By: Alice,
on 4/25/2015
‘Anzac’ (soon transmuting from acronym to word) came to sum up the Australian desire to reflect on what the war had meant. What was the first Anzac Day? At least four explanations exist of the origins of the idea of Anzac, the most enduring legacy of Australia’s Great War.
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By: Alice,
on 10/7/2014
Why do organisations that know a crisis can cause intense damage to reputation and value take so few steps to prevent crises from happening in the first place? This is one of the perplexing questions of contemporary management.
One important element in this riddle is that many organisations simply fail to appreciate the difference between tactical crisis response and strategic crisis management, and thus miss the critical prevention phase. Importantly this is not a just a matter of semantics and definitions. How an organisation approaches crisis management can represent a genuine threat to survival. The reality is crisis response and crisis management are not the same thing, and that distinction lies at the heart of the modern approach to crisis management.
The traditional response approach is simple and effective in a limited way. It prepares the organisation in the event a crisis occurs, and helps it respond as effectively as possible to minimise the damage. This has been called the Event Approach – treating a crisis as an event you prepare for and then respond to. By contrast the emerging, more strategic approach represents a crisis not so much as an event, but as a point along a process which begins long before the crisis, continues through preparedness and prevention, works through managing the event itself, and then addresses the many organisational risks which develop after the event. This so-called Process Approach is undoubtedly one of the most important recent evolutionary developments in crisis management, bringing an increased focus onto two previously underdeveloped areas.
The first of these areas is crisis prevention. Conventional crisis preparedness is vital – including key activities such as crisis management manuals, team selection and training, pre-prepared contact lists and written materials, and a variety of simulations and training. However none of these activities helps reduce the likelihood of the crisis happening in the first place. They are like the insurance the homeowner takes out against fire and burglary. The insurance policy itself does nothing to reduce the chances of fire or burglary. It simply provides the homeowner with some financial protection, paid for in advance. But responsible homeowners do more than just take out insurance. They install smoke detectors, fire alarms, intruder alarms and CCTV, plus double locks on doors and windows. It is these steps which go beyond passive insurance (crisis preparedness) and add proactive steps to reduce the likelihood of disaster happening on the first place (crisis prevention). Obviously no astute homeowner would do one without the other.
In exactly the same way, the Process Approach to crisis management calls for organisations not just to put traditional crisis preparedness in place but also to implement a wide range of proven activities to prevent the likelihood of the event occurring. These might include environmental scanning, risk analysis, media monitoring, issue management, and preventive maintenance, as well as effective emergency response (because an emergency badly managed has the potential to become a crisis).
None of these activities is fresh or original. What is new is explicitly positioning them within the context of crisis prevention as part of a continuum of organisational activities which constitute comprehensive crisis management. It helps explain the value of strategic crisis management as opposed to tactical crisis response.
The second underdeveloped area highlighted by the modern Process Approach is the need for a much more complete view of what happens after the crisis. The traditional Event Approach focuses primarily on getting back to “business as normal” as quickly as possible. This business continuity or operational recovery model typically has a strong emphasis on tactical matters such as restoring power, water and other utilities, as well as protection and restoration of data, communication, and other IT capacity.
Again, such activities are vital, but the Process Approach to crisis management emphasises that the crisis risk is not over when business resumes. This period is sometimes called the “crisis after the crisis” and can represent an even greater risk than the crisis itself, particularly the risk to reputation. These ongoing risks may take the form of official inquiries, coroner’s inquests, prosecution, costly litigation, adverse regulation, or shareholder backlash. When the crisis event itself is seemingly over it is very natural for executives to want to move on as quickly as possible. But the dangers in the post-crisis period are very real and have all too frequently led to the downfall of senior managers and even entire organisations.
