Let’s talk about crisis-proofing your project. But, before we do, let’s agree on what a crisis is. Not everything that goes wrong is a crisis, of course, but let’s consider the worst possibilities first, and we can scale down from there. The way I see it, there are four distinct levels of crisis, differentiated by what is truly at stake. Each demands a different level of urgency, focus, and priority of response.
First, do the circumstances put people at risk? When a crisis unfolds, safety should always come first, second, and third. Whenever the potential for physical danger exists, cost considerations should factor well behind. In the event world, safety takes precedence not only for the audience, but for the staff, athletes, performers, contractors, media, and anyone else at the venue. Note that what I am not referring to is inconvenience. I’ll take an upset, inconvenienced customer all day long over one who has a chance of being bandaged by EMTs, sped to a hospital, or hunched over a porcelain plumbing fixture.
You’ve probably personally experienced this protocol put in practice dozens of times. Have you ever had a flight delayed because “there’s an indicator light on in the cockpit, and nothing seems to be wrong, but we’re going to have maintenance come take a look?” I hate being inconvenienced by flight delays but I’m totally okay being 100 percent sure that my plane is more likely to stay in the air for as long as it takes to get to my scheduled destination. Whenever steam rises from my forehead after that announcement, I imagine how I would feel if the pilot instead said: “There’s an indicator light on in the cockpit, but whenever that happens it usually turns out to be nothing, so we’re going to go ahead and taxi out to the runway. Flight attendants prepare the cabin for departure and thank you for flying with us.” I’m a comfortable flyer because not only do I know I will never hear that, but I also know the pilot won’t take off without making certain every indicator light of any color, shape, or size has been taken care of.
You are the pilot of your business, project, and problem. The singular imperative to protect the lives and health of our customers, clients, colleagues, and staff is one of the major reasons why companies managing a crisis have endured significant financial loss, customer inconvenience, and sometimes even public ridicule, but they still declare recalls on potentially contaminated food, dysfunctional airbags, and imperfectly designed juvenile furniture. You would be well within your rights to argue that companies first respond to challenges in ways that reduce their exposure to legal penalties and subsequent litigation. I would agree with you, but putting that skepticism aside, let’s also agree that the protection of human life is paramount, and when making decisions, whether in the planning phase or in the heat of a crisis, the best and most important outcome is that “no one got sick, hurt, or killed.” When presented with any situation that requires a decision that directly or indirectly increases or decreases risk to life or health, it’s an easy decision. You go with decreasing risk. Always.
The next level of crisis puts a brand at risk. The objectives of the sports brands I worked for included: (1) staging competitions of the highest caliber; (2) officiating them with unquestionable impartiality; and (3) presenting them in an entertaining package, which added value to the fan’s experience, regardless of the outcome. (I recognize that if you are a fan of the team that gets pummeled, it may be among the worst three hours of your life, during which you will question all these objectives.) Change the delivery of any one of these three variables, and the brands will suffer to some degree.
If the games aren’t competitive, they are less compelling and less exciting. If the officiating seems inequitable, we start to wonder about the motivations of the league or the referee, whether our concerns are intellectually justifiable or not. And, if we are not entertained or we do not feel valued, we begin to evaluate whether the cost and inconvenience of attending a game is worth our money.
These examples are crises of confidence that can build over time, and if they become chronic, they can create a host of other problems. Fans will stop buying tickets, sponsors will stop sponsoring, and broadcasters will stop broadcasting. Trust in the brand, established over the course of years, will begin to dissipate and suddenly, the entire economic system of the organization will be under stress.
Great organizations monitor the deterioration of brand perception over time to try to course-correct, resurrect consumer trust in the brand, and keep from doing long-term damage to the company. However, the company may not be as prepared as it should for the decisive responses required when a crisis emerges because something went wrong very suddenly.
On April 9, 2017, a passenger was badly injured by security guards on a commercial flight at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, and dragged, apparently unconscious, down the aisle and off the plane. Moments later, footage of the incident hit social media and the airline had a brand crisis on its hands. The next morning, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz responded with a public statement that explained the company’s standard practice of “re-accommodating” passengers, but by then, outrage had spread like a major contagion. Negative opinion further metastasized when an e-mail to the airline’s employees surfaced that seemed to defend the treatment of this particular “belligerent” passenger as in keeping with company procedure. Notwithstanding the withering social and traditional media firestorm, yet another day would pass before United Airlines issued a public apology for the treatment of the injured passenger.
