Best Practices is Risk and Crisis Comms
In trying to catch up on my journal reading I’ve just been through the August 2006 edition (Vol. 34 No. 3) of JACR, which is a special section on “Best Practices in Risk and Crisis Communication.” The basis of the review is the NCFPD’s list of ten best practices, which are a result of an extensive synthesis of the body of risk and crisis communication scholarship. The best practices are:
- Process approaches and policy approaches (meaning, have formal processes for this stuff and have the communicator at the policy formulation table)
- Pre-event planning
- Partnerships with the public
- Listen to the public’s concerns and understand the audience
- Honesty, candor, and openness
- Collaborate and coordinate with credible sources
- Meet the needs of the media and remain accessible
- Communicate with compassion, concern, and empathy
- Accept uncertainty and ambiguity
- Messages of self-efficacy
Straightforward enough, and a good list. More interesting, though, was the response by Peter Sandman (HTML, PDF). First, he provides an interesting frame on the topic, noting there are important differences between when people are not worried enough about a serious hazard, too worried about a small hazard, and rightly worried about a serious hazard. Second, he notes:
My final comment on the best practices may be the most important. In an article as short as this, with only a few paragraphs on each of the best practices, they come out sounding pretty abstract but also pretty obvious–so obvious, in fact, that the reader may fail to notice that they are extremely difficult to implement and very seldom accomplished. They’re not so much best practices as they are aspirational goals. Any reader whose overall response is, ‘‘Yeah, we do most of that,’’ has been ill-served by the article. Odds are you don’t. Almost nobody does.
The best practices wisely concede that candor and openness are tougher goals than honesty (#5). But in fact, all ten of these recommendations are tough. They fly in the face of organizational culture, of individual ego, of technical hubris.
This sounded like the clear-eyed perspective of someone who’s done the thing and not just studied it. Ultimately, the matter one must solve for–in particular, that the leader must solve for–is execution. Strong communicative practice is tough stuff, made tougher by the fact that most approaches to communication problems are relatively unsophisticated and grounded in historical precedence and a journalistic tradition. The ultimate best practice is getting things done.
