Cartwright (07:12):

Yeah, I mean, the human imperative as I call it, has been a sort of mild obsession of mine for about the last decade, not as some highfalutin intellectual idea, but as something really practical. If you think about it, you can define a crisis as an event of such a magnitude that it has the potential to fundamentally disrupt business as usual and reputations, and that's all great. But I have a sort of alternative definition of crises, which are that they're essentially human events that have very real human consequences that therefore require a human response based on human empathy. And I think if you think about crises essentially as human at their core, if we respond to those challenges and opportunities with technical systems and technological processes alone, we are kind of bound to fail. And that's why I talk a lot in my work and about my business is saying that essentially organizational resilience ultimately depends on human preparedness. In other words, the resilience of our human systems. But I think we still spend too little time on the human training and the human stress testing on which that organizational resilience depends.

Doug Downs (08:38):

Do you ever get any pushback on that? Do you ever get CEOs saying, that sounds great, a little hallmarky, but we have these technologies and people are just going to be happy with the outcome, so don't worry about it. Do you get pushback on that concept?

Rod Cartwright (08:54):

Do I get pushback? I think I see a sort of organizational tendency because risk and resilience are very often led from outside the comms function. They're very often led by the risk function or strategy or operations who tend, and this is not a criticism, they tend to take an approach that basically looks at risk through the lens of risk registers and risk appetite statements and heat maps, and that's all lovely, but they forget to then go, how does that look in the real world? What is the real world human manifestation of that piece of paper? So I think a lot of the time it's reminding people that it's not about paper risks, it's about real world risk scenarios. And that's if you get the pushback, if you like how I push

Doug Downs (09:48):

Back on that pushback, you used the term poly crisis in your report, and I assume that's because late at night I'm watching the news about the war in Ukraine or the Middle East. I know disinformation is constantly surrounding me with technology to ramp it up, cybersecurity, climate change, all that stuff. Going to what you mean by poly crisis, and I'm wondering if this is what's accelerating the social divide that's causing the polarization that's having impact on all of us?

Rod Cartwright (10:23):

Yeah, I mean, actually there are two related terms that I use in the report. One is perma crisis, which is actually a relatively recent term. I mean, it's kind of interesting that in the uk, at least Collin's Dictionary made perma crisis their word of the year in 2022. So that gives you a feel

Doug Downs (10:41):

Of

Rod Cartwright (10:41):

The extent to which a sort of permeated public consciousness and day-to-day language, poly crisis is slightly different and much older. So without getting too bookish, it was actually coined by a couple of French social scientists in the seventies. And it's basically about the idea that we have the sort of simultaneous interplay, the mutually reinforcing interplay of multiple risks, threats and catastrophic events. And again, as an example, Ipsos in their trends report last year, the title of that was A New World Disorder Navigating a Poly Crisis. So I think what we've seen in the last decade is that the idea that both have become embedded in our everyday lives with very real implications for government, corporations, communities, individuals, and actually I think as you say, society at large. So it's that sense of simultaneous perma crisis and poly crisis as one of the defining dynamics of our age, and

Doug Downs (11:49):

We just become numb to it. A couple of weeks ago, I came back from Washington DC on a trip, thought I had a cold, took a test, I had Covid. Yeah, okay. Stayed indoors for, but covid is pretty serious. I wasn't coughing up blood or anything, but I took it all in stride. That's kind of the problem. If we're surrounded by crisis all the time, we take it in stride. We become numb to the causes and the outcomes of all these things and the things that we can fix.

Rod Cartwright (12:17):

I agree, and this is a really important facet of the report. It is not all doom and gloom. There is, dare I say, an optimism that you are right, that we become numb. But as human animals, we also adapt. I mean, anyone who has been through a difficult period of their lives, whether through their physical health or their mental health, most people I speak to, and it's my own experience, that it's those difficult periods. Forgive the cliche, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So I do think there is a numbing sense of perma christis and post-crisis, but I think we adapt and grow stronger through it, and we may come onto it, but I think the idea that crisis is as much about opportunity as risk is really, really important.

