As public relations professionals, we’re think we know a crisis when we see one.
It’s the factory that is ready to explode. It’s the product that is sending customers to the emergency room, or the construction project that has environmentalists in an uproar. It’s the top executive who posted an insensitive comment on Twitter, or the troubled employee who showed up to work with an AK-47.
We tend to think about – and act upon – every crisis as if there is little to fundamentally distinguish one from the next. However, almost forty years of risk communication research says we are making a big mistake.
Many of us are failing to recognize a basic concept that risk communicators have long accepted: The things that hurt people are completely different from the things that upset them.
Risk = Hazard + Outrage
Let’s say that we generate a long list of risks, and we ask a group of technical experts to rank those risks from the most dangerous to the least dangerous. Now let’s take that same list and conduct a survey of non-experts, asking them to rank those same risks from the most upsetting to the least upsetting.
If we compare those two versions of the list, we will find a statistical correlation of about 0.2, according to risk communication pioneers Vincent T. Covello and Peter M. Sandman: “There is virtually no correlation between the ranking of hazards according to statistics on expected annual mortality and the ranking of the same hazards by how upsetting they are. There are many risks that make people furious even though they cause little harm – and others that kill many, but without making anybody mad.”
This insight led Sandman in the early 1980s to a game-changing realization. Most technical experts believe “risk” and “hazard” to be synonymous. But that correlation of 0.2 clearly indicates that non-experts look at “risk” quite differently. To recognize this difference, Sandman chose to redefine risk. He took what the technical experts call “risk” – that is, anything that presents a real threat to life, health, safety or property – and called it “hazard.” Then, he took what the non-experts call “risk” – that is, anything that angers, offends or frightens – and called it “outrage.” Sandman summed all this in a tidy formula: Risk = Hazard + Outrage.
There are many important implications that result from this formula. Let’s focus on just three:
In any situation that involves risk to any community of non-experts, it is rarely enough to address only the hazard. It is at least as important to anticipate, recognize and reduce the community’s outrage.
Conflicts between organizations and communities often result from how differently risk is defined by an organization’s experts and a community’s non-experts.
In any situation that involves risk, a primary goal of the public relations counsel is figure out what could outrage a given community – whether geographical, demographic or psychographic – and then to prepare the organization to manage the outrage.
Hot crisis vs. cold crisis
When crisis communicators discuss the concept of “crisis,” we almost always focus on extraordinary disasters, such as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident of 1979, the Tylenol murders of 1982 or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. In Sandman’s terminology, these are “high hazard/high outrage” situations: The experts and the non-experts generally agree that each situation rose to the level of a crisis.
On a second tier, most crisis communicators would likely include situations that are less hazardous to public health, but are significantly hazardous to the general welfare. These tend to be major economic crises, such as the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, the dotcom bubble of 1997-2000 or the Wall Street bailout of 2008. We might debate the specifics, but generally both experts and non-experts would view these as high hazard/high outrage situations.
So, let’s put all of these under a single category called “the hot crisis.” Generally, hot crises are situations that prompt an emergency response from a team of technical experts from health care, law enforcement, environmental protection, regulatory enforcement or emergency management.
Now let’s consider a second category of crisis, one which reflects clear disagreement between the technical experts and the non-experts. In Sandman’s terminology, this would be a “low hazard/high outrage” situation: The experts insist there is little or no threat to life, safety, health or property, but the non-experts are angry or frightened.
Unlike the hot crisis, this category of crisis has far more to do with controversy and scandal than with emergency. This is the “cold crisis,” and it is far more common than the hot crisis. Indeed, for every hot crisis you will find in the news – or in history, for that matter – you will find scores of cold crises at the local, regional, national or global scales.
Identifying the cold crisis
Recognizing a hot crisis is relatively easy: It features an overt threat to life, health or property; it generally prompts an emergency response from a technical, regulatory or professional team; and it provokes a strong reaction from the threatened communities. In other words, the experts agree there is a high hazard, and the non-experts respond with a high (but appropriate) level of outrage.
