Public relations: People are not stupid

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Public relations: People are not stupid

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has recently begun airing a television and radio campaign touting its commitment to safety. In the spots, the company CEO characterizes PG&E as a company that "had lost its way" but is now back on track thanks to the continued commitment of its employees.

Nobody is buying it.

Having worked with PG&E employees at all levels, I can't fault the claim that there are a whole lot of dedicated and hardworking people in the company. But there are many who would argue that PG&E didn't "lose its way" – it never was on the right path to begin with. Since the gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno in 2010 that killed 8 people, the image of PG&E that has emerged in the media is that of a company that fostered a culture where safety was subordinate to profit. Inadequate safety records were kept, promised safety work was never performed, revenue earmarked for safety upgrades was redirected to other uses, and employees were rewarded for not reporting problems.

At the same time PG&E is running its campaign, it has requested a $5.25 billion increase in gas and electric revenue to pay for upgrades to safety and reliability. If approved, this increase will raise utility rates by over 15% by 2016. PG&E has also requested an additional $2.2 billion to fund transmission line work that would further raise rates.

Despite claims that the campaign is being paid for by shareholders and not customers, many are seeing the campaign as a cynical attempt by the company to defuse consumer anger over the proposed rate increase. There are increasing demands that PG&E account for its poor safety record and demonstrate that the increase is not just an attempt to get more money to pay for what should already have been done.

The lesson here is that the people are not stupid. A slick media campaign is not going to divert attention from years of poor performance or overcome the public perception that corporate greed cost lives. It's going to take more than images of hardworking employees to salvage PG&E's reputation.

Public relations: Don’t be too quick on the draw

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Public relations: Don’t be too quick on the draw

The ability to move information almost instantaneously can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Witness the recent case of CNN and Fox News in reporting the Supreme Court decision the federal healthcare law last week. In their rush to scoop other networks, both CNN and Fox failed to read the full text of the Court's decision and incorrectly reported that the Court had struck down the health insurance mandate. While the error was quickly corrected, it generated considerable confusion as other sources correctly reported the Court's decision. It also caused some red faces in Congress as some elected officials tweeted the incorrect information to their constituents.

There are two lessons here for crisis managers. The first is the Internet's ability to spread disinformation at an alarming rate. The other is that the Internet can also be self-correcting and can spread corrected information just as fast. This means that if you're using social media, you need to be accurate. Take the extra few minutes to get it right before hitting the key to post your message. Secondly, you need to move quickly to correct bad information – the longer you wait the harder it will be to get the facts before the public.

By the way, the congressmen learned a third lesson: the Internet never forgets. While many officials deleted their incorrect posts, copies were preserved by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based group supporting transparency in government. Once you post something, it's part of history. Take those extra few minutes to be sure of your facts!

Alien invasion and leadership

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Alien invasion and leadership

You just have to love publicity people. To drum up interest in the new National Geographic television series Chasing UFOs the PR folks commissioned a survey of of some 1,114 Americans regarding their attitude towards extraterrestrials. Among the more interesting conclusions was that 65% of those surveyed believe President Obama would be better suited to handle an alien invasion than contender Mitt Romney.

In developing our emergency plans we (quite rightly) try to make them independent of personality. However, the culture of an organization and its leadership have a great deal to do with success in dealing with crisis. One person can make a difference for good or ill, in crisis and the group perception of the person in charge can significantly affect group performance.

So as you develop and test your plans, keep in mind the human factor. How suited is your leader to dealing with crisis? What can you put in place to assist him or her? How will you cope if they are unavailable? Never forget that no matter how good your plan, it is the team that executes that plan that make it successful. And the performance of that team will depend on the leadership skills of the team leader.

Climate change meets realpolitik

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Climate change meets realpolitik

We sometimes assume that risk and mitigation are absolutes. We think of risk as something quantifiable and logical and that, by extension, efforts to reduce risk are also logical. However, we forget or ignore research that shows that objective risk, perceived risk, and mitigation are only loosely coupled. Risk perception of the community ultimately determines the effectiveness of mitigation.

Take for example the law under consideration in North Carolina. The state's Coastal Resource Commission recommended planning for a 39 in rise in coastal sea levels by 2100. Business interests, concerned over the effects of this planning on coastal development, have supported a bill that would ignore climate change reports based on scientific studies and use only historical data in determining sea level rise. The catch is that the data is limited to data after 1900 and allows for only linear extrapolation of the data rather than more accurate methods.

Lawmakers in Virginia faced similar opposition in trying to base their planning on scientific evidence by commissioning a study on sea level rise. In this case local Republicans believe that "climate change" and "sea level rise" are liberal buzzwords and were prepared to block any study using those terms. Changing the term "sea level rise" to "recurrent flooding" allowed the study to pass muster without opposition.

Mitigation has always been a hard sell particularly where it comes into opposition with business interests. It's sad to see ideological political opposition to the science on which we base effective mitigation. And what does it say about our politicians' understanding of the issues when a name change is all it takes to remove their opposition? 

Emergency Management and Higher Education

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs1 Comment on Emergency Management and Higher Education

I had the privilege this week of delivering the keynote address to the Higher Education Conference hosted by FEMA at the Emergency Management Institute in Emmitsburg, MD. This annual conference brings together several hundred educators from across the US (including some international visitors) who are involved in the delivery of degree programs in the fields of emergency management and homeland security.

It's a humbling experience to address my colleagues here because I have come to realize over the years that the work they do is absolutely vital to the continued professionalization of emergency management. First, they do the research that forms the specialized body of knowledge for our profession. Their work provides us with the empirical data that should form the basis of our emergency management programs.

More importantly, they are training the next generation of leaders in emergency management. These graduates have a solid grounding in theory and practice and are encouraged to gain practical experience through internships and volunteer work. They are better equipped for an unclear future than many of us older managers were when we came to emergency management as a second career. And we owe this to the educators who have worked hard with limited resources to make higher education programs in emergency management a reality.

If you are not familiar with FEMA's Higher Education Program, visit their website at http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/ If you are fortunate enough to have an educational institution near you offering one of these programs I urge you to offer your support, either by providing instructional support or an internship. It's a solid investment in our future.

Terrorism theater and media spin

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Terrorism theater and media spin

One the hallmarks of our 21st Century media is the "news spin" – stating information in a way that emphasizes the message that the sender wants delivered, even if the facts don't quite line up. United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's recent visit to New Zealand offers us a classic example of the spin.

In reporting on the visit, New Zealand TV went into great detail about the Secretary's warning about "body bombers" – terrorist with surgically implanted, non-metallic bombs. However, Napolitano actually said "Do we have specific credible evidence of a threat today? I would not say that we do, however, the importance is that we all lean forward."

So is the threat real or not? Why is the report headlined, "New Zealand warned over body bombers?" The answer is, of course, that terrorism theater sells products and makes for more interesting news stories that generate more advertising revenue. Instead of using the information to allay public concern, the New Zealand TV and Secretary Napolitano have instead heightened concern without offering any positive actions that the public could take. As we saw after 9/11, warnings without recommendations for action serve no purpose other than to increase public anxiety . This is particularly true when the actual threat may be questionable (remember the messages about terrorist use of crop dusters?).

Are surgically planted bombs possible? Certainly. Should anti-terrorist planners be taking them into consideration? Sure. But does the public need to be concerned over something for which there is no credible evidence and no defined defense? Definitely not.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier for passing on this information.

Pink slime: public outrage and unintended consequences

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Pink slime: public outrage and unintended consequences

A short time ago I wrote about the public outrage over "pink slime", the beef additive used in most  ground beef products for over ten years and certified as safe by the USDA. As I mentioned, a combination of circumstances had caught the public attention, forcing many companies to stop using it.

As with many things, this media-generated issue has had consequences. The principal manufacturing company, BPI, almost immediately shut down three of it's four processing plants, keeping the employees on salary for 60 days. The company assumed that this was a temporary setback and that once the facts were known, they would be able to resume operations. They forgot that public outrage is not easily swayed by facts. BPI had now announced that it will close the three plants permanently, costing 650 workers their jobs.

There are two lessons here, both highlighted very well by the Detroit Free Press article about the closings. The first is the speed at which the controversy grew. Fueled by social media, the issue commanded almost immediate attention and forced a reaction from major food franchisers and companies within days. This is in stark contrast to previous food issues that have taken years to garner attention.

The second lesson lies in the assumption by BPI that they were dealing with a food safety issue that could be countered by the facts that the additive was safe and had been in use without any ill effects for over ten years. What BPI missed was that people were outraged not because the product was unsafe but because they had never been told it was in use. Treating it as an additive rather than just beef would have required it to be listed as an ingredient on food packaging.

It's a costly couple of lessons and BPI is paying for them with loss of 650 jobs.

Damage estimates for alien invasion?

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Damage estimates for alien invasion?

As any of my friends will tell you, I'm an action movie buff. Good or bad, new or classic, I go to see them or watch them on DVD pretty regularly. However, the one genre of action films I'm generally not too excited about is disaster films. It's not that I don't like them, I just have a bad habit of commenting and laughing at factual errors. It's very unnerving to my friends when I burst out laughing at an otherwise dramatic moment.

However, even in a non-disaster movie, I still look at some scenes of destruction and ask myself how I would have handled such an event. Actually, it's usually more something like, "Crap! I'm glad I'm not that city's emergency manager!" I've even given some thought to using movie clips or plot ideas as the basis for exercises.

Now the good folks at the Kintec Analysis Corporation have gone one better. To showcase their talents in impact analysis, they've developed a post event damage estimate for the climatic battle in the Avengers movie. (If you haven't seen it, do so!) In this battle, the Avengers take on an alien invasion force out to conquer earth (what else?) and the result is chaos on the streets of New York. Kinetic estimates the damage from the battle at $160 billion dollars.

What makes this so impressive (and worth blogging about) is that the analysts at Kinetic take this fictional scenario and do a great job of identifying real issues that would have arisen if it had been real. They describe a methodology for assessing the damage and apply it to the damage seen in the film. They consider insurance questions (does the participation of the nordic gods Thor and Loki give insurance companies an out under Act-of-God clauses?) and issues of liability (what is the liability of the government agency that created the portal that allowed the invasion force to enter?). They even discuss the risk of hazardous materials exposure related to cleaning up alien equipment and bodies.

So see the movie, read the damage estimate, and consider how you could use this idea to make your exercises more interesting.

Thanks to Art Taber for sending me the link to the damage estimate!

Homeland Security and the minority report

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Homeland Security and the minority report

Phillip K. Dick's short story, Minority Report, later made into a hit movie with starring Tom Cruise and Max von Sydow, tells the story of a law enforcement program set up to prevent crimes by predicting future criminal acts. The story centers on a man who believes he is falsely accused and must prove he is innocent of a crime he hasn't yet committed. More importantly, the story raises the moral question of whether a person should be punished for a crime they have not yet committed.

Unfortunately, the question may not be hypothetical. The Department of Homeland Security is working on Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a program designed to monitor physiological and behavioral clues to identify potential terrorists. The concept is to look for statistical aberrations in body language, heart and respiration rates, etc. and use the results as predictors of future behavior.

While one can argue that this program merely automates what we've been training security people to do for years, removing human judgement from process may create a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have a tendency to believe in what computers tell us, even if we know the result to be intuitively wrong.

In a deeply thoughtful article on FAST and the false-positive paragraph, masters candidate Alexander Furnas demonstrates that the large number of false positives will actually aid terrorists by diverting security resources to resolve these false positives.In essence, the real terrorists will get lost in the crowd of innocent travelers singled out for additional screening.

Security expert Bruce Schneier looks at the problem from a slightly different perspective that should give us pause, "If FAST determines you are guilty of a crime you have not yet committed, how do you exonerate yourself?"