Doug Downs (13:09):

Then let's get to the positives. You're right, I did feel a sense of doom and gloom from the report, but part of that's confirmation bias. I expected to feel that way. What role could I possibly have as a public relations professional tasked with supporting my company that can lead to the positives?

Rod Cartwright (13:30):

Oh, where do I start? There are so many opportunities here, and I should have said that one of the other cornerstones of this report and my work more broadly is based on the idea that we fundamentally misunderstand and misuse the word crisis. I'm going to go a bit bookish on you for a second, but if I say crisis, you tend to say, we imagine Eduard Munch's the scream. It's an idea of disaster or catastrophe. Usually it's an end point. If you actually, as I did 30 years ago when I was doing my master's thesis, looked up where the word crisis comes from. It comes from a Greek word meaning choice, decision or judgment. And the first time it was ever used in the English language, it was to mean the point in a disease which determines whether the patient recovers or whether the patient deteriorates and passes away.

(14:24):

So this idea that properly defined a crisis is only ever a turning point. It's a point of inflection, potentially as rich in opportunity, as risk. And I think if we go into the process of crisis management or crisis comms expecting us to be managing the downside, then we'll manage the downside. If we go in going, there is opportunity in this crisis, then our entire mindset changes. And there's actually some really interesting research from about 15, 20 years ago from a company called Oxford Metrica who looked at the share price impact of 200, what they called mass fatality events. And they found that unsurprisingly, companies that had performed badly in the crisis saw their share price drop on average 15% in a six month period. But there was a group of companies who were judged to have done well and saw their share price tick up 5%, five percentage points. So I just think it's a really after the initial down,

Doug Downs (15:30):

After the initial hit,

Rod Cartwright (15:31):

Yes or indeed without having a hit in the first place. I think this idea

(15:37):

That we need to, I often talk about this, we need to reimagine risk and rethink crisis to realize that there's opportunity there and there's, this sounds deeply od, but I'm going to quote myself from the report, which is that one of the key statements in the report, which weirdly everybody seems to have picked up that quote, is that despite the interconnected mutually reinforcing nature of this growing list of top tier risks which underpin the Polly crisis, there's a real opportunity lurking beneath the sense of perma crisis. And the opportunity is the chance to use risk management, to use crisis preparedness resilience building as sources of huge positive value rather than viewing them as annoying and costly insurance policies. So as I say, there is an optimism born, not just of me wanting the world to be better than it is, but on the basis that crises are turning points, not automatic disasters.

Doug Downs (16:51):

Excellent. Rod, in our previous episode, our guest, Brittany Brown from NASA left a question behind for you

Brittany Brown (16:59):

For the next guest. I love to know your thoughts on AI as it relates to communications. Is AI something that you fear or something that you'll embrace and why?

Doug Downs (17:11):

I would imagine you're an early adopter with generative ai, not just using chat GPT for heaven's sakes, but actually exploring how AI can change the game for us here

Rod Cartwright (17:22):

To some extent. I mean, I go into it with a sort of experimentation mindset because even if you speak to people at the heart of AI in Silicon Valley and beyond, most of them will honestly admit that no one actually knows where this is going or how it works properly.

(17:38):

So yes, I'm an early experimenter rather than an early adopter. I mean, we could do an entire episode, a few hopefully cogent thoughts. Firstly, I think we've got blinded by generative AI as if it's the only game in town when of course there are huge sues of predictive ai, which are doing amazing things across healthcare and climate change. So I think we need to be careful about thinking all AI is generative ai. It isn't. I think there's enormous opportunity to use AI within PR and comms to help manage workflow and being more efficient with that. And I think there are some great examples emerging of how it can be used specifically for crisis comms in terms of scenario building and messaging and stress testing and early drafts. But I also think we can get all obsessed with is the singularity going to come in three years or 30 years?

(18:40):

When is artificial general intelligence going to hit? And I think we have to think about these things, but I also think we have to be very careful about the legal, moral and ethical uncertainties as AI develops at speed. Particularly the whole question of some of the biases that are inherent in how large language models are being trained. So I think we've got to be a bit careful, but I think the other question we have to ask ourselves is, is it any good? Because I think interestingly, last year when I did my report, I thought, chat gpt is two months old. I'm not going to bother this year. I'm like, I can have Claude, I can have Gemini, I can have chat GPT, I can have perplexity. And I thought, I'm going to see how they can help me. And two things happened. One was I was spending so long working on the prompt architecture to get anything back that I vaguely wanted to read because yes, what do LMS do?

