Crisis Communication: Overcoming Barriers When Crafting an Effective Risk Communication Strategy
When a disaster strikes, there is no time for planning, and what is already in place must therefore suffice. One of the most important factors to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the need for more effective communications between the relief agencies, U.S. military and civil law enforcement. Effective communications between these agencies and the people that needed help was clearly required but the implications of this failure were played out in the international media and calls for reform have become increasingly louder in response. To determine what could have been done differently to ensure that effective crisis communications were in place, this study provides a review of the relevant peer-reviewed literature to determine the background of the problem and what the experts are advising, followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.
Review and Discussion
Background and Overview.
When it comes to crisis communications, there is no room for positive thinking. According to Fearn-Banks (2002), "A crisis can and will happen. 'When?' is the question. Negative thinking is more appropriate than positive thinking in crisis management" (p. 2). The difficult part about ensuring effective communications during periods of crises is the unknowable aspects about what to expect. In this regard, Fearn-Banks defines a crisis as "a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting the organization, company, or industry, as well as its publics, products, services, or good name. A crisis interrupts normal business transactions and can sometimes threaten the existence of the organization" (p. 2). Crises can assume a number of both manmade and artificial forms, including strikes, terrorisms, fires, boycotts, product tampering, product failures, or a wide range of other, comparable events; the size of the enterprise involved is not relevant to the need for crisis planning and management (Fearn-Banks, 2002). "It can be a multinational corporation," this author advises, "a one-person business, or even an individual. By definition, a crisis interrupts the normal flow of business, so a crisis cannot be a normal part of this flow" (p. 2). In reality, the scope of potential crises hat an organization faces is extensive; this is particularly accurate if the definition of an organizational crisis provided by Fink (1986) is followed: "A time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending - either one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome or one with the distinct possibility of a highly desirable and extremely positive outcome. It is usually a fifty-fifty proposition..." (p. 15). All too often, though, people tend to consider crises as disasters or accidents; while these are in fact types of crises, as Dyer (1995) emphasizes, "Crisis is more a matter of organizational response to business situations. Crisis occurs when there is a large, important difference between the expectations that corporate management has about the way its plans will interact with the environment and what actually happens" (p. 38).
In the Age of Information, it would appear superfluous to be overly concerned about the need for effective communications; after all, everyone is wired to everyone else and communications are virtually instantaneous - right? Unfortunately, when disasters strike, one of the first resources to be lost appears to be the communications infrastructure, and things have been getting worse instead of better in recent years for a number of reasons. According to Stone (2003), the need for effective communications during the recent periods of increasing frequency and severity of crises has been made abundantly clear that more needs to be done. "Whether such crises occur in our public schools, governmental agencies, or business enterprises, these crises affect people, property or our environment, and they are matters of major concern" (p. 3). The criticality of crisis-communications management to U.S. businesses in particular is underscored by three salient factors:
The increasing mass media reporting of hazards and their attendant risks;
The phenomenal growth in the number of product-liability lawsuits, particularly since 1975; and,
The pervasive, enormous impact of business crises on more than the reputations and the financial and social status of businesses (Gonzalez-Herrero & Pratt, 1996).
The convergence of the foregoing factors has created environments in which a number of enterprises have been forced to respond strategically to crises; the communications strategies that have been adopted in response represent a trend wherein companies are perceiving themselves as being more vulnerable to crises today than they were in the past (Gonzalez-Herrero & Pratt, 1996). Unfortunately, in spite of these trends, an enormous number of companies in the United States still do not have any type of crisis communications plan in place today (Samansky, 2002). In fact, "Even though corporations are more vulnerable to crises than...
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