I am not aware of whether United Airlines had a plan on how to respond if an allegedly disruptive passenger refused to be re-accommodated, but I am reasonably sure that if they did, this wasn’t it. The assault on the airline’s brand continued to mount when an official apology was issued two days later, which no matter how genuine, made it appear that the company was responding not to the problem that occurred on their plane, but to the resulting public outrage.
This example also illustrates that more than one level of risk can be in play at any one time. At first, United Airlines simply faced a passenger who refused to be removed from his flight. By forcibly removing him, the level of the issue was escalated by one broken nose, two missing teeth, and a concussion. One of the individuals involved in the altercation contended that the actions of the passenger caused his own injuries while resisting removal, but that’s really immaterial. The plan should have been to take every effort to avoid injuries, regardless of the cause, and if an injury somehow did occur anyway, how that situation should be handled.
The next level of crisis can put a product, project, or activity at risk. My projects are events, but yours might be protecting the food supply chain, designing top-performing airbags, opening a new restaurant, introducing a new web application, or simply keeping the trains running on time every single day. The food supply chain may be entirely free of E. coli and other nasty contaminants, but the food supply chain could be disrupted by a distribution center worker’s strike, a crop-damaging freeze, or a truck-stopping fuel shortage. Your airbags may need an inflator made by a subcontractor that suddenly goes bankrupt. Or, the new wonder drug may be stuck in regulatory purgatory. The construction of your new restaurant may be delayed, the web application doesn’t function optimally on certain types of phones, or the trains can’t move because the tunnel running under the river has flooded over the third rail.
This level of crisis can be significant to the product and might even result in some amount of financial loss, customer inconvenience, or reputational damage. Product risk has the potential to evolve into brand risk if not skillfully managed and thoughtfully responded to. Only true pessimists strictly adhere to Murphy’s Law, which popularly states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” But I do believe in the greater truth of Murphy’s First Corollary, which observes: “Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.”
When things are going badly, you simply can’t leave them to themselves. You must step in to keep product risk from growing into brand risk, or worse, safety risk. The revelation that Apple Inc. programmed software updates that purposefully drained batteries faster on older model iPhones, for instance, created a product risk, which resulted in numerous incensed customers. The company rapidly responded by lowering the price of replacement batteries.
In the sports world, we have to work fast because not much escapes notice and nearly every product issue can become a brand crisis. That’s because the product is so visible, the consumers—our fans—are so passionate and knowledgeable about the product, and the media are always ready to provide the uncompromising depth of analysis that fans demand. Nevertheless, making a fast decision is not as important as making the right decision; proper and thorough contingency planning can help reduce the amount of time required to get there.
When something goes wrong, many of us think about what it means to us personally. It’s only human. We wonder what people will think of us while the crisis is unfolding, or after it has passed. Will our bosses or customers trust us to solve the problem or deal with the aftermath? Will we undergo a painful investigation or demoralizing corporate scrutiny? Will our colleagues think poorly of us? Will the failure become a news story within the company, the industry, or the general public? Will we be demoted, or lose our year-end bonus? Worst of all possibilities, will we lose our job and have a hard time finding another? This risk usually follows an incident that fits into one of the first three levels of crisis. Forget it completely and focus entirely on solving the game-time crises first. I am not suggesting being a saint or a martyr. When something goes wrong, focusing on resolving or managing the issue can reduce the negative impact on your personal brand. It rarely works the other way around.
Why should I bother you with a philosophy lesson on levels of risks and wrongness? To help you with triage when something does go badly and time is not on your side. Triage is simply a fancy word for a system of prioritizing.
When you visit a hospital emergency room, you are usually quite lucky if you have to wait three, four, or five maddening hours to be seen by a treatment team. The minutes drip away in interminable slow motion because the triage team has determined that you are unlikely to die while waiting. Meanwhile, the emergency room staff has given fast passes to life-threatening injuries, illnesses, gunshot wounds, and heart attacks past the room filled with the miseries of broken wrists, hernia-inducing coughs, and lacerations from careless bagel cutting. If you are managing a crisis, or drafting plans to avoid one, you will need to evaluate the issue with the same cool, calculated objectivity as the seemingly emotionless triage nurse, who is in actuality trying to evaluate which crisis is the one that needs to be treated soonest.