There is, sadly, an extensive body of case studies and research which spells out the disastrous impact of a crisis on reputation, long-term share value, and the chances of corporate survival. While nothing can guarantee that a crisis won’t strike and potentially deliver these impacts, the Process Approach offers practical steps to reduce the chance of a crisis in the first place, to minimise damage should a crisis occur, and if a crisis does occur, to help the organisation survive.
Headline image credit: Highway at night. CC0 via Pixabay.
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By: Alice,
on 5/28/2014
So, recently there was another report from the scientists of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) telling us that climate change (what used to be called global warming) is upon us and there are real changes happening now. The scientists urged us to heed their warning and change our behaviours, and we ignored them in droves. Why we ignored them is interesting. The information they are giving us is dire. The environment is already changing for the worse, and will continue to change. We must all act now to avert some pretty disastrous outcomes.
However, the real issue is that humans just don’t really care about the information they have to hand. We never have. We’ve just lived through the wonderfully coined ‘information age’, a time where all of the world’s information was organised for us and made available to all of our fingertips. How many of the world’s problems did all of this easily accessible information solve? None.
The presentation of information alone is rarely a powerful enough motivator to get people to change. Especially when the information is complex, negative, or about the future (such as information about climate change). Due to various cognitive biases and a desire to believe everything is ok just the way it is we tend to tune out. How then can scientists get their message across, and effect genuine behavioural change within the broader community?
Well, there is a very handy behavioural change tool in existence, one that has proved itself capable of changing behaviour en-mass time and time again. This tool has been used to get people to loose weight, make them move more, volunteer their time to good causes, and cook healthier meals for themselves. This tool is one that if scientists could get hold of it, and use its powers effectively could get people to change their behaviours and start to look after the environment. The tool is called ‘reality TV’.
It pains me to say this, but over the course of the last 15 years, high-rating reality TV shows have continually proved themselves to be the best changers of mass behaviour. In my country of origin, Australia, we only need to look at what Bondi Rescue did for surf club enrolments, what The Block has done for the home renovation industry, and what Masterchef has done for the sales of Wagyu beef. Every country would have its own proven examples of reality TV changing the behaviour of the masses.
Reality TV is a great behavioural change agent because we like to be entertained first and informed second. An entertaining platform helps to make information that will be useful easier to digest. However, this is not all. To change people’s behaviour, you need to consider their motivation to do something and how easy it is for them to do it. Reality TV shows are a great way of increasing motivation for a particular activity as they make something feel like it’s already popular and thereby change the social norms (i.e. if there is a reality TV show about something it must be popular; therefore, I should get involved). People like to conform so if they think others are already doing something, they’ll do it too. However, reality TV shows also make a new behaviour easier to do by modelling it. Ever watched a reality cooking show? They model how to do the behaviour. So reality TV, in more ways than one, increases people’s motivation to undertake that behaviour and makes it easier by skilling people up via modelling.
So, the people who can make us start taking proactive steps towards saving the environment are the producers of reality TV. They will also need to convince the broadcasters that a TV show about the environment will rate. Thus, the show needs to be an extremely compelling reality TV series where you have lovable winners and lots of losers battling it out to save the environment.
Those who come up with good ways to make a difference to the planet will, just like the contestants on the cooking shows who dream up a great way to cook cous cous, act as models for all of us. We, too, will adopt the winning behaviours, and momentum will build to start acting in a pro-environmental way, becoming mainstream very quickly.
Unfortunately, there is a saying in TV that states ‘green doesn’t rate’, and this is largely because they have been treated as overly worthy, or blandly in the past. No one has sensationalised and popularised environmental issues as only reality TV can. This means, even more so, that we have to dumb down the environmental messages and turn them into a reality TV show. There you go Simon Cowell, here’s your new big challenge. You got the world singing, now get us all to take positive action to save our wonderful planet.
is out May 28th.Adam Ferrier is a consumer psychologist and Chief Strategy Officer at independent creative:media agency Cummins & Partners. His book http://www.oxford.com.au/ferrier.” target=”_blank”>The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour
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