2024
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Top 12 Barriers to Effective Outrage Management
Posted: July 22, 2024
I haven’t posted a column since December 2022, and I’m not planning to start again. But after Australian risk communication consultant Kelly Parkinson drafted this list of key barriers to outrage management for a client, he sent it to me for comment. I suggested some changes and additions, and we both ended up thinking it was well worth adding to my website. So here it is. Some of the listed barriers are genuine downsides of outrage management; others are just reasons why it’s likely to be a tough sell inside most organizations. For reasons this short column makes clear, outrage management is an especially tough sell to public relations professionals. Kelly is a rare exception, a senior PR pro who instantly got it (a few decades ago) and never looked back. I’d feel a lot better about being retired if there were a couple of dozen Kelly Parkinsons around the world.
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2022
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COVID Precaution Decision-Making: 15 Theses
Posted: December 29, 2022
I am hard-pressed to claim that this is about risk communication – or even that it’s a column. It’s more a cri de coeur – a list of theses (just 15, not 95) that I’d like to post on CDC’s door. As we enter our fourth COVID calendar year, these theses feel to me like obvious but neglected truths about COVID precaution decision-making. I fervently believe that we would all have fared better in the pandemic if we had taken these theses to heart, and if those in authority over us had taken them to heart. Sadly, I suspect that COVID is not yet done with us, so we will have additional opportunities to reconsider how we make COVID precaution decisions. And sadly, I suspect my 15 theses will remain neglected. I can’t even imagine a place to publish them, except here.
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Posted: August 30, 2022
On June 15, 2022, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Faye Flam emailed me that she was writing an article on “confusing or misleading terms or expressions surrounding Covid,” and invited me to weigh in. That started me off on what promised to be an endless catalog of what I decided to call “COVID Language Traps.” I sent Faye a longish response on June 20, parts of which she used in her June 29 column, “Fuzzy Language Is Setting Back the Fight Against Covid.”
I kept writing. I could be writing still, but after topping 11,000 words (in thirteen entries) I decided enough was enough. Then I pared the piece down to less than 5,000 words (in nine entries), which the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy agreed to publish (with some minor editorial changes). I posted the CIDRAP version here
(95kB pdf). This is the longer original, with entries on misinformation, mask, airborne, immunity, herd immunity, natural immunity, sick/ill/illness/disease, case, booster, rare/common, significant, emergency, and pandemic/endemic.This column is categorized as:
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Public Health Tells Noble Lies
Posted: March 4, 2022
I have long believed that do-gooders in general and public health professionals in particular endanger trust by telling too many “noble lies,” prioritizing their altruistic goals over truth. That belief has figured in my writing and consulting for decades – and it figured in my writing and consulting about COVID as well. In December 2021 an opinion editor at the New York Times invited me to submit an op-ed on how COVID messaging prioritized health over truth. After the Times turned it down, I shopped it around to a number of other newspapers and online publications, some general-interest and some health-focused, updating as appropriate. Nobody wanted it. At least part of the reason, several editors told me, was a fear that antivaxxers would weaponize my claim that public health officials and experts are liars. (One acknowledged the irony that she too was prioritizing health over truth.) So here it is, previously unpublished. Freed from publishers’ length restrictions, I’ve added a little extra detail, but it’s basically the op-ed nobody wanted.
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2021
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Excerpts from: “Watching the COVID Booster Sausage Being Made”
Watching the COVID Booster Sausage Being Made
Posted: December 4, 2021
I started writing what I thought would be a website column in August 2021, when President Biden first proposed making COVID boosters available to all American adults, and the public health profession responded with considerable outrage. I kept revising it – and lengthening it – as the policymaking process continued. By late October I had a near-final draft that focused largely on what I considered a face-saving set of FDA and CDC decisions that actually allowed anyone who wanted a booster to get a booster, while seeming to impose complicated restrictions on booster eligibility. But the situation kept changing. Now, effective November 19, Biden has the policy he sought in August: universal adult COVID booster eligibility. So my blow-by-blow description of the COVID booster “sausage-making” process is arguably beside the point. I decided to post it anyway.