Like the emergency room, it is not uncommon for more than one thing to go wrong simultaneously, or for the first malady to cause a chain reaction of other problems. As counterintuitive as it may sound, our first task at the Superdome was not getting the power restored and the game re-started. It was to be sure that no one was likely to get hurt (a Level 1 risk) as a result of the blackout.
Our initial response was to take steps to avoid panic and fans trampling each other as they rushed for the doors. If the blackout was an equipment failure, one that could be corrected with a minimum of inconvenience, the safest advice we could provide to fans was to stay inside. If, on the other hand, it was a fire in the building that caused the outage, or a fire was ignited because of it, we would need to implement a quick evacuation. Perhaps the blackout was a deliberate act connected with a larger, more insidious situation—a terrorist incident, a cyberattack, or a disaster outside the building. In order to make the decision whether or not to evacuate the building, we needed more information, and quickly. If the failure originated from a fire inside the stadium or immediately outside, we would need to direct fans away from those locations. If there was an active shooter waiting for fans to come pouring out of the stadium—as sadly later occurred at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England—keeping people inside would be the obvious course.
Knowing that we could communicate with 71,024 fans and thousands more workers and media, and identifying what to tell them, was way more important than figuring out how to get the lights back on. I concentrated on that while law enforcement officials, NFL security, and the stadium management team evaluated the frightening possibilities of the foregoing paragraph.
Crisis triage will always focus first on actions that alleviate physical dangers. You will be thinking of a great many things if, and when, something goes wrong. Always start with “are people safe, and if they are, what do we have to do to make sure they stay that way?”
To me, the greatest moment in halftime history was Prince performing Purple Rain in the rain at Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007. When the stormfront, which was forecast to pass quickly across the Miami area, seemed to stall over Dolphin Stadium, I wasn’t focused on how emotional, poignant, and theatrically spectacular that performance would be. I was concerned whether there was any possibility that the electronic gear—lighting, audio, or even his famously iconic electric guitar—could injure the star or any of the hundreds of support cast or crew.
After protecting the safety and health of our customers, clients, and staff, we then consider brand risks, which are the issues that can do the most profound and long-term reputational or financial damage to the health of our business. As time is often of the essence, a number of smaller, easier-to-solve problems may have to wait or be delegated to others while the greater, more impactful, and potentially existential issues are addressed. Regrettably, sliding one problem ahead of another can create controversy, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction among those impacted by other important, but less imperative, issues, like when you have to wait in the emergency room for someone to X-ray your broken shoulder because a head trauma patient was wheeled through those swinging double doors ahead of you. Your shoulder will still be fractured, but probably won’t get any more broken while the more severely injured individual is being stabilized. But that time could have been devastatingly more important to the head trauma patient if your shoulder was examined first.
Your broken shoulder represents a product risk in which something goes wrong that is unlikely to have a serious, long-term impact on your overall health. Your shoulder may hurt, it may keep you from typing with two hands for a while, and it may require months of excruciating physical therapy to reestablish its previously glorious contribution to your backswing. But you will return to being a high-functioning human with the proper amount of time, treatment, and effort.
When your product, project, or activity “breaks its shoulder” and is unlikely to have a serious, long-term impact on the health of your company or brand, you may have time to be more thoughtful about the response if the product risk doesn’t escalate into a brand risk. You should prioritize next for action those product risks that have this potential. Problems that will likely never elevate to this level of significance can be addressed after the more important things are handled.
If you stay true to your mission by planning wisely to reduce or forestall disaster, or managing the response to a crisis once things go wrong anyway, the reflection on your own personal brand will often take care of itself. Where we as emotionally fragile and egocentric humans fail is when we allow the threat to our personal reputation to motivate our thinking. Solving problems intelligently, in the right order, can help restore the luster to our brands. Eventually.
The truth is that it is impossible to completely crisis-proof our projects, companies, or products. But we can make them more crisis-resistant and we can apply a triage decision-making framework that will help us prioritize responses when something goes wrong anyway. Simply, we have to do everything we can to keep a crisis from happening in the first place, and if it does, we will need a plan on how to respond. First, apply a dark and fertile imagination to visualize as many potential threats to our success as possible. Then, we can spend the time, money, and energy to keep all those monsters securely UNDER the bed.