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Sunday, January 23, 2011

COMM 633 Strategic Crisis & Issues Management

Crisis communications was a course that was both structured and free-form.  It is that same dichotomy that embodies the idea of crisis, unexpected and unpredictable, and the discipline of crisis communications.

The course was divided into three parts: pre-crisis, crisis event, and post-crisis. 

Pre-crisis we learned about planning, about looking at the past to come up with possible crisis scenarios for a variety of situations that could flare from being a problem to becoming a full blown organizational crisis.  We looked at prodromes, scanning, thinking about black swans, and stretched the input to consider any other possibility (both known and unknowable/out-of-the-box) that could be useful in forming a framework for a specific crisis scenario. 

Crisis detection begins the second phase of crisis communication planning. Investigation into the crisis event showed the importance of resource allocation (who does what, where and when), of determining or recognizing a crisis-in-progress, and of having steps and structures in place to address and address and contain the crisis.  Meaningful in this stage is organizational honesty and transparency.

For the post-crisis stage, it is important to ensure that the crisis is over, that the response is evaluated from multiple perspectives, and that learnings and take-aways are noted and incorporated into the next phase or permutation of crisis planning.

In a crisis, one of the most important things is handling and addressing a crisis is communication.  Attention to all possible stakeholders was a point that resonated with me.  Stakeholders drive and define whether or not something is a crisis.  Therefore, identification of the groups/people that could be affected by a business or personal brand crisis is critically important. Success on one front in dealing with a crisis does not make the whole impact of a problem suddenly become resolved.  It is a multi-faceted dilemma that requires complex assessment and strategy.

Post-crisis it is critical to evaluate, assess, and revise existing crisis communications plans to take into account any knowledge gained from a prior crisis.   Communication effectiveness is critical to whether or not a crisis is deemed to have been successfully weathered.

We spent a lot of class time talking about real-time and case study crises.  We argued as to how to address a crisis and how to specifically counter or approach different communication dilemmas.

I enjoyed Professor Grayson's real-world business examples, and his hands-on knowledge about what it takes to do crisis management as a job for a large corporation.  We spent time talking about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, analyzing the handling of the environmental crisis from a variety of stakeholder vantage points.  While I took this class before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I found myself analyzing the communications failings as the incident played out for the 3 months last year.  I saw the negative impacts that resulted from a poorly defined and/or badly executed crisis plan.  Coordination of information was problematic, and the lack of transparency, leadership and an unwillingness to take responsibility - all points addressed ahead of time in a crisis plan - had undesirable affects on both the outcomes and severity of the crisis.

While my conclusion from this course is that there is nothing absolute in communicating during a crisis, the exercises of working through what-if and real-world scenarios created lasting value for me.  I now look at this discipline with new respect, with a willingness to spend the time to pre-plan and test the most likely (and unlikely, with consideration of black swan possibilities) crisis communication plans.



Syllabus COMM 633 Syllabus

This course was very fluid and hands-on.  We were asked to develop crisis communications plans on topics that were in the news, local, or of other particular interest.  This crisis communications plan is for the Carolina Panthers NFL football team Carolina Panthers Crisis Communcations Plan. This plan was done in the midst of a political crisis in North Carolina involving the wife of a former Governor Mary Easley Crisis Communications Plan.

For our mid-term exam, we had to submit the following based on questions and scenarios proposed by the professor Midterm Exam.

For our final exam, we had a group project where we had to respond in real time to a "crisis".  We had prepared ahead of time by doing pre-crisis Plan, which is included here Hospital scenario - Crisis Communications Planning.  For the exam, we had to react, with a live simulation of a crisis (phone calls coming in to our group and responses required).  We then were able to truly see the benefits and limitations of a Crisis Communications Plan.

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