The “Excerpts” column is made up of excerpts from some of the sections, with each excerpt linked to that section. I hope it might entice a few to read the full essay.
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“Even-Though Risk Communication”: Mandatory COVID Vaccination
by Peter M. Sandman and Jody LanardPosted: October 17, 2021
I am a strong supporter of COVID vaccination, as is my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. But we are ambivalent about COVID vaccination mandates. We see a strong case for making people get vaccinated … and a strong case against doing so. In this short column we summarize both cases. And then we make our risk communication case that, whichever side you are on, you should acknowledge that the other side has a decent case too, even though you believe that on balance your side’s case is stronger. We call this “even-though risk communication.” Why should you do it? It’s kinder. It’s truer. And when your audience is on the other side, it’s much likelier to work.
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Firing Healthcare Workers Who Refuse COVID Vaccination
Posted: September 30, 2021
An infectious diseases epidemiologist who appears often in media pandemic coverage interacts periodically on Twitter with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. On September 27, 2021 he asked Jody what she thinks about whether hospitals should fire nurses or other healthcare workers (HCWs) who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID. Jody passed the inquiry on to me, and I responded with a numbered list. Then I decided to post my response, somewhat revised, as a column. My overall argument is that hospitals should see firing employees as a last resort. I’m especially attached to #1: that managements should beware of how their own outrage might be distorting their judgment. Also #9: that HCWs who have treated COVID patients for 18+ months without benefit of vaccination have probably been infected already or if not must be incredibly careful healthcare workers. Does it really make sense to fire them in their 19th month?
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Public Health Agencies and Professionals Don’t Want to Talk Much about COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters
Posted: July 23, 2021
Jody Lanard and I have been interested in messaging questions about COVID-19 vaccine boosters since the early days of COVID-19 vaccines, but our interest peaked after July 8, 2021, when Pfizer went public about its evidence of waning antibodies and its plan to apply for a booster Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). The U.S. government response to the Pfizer announcement was an immediate “pushback” statement issued jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It was clear to us that the CDC and FDA didn’t want to talk about boosters, and didn’t want Pfizer to do so either. After four tries to interest various reporters in covering the booster risk communication story, we converted our final attempt into this column, outlining our four main objections to the way the agencies (and the public health profession generally) were addressing the COVID-19 booster issue.
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Posted: May 16, 2021
CDC’s May 14 announcement that vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks or socially distance in most situations provoked a wide range of reactions, even among experts. Some exulted at the new freedom. Some thought it was long overdue and still insufficient. Some thought it was excessive and dangerous. Some worried that unvaccinated people would take advantage. Some worried that vaccinated people weren’t as safe as CDC was suddenly maintaining. Some worried that children and immunocompromised people were left in the lurch. Jody Lanard and I brainstormed our own reactions, and then converted our brainstorm into some notes on ways we thought CDC might have done a better messaging job. (A footnote for those who find this column either unduly skimpy or blessedly brief: We wrote it as a thread for Jody’s twitter feed twitter.com@EIDGeek, then decided to post it virtually unchanged as a column.)
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COVID-19 Vaccine Blood Clots: Secrecy versus Pause versus Informed Consent
Posted: April 24, 2021
A rare but potentially deadly side effect materialized in recent weeks among people vaccinated against COVID-19 with the AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson vaccine: a specific sort of blood clot problem. In response, many countries including the U.S. paused their rollouts of those two vaccines – even though there was little doubt that the pauses would do more medical harm than the clots. The risk communication question that preoccupies this column is how to address the tiny clot risk in the way that exacerbates vaccine hesitancy the least. The column considers three options: (1) Secrecy, a dangerous option that officials did not choose; (2) Pausing, the pretty bad option they chose; and (3) Informed consent, the good option I wish they’d chosen. Central to the discussion is whether there’s any way to make excessive official precautions – the proverbial “abundance of caution” – reassuring rather than alarming to the public.
