The Noggin Blog

With a couple of tweets – how else? – President Trump inserted himself directly into the California wildfire crisis, blaming “poor forest management” as the cause of the “massive, deadly, and costly forest fires” and threatening, for good measure, to pull funding (presumably for federal firefighting assistance).

If your organization has a crisis communication plan, your team has probably thought long and hard about what you’ll say, to whom, and through what channels. If your organization, like nearly half of those surveyed by Nasdaq, has no crisis communication playbook, these are key questions to explore.^[i]  But whether your crisis team is revising the plan or building one now, remember that communication is not just about what you say. It’s also about listening to stakeholders.

Show me an executive who thinks they’ve got crisis leadership down pat, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t have the first clue about the nature of crisis. That’s right. Crisis is nothing like you think. Of unusual-and I mean unusual-frequency and impact, a crisis, especially novel crisis, forces business leaders to take decisive steps to respond to challenges they’ve probably never confronted, without understanding the provenance of the crisis in the first place or the longer-term consequences of the crisis intervention they’re about to take.

How much did corporate reputations slump during the financial crisis? A lot, at least according to industry actors at the time. For instance, when polled in 2009, 85 percent of executives agreed that the public’s trust in business had diminished.

Been managing volunteers, especially disaster response volunteers, for the last few decades? Then, you’ve probably noticed a shift. There’re fewer long-term volunteers; new volunteers are harder to come by than ever; and your base of existing volunteers is serving historically short stints.

By now, the case for interoperability, especially the efficient transfer of relevant data between agencies – otherwise known as interoperability in information management – is clear. Just take a look at many post-emergency, after-action reports; most cite a lack of interagency cooperation as contributory to mission setbacks, or even failures. Of course, one of the best examples in recent memory: poor interagency cooperation between New York City responders during 11 September.

When it comes to disaster response, full-time staff usually gets heavy reinforcement from volunteers. Indeed, in the event of an emergency, volunteers, especially spontaneous, converging volunteers, are often the first on the field, providing much-needed first responder support, including search and rescue, first aid, damage and need assessment. It’s also not uncommon that volunteers numerically dominate the response effort. In Australia, for instance, rural fire services often average career staff to volunteer ratios that easily exceed 1:130.

Let’s face facts. Features only improve products when actual customers use them. Too often well-intentioned features create more complexity than value. That’s never more so the case than when those features are introduced with cumbersome design elements, which users need to wade through in order to get where they need to go. After all, users are humans. And there’s only so much design stimuli we can absorb at any one time.

So far this year, the U.S. has already been hit by six storms, excluding the recent Hurricane Florence, that were each severe enough to inflict at least $1 billion in damages. Together, these storms caused more than thirty deaths.

Hurricane Florence—which recently struck the Southeast U.S. leading to severe flooding in the Carolinas—caused an estimated $20 billion in damages, possibly higher given that estimates on the monetary cost are still being estimated, and led to more than forty deaths.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is grabbing headlines for his tweets—one of which even set in motion an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission—and for smoking marijuana in a video interview with stand-up comedian Joe Rogan.