(19:39):

They spot symmetrical patterns. But as someone said to me, and I thought, this is a brilliant quote from someone, I was at the Eco Global Summit in Istanbul. They said, what's interesting about your report is that generative AI finds the obvious patterns. What you've done is you found the interesting stuff that lurks between the cracks. And I thought that was absolutely fascinating. The other thing that worried me was even when I fed the PDFs into some of the LLMs, it still hallucinated some of the data. So if I can't trust it to get the data even when provided with the source material. So I ended up using it a little bit, but the report was fundamentally a human activity. And I think it's going to continue being that at least for a year or

Doug Downs (20:34):

So. Do you think there's a danger, given that we're becoming more and more polarized within Western society anyway? You're red or you're blue and the other side is crazy. Do you think there's a danger that AI will evolve, that I may use the blue form of generative ai, or I may choose to use the red form of generative AI and live my world that way?

Rod Cartwright (21:01):

It's like neo in the matrix. Do I take the red pill or the blue pill? I think, I dunno whether they realized or whether they consciously made the red and blue. I thought it was fascinating. I think it's like everything. What worries me is that given that the LLMs currently have been trained on the internet, and the internet is both highly polarized and highly biased, which

Doug Downs (21:27):

Is Google influenced, by the way, whatever you think Google's influence is.

Rod Cartwright (21:32):

Yes, absolutely. So I just worry that in the same way as we have found ways as a species of using social media to divide ourselves, I'm sure it's perfectly possible that we can weaponize AI to divide ourselves even further. I don't have specific evidence for that. It's just an instinct. If

Doug Downs (21:52):

We can build it, there's something we can fight about, but we'll take deposits from your report. Yeah, correct. Absolutely agree. Yes. Okay, your turn. Rod, what question would you like to leave behind for our next guest?

Rod Cartwright (22:04):

So I've got quite a short question, which is I'd like to ask the next guest, what do you think the most important hidden superpower is of communication professionals? Oh

Doug Downs (22:17):

Wow. That's would imagine my answer would be something along the lines of human empathy because it all seems to come back to that. Or being the ethical traffic cop within the organization. I suppose those would be my default short answers.

Rod Cartwright (22:38):

Interesting. Yeah, I mean the whole single source of truth thing is very interesting. Yeah, definitely. So to your question about what possibly can the PR professional do, one of the things I say in the report that I found deeply inspirational when I first came across it is that there's a professor at MIT called Deborah and Kona who's kind of unearth the thing from academia in the seventies, which she calls sensemaking. And that is the idea of being able to make sense of a world of confusion and complexity. And I think and say in the report that if you like our hidden untapped superpower as professional communicators is being sense makers in chief, if you like, in ways that I genuinely don't believe any other business function is wired to do. And I talk about the fact that we of course should focus on business as usual and business continuity, but we also need to think about reputational continuity and reputation as usual and focus on relationships as much as we do on reputation. And I think so much of our sensemaking power as a function is to help businesses to focus as much on relationships as on reputation and make sure that we are looking not just at BAU, but at reputation as usual. Truth is

Doug Downs (24:15):

We need courage to do that. And some will have that courage, some will think they have that courage, but they don't. And some just don't even want to have the courage to do it. Thank you, rod. Really do appreciate this today a

Rod Cartwright (24:31):

Lot. Great. I've genuinely enjoyed it. Now I hope I sort of got to answers to your

Doug Downs (24:36):

Questions. If you'd like to send a message to my guest, rod Cartwright, we've got his contact information in the show notes, stories and strategies, co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies, podcasts. Hey, if you're listening on Apple right now, do me a favor, go in, leave a rating for the podcast that's kind of like gasoline for the podcast. It's like energy juice really helps drive more people on Apple. And if you're on Spotify, leave a comment on the episode in the comments section. That's the energy juice within Spotify. Thank you to our producer Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.