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One-Dose Two-Dose Vaccine Risk Communication: Another Impossible Thing to Believe Before Breakfast
Posted: January 22, 2021
A mostly thoughtful debate is raging among vaccine experts on the pros and cons of prioritizing first doses of the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, versus the current policy of trying to make sure every first dose recipient gets her second dose on schedule, even though that means more people must wait longer without any vaccine protection at all. I’m not entitled to an opinion on this question. But I hate to see experts and officials on television day after day sounding like they’re on both sides at the same time: “We need to get as many people as possible vaccinated as quickly as possible” and “we need to make sure people get their second doses on schedule“ – as if the same dose could go into two different arms. This short column is a plea to stop asking people to believe that impossible mixed message.
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2020
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Posted: December 20, 2020
As COVID-19 vaccines started rolling out, while the virus itself racked up unprecedented numbers, my friend Bruce Hennes asked me what I thought the key pandemic messages should be right now and for the next few months. This is my answer, in four parts: (1) It’s an awful time for almost everybody. (2) Things are going to get better, but not right away. They will get worse first. (3) We’re all the victims here. And we’re all the perpetrators. We need a truce. (4) We are all in charge of ourselves. At Bruce’s urging, I edited this column down to a shorter version about half its length. Both versions are linked above. Naturally, I recommend the original.
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Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo: A Plague on Both Their Houses – or Not?
Posted: October 5, 2020
After a devastating spring, New York City successfully beat back the COVID-19 virus. But as I write this in early October, the virus is beginning to make a comeback in a number of the city’s neighborhoods. Mayor Bill de Blasio has just proposed lockdown-like precautions in those neighborhoods. To go into effect the precautions need to be okayed by the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo. The governor’s okay isn’t a foregone conclusion, mostly because de Blasio and Cuomo have been feuding for years. In an effort to help get the okay, my wife and colleague Jody Lanard quickly drafted this short column. I revised it some and posted it so Jody could tweet it.
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Public Health Professionals Should Be Saying THIS about the Public’s COVID-19 Risk Choices
Posted: June 8, 2020
I have watched with dismay as public health professionals failed abysmally to “stay in their lane” when expressing opinions about the public’s COVID-19 risk choices – especially vis-à-vis demonstrations against state lockdown policies and the police murder of George Floyd. So when asked what I thought they should be saying, I drafted this short list of message points.
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Posted: May 23, 2020
Postscript: Masks as Virtue-Signaling
Posted: June 7, 2020
A state health department official I work with from time to time sent me an email on May 20, asking how I would advise doctors’ offices to respond to patients who refused to wear masks. I sent her a list of suggestions on whether and how to make patients wear masks. When I refashioned the list into a column, I couldn’t resist adding an introduction about the opposite problem, the long history of opposition on the part of experts and public health officials to letting people to wear masks during respiratory disease outbreaks when they wanted to. In the two weeks after the column was posted, I saw more and more evidence that mask-wearing (in everyday life, not in doctors’ offices) was becoming a partisan issue, with virtue-signaling on both sides. So I added a “postscript” on that.
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Talking to Frightened (or Miserable) People about COVID-19
Posted: April 13, 2020
Two different reporters recently asked me to comment on how officials should talk to the public about COVID-19. One was asking specifically about the governor of Florida, the other about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I sent them both pretty much the same crisis communication fundamentals about talking to frightened (or miserable) people. Neither reporter found use for my comments, so I decided to post them as a column. Even more than information, frightened (or miserable) people seek guidance – about what to do, what to expect, even what to feel. My advice on how to provide that guidance: Validate our fear; express your own fear; be candid about how bad things are; provide any genuine reassurance you can find; give people things to do; give people choices of things to do; and, oh yes, explain what the government is doing too.
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Strange COVID-19 Bedfellows: Gnawing Anxiety and Under-Reaction
Posted: March 11, 2020
In an email exchange with a journalist friend a few days ago, Jody commented that a lot of people seemed to be reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic with a strange mix of gnawing anxiety and under-reaction. Her friend thought she nailed it. So we decided to try to capture it in a short column. This isn’t the usual adjustment reaction. Instead of temporarily overreacting, people are hesitating, preparing less and taking fewer precautions than the knots in their stomachs say they should – beset by self-doubt that maybe they’re wrong and fear of embarrassment that maybe others will mock them. Perhaps the most challenging job public health officials face right now is helping us bear these feelings and ambivalences – and, of course, bearing their own.
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Telling the Public Hard Truths about COVID-19: Advice to a Public Health Agency Director
Posted: March 9, 2020
Over the years I have worked with a number of city, state, national, and international public health agencies. I am working with several now, trying to help them communicate hard truths about COVID-19. One of these clients has given me permission to reproduce three emails I sent to the agency director on March 6, 7, and 8. (I have also been reviewing draft documents on COVID-19 for the client, and the director and I have talked on the phone.) Other than some added links and a few small changes to make them anonymous, these emails are unedited. They are some of what I would want to say right now to every public health agency director.
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Posted: February 29, 2020
For weeks, while other countries found community transmission of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, the United States found none. This meant practically nothing, because the United States did not permit testing of any cases other than travelers or contacts of confirmed cases. Only in the past 48 hours have U.S. community transmission cases been reported. This led to a February 29 news conference headed by Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Jody Lanard and I listened to the presser. This is our immediate and strongly negative reaction, which we started writing minutes after it ended. Our main criticism: In the absence of widespread testing, CDC has no right to insist that the United States does not have many locations with community transmission. Doing so – sounding like you think that “absence of evidence” is “evidence of absence” when you haven’t gone looking for evidence – isn’t just over-reassuring. It is close to dishonest.
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Risk Communication about Containment – 2019 Novel Coronavirus
Posted: February 4, 2020
Jody Lanard and I have long argued that experts and officials should avoid sounding confident that containment measures are likely to “work” against pandemics-to-be – whether they’re conventional measures like contact tracing or controversial ones like travel restrictions. When the swine flu pandemic was emerging in 2009, we wrote a long column explaining why this is so. Containment, we said, is still worth trying, partly as a Hail Mary that might conceivably stop the spread of the virus, but mostly as a way to slow it a little, buying time for preparedness and maybe reducing the intensity of disruption. Here’s a short version, applying the same reasoning to the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China.
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Public Health’s Single Biggest COVID-19 Risk Communication Failure
Posted: August 4, 2020
In early July a reporter asked me what I consider the single biggest COVID-19 risk communication failure of public health experts and officials. It took me a month to think through my answer and draft this column. (Along the way I tested out some of my thinking in a telephone interview with Bloomberg reporter Faye Flam.) It’s a five-part answer: (1) First public health over-reassured the public and left us unprepared. (2) Then public health panicked and overreacted, locking down even places without much spread of the virus. (3) Then public health flubbed the rationale for lockdowns, adopting a suppression narrative instead of teaching us how to balance priorities and “dance” with the virus. (4) As part of its defense of lockdowns, public health abandoned the goal of “flattening the curve” in favor of the goal of minimizing transmission in every way possible. (5) Along the way, public health insisted that public policy and individual decisions should be grounded exclusively in “The Science” – that is, in the advice coming from public health itself.
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2019
(There were no columns in 2019.)
2018
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Posted: October 19, 2018
The fundamental question this column poses is whether to post informational “warnings” about a risk that many people consider serious but most experts don’t. The column focuses on a specific example: labeling foods that contain genetically modified ingredients. The column concedes that GM food labels have a “hazard salience” effect that leads to increased concern. But the labels also have an “outrage reduction” effect – a product of control, voluntariness, familiarity, trust, and cognitive dissonance – that leads to decreased concern. Usually the outrage reduction effect is stronger and longer-lasting than the hazard salience effect. And the available evidence suggests that this is indeed the case for GM food labels, which turn out more calming than alarming. The column then broadens the discussion to informed consent more generally. Relying in part on the