In a hot crisis, crisis communicators ideally focus their efforts on distributing vital information to affected communities via news media, social media and community representatives, usually in coordination with the response team. The first priority is to protect life, health, safety and property. The second priority is to protect the organization’s reputation and shield the organization from liability.
But when a crisis is cold (low hazard/high outrage), we are dealing with what Lawrence Susskind, a leading scholar in public dispute resolution at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls “colliding values.” The technical experts are telling us, “Hey, this is no big deal,” but one or more communities are telling us in no uncertain terms, “This makes us angry.” Thus, our job is not to warn a community about a hazard, but rather to find ways to calm the community’s outrage.
Sandman’s formula tells us that risk is in the eye of the beholder. So, it doesn’t matter that our technical experts can’t or won’t acknowledge the risk. If a community is outraged by our organization’s actions (or lack of action), then our organization is facing a risk that we must manage.
There are many ways to parse this outrage. Covello recognizes two sources, Susskind lists six, and Sandman identifies 12 primary sources with eight secondary sources. However, we choose to look at it, we can be sure that outrage results from one or more of five primal fears:
- Physical: “This threatens my safety.”
- Economic: “This threatens my prosperity.”
- Social: “This threatens my status.”
- Personal: “This threatens my self-image.”
- Cultural: “This threatens my system of values.”
To this list, we should add a crosscutting element that Sandman calls “The Yuck Factor”: There are things in life that people just find disgusting or loathsome without being able to say exactly why.
Most top executives can empathize with these fears when their experts can identify a corresponding hazard. What tends to baffle them is when the experts and the non-experts disagree. That is, when the hazard is low and the outrage is high. Moreover, many of the communications methods we use to manage a hot crisis are useless during a cold crisis; indeed, they often make matters much worse because they tend to magnify outrage.
Managing the cold crisis
Without the presence of an identifiable hazard, the technical experts are likely to dismiss the community’s outrage as irrational, irrelevant or ignorant.
“Government officials, industry representatives and scientists often complain that non-experts and lay people irrationally respond to risk information and do not accurately perceive and evaluate risk information,” Covello writes.
As a result, the experts will likely at best to advocate an educational program and at worst to dismiss the community’s outrage entirely. However, “educating the public” rarely calms outrage, and hubris usually aggravates it. The far more effective option is to employ these four widely accepted principles of outrage management:
- Humility – Our experts are authorities in the hazards that may result from our organization’s actions, but communities are always the experts in their own outrage. Listen to what they tell you.
- Empathy – Take the time to understand exactly why the community is outraged. Peel away the layers until you find the source, which is often hidden, even from the community. Listen for clues that indicate whether members are frightened or offended, or both. Ask questions. Don’t interrupt, argue or defend. Focus on any points of agreement, and ask the community to help find a solution.
- Acknowledgment – The most important thing you can do in any crisis, Sandman says, is to simply acknowledge the outrage. Lawyers frequently resist acknowledgement, believing it to be the same as admitting liability. But it is possible to say, “We understand that your are angry, and we think we understand why your are angry. Can we work together to make things better?” without admitting liability. (See Figure 4.)
- Penance – Be prepared; your organization may have to pay a price to calm a community’s outrage. That doesn’t mean your organization should break out the checkbook. But your executives may have to wear the hair shirt for a little while. This is small price to pay in the long run, but it is often hard for executive-level egos to accept in the short term.
Suggestions for further reading
“Responding to Community Outrage,” Peter M. Sandman (American Industrial Hygiene Association, 1993); also available as a free download at http://www.psandman.com/media/RespondingtoCommunityOutrage.pdf
The Peter M. Sandman Risk Communication Website, http://psandman.com/
The Center for Risk Communication, Vincent T. Covello, director, http://centerforriskcommunication.org/
“Dealing with an Angry Public,” Lawrence Susskind and Patrick Field (The Free Press, 1996)
Risk and Crisis Communications: Methods and Messages, Pamela Ferrante Walaski, (John Wiley & Sons, 2011)
Risk Communication: A Handbook for Communicating Environmental, Safety, and Health Risks, Fourth Edition, Regina E. Lundgren and Andrea H. McMakin (John Wiley & Sons, 2009)