Crisis Management: Transparency Provides Protection
My colleague, Johnathan Bernstein, recently ended a blog on the Chilean mine rescue with this comment:
Truly successful crisis management does more than simply resolve the issues at hand. By making public the steps being taken to rectify and resolve issues, little room is left for damaging rumor and innuendo to creep in and stakeholders far are more likely to lend a sympathetic ear.
This is probably the most succinct statement of the role of crisis management that I have ever read.
As emergency managers, we tend to sometimes treat information as something that must be protected and doled out piecemeal. Part of this is because for years we've been trained that media is the enemy and forget that they can, in fact, be allies in our quest to get vital information to the public. Many times it's not enough to just do your job – you have to let the public know you are doing it and why you're doing it the way you are. Johnathan's statement reminds us that how well we handle the crisis today can save us considerable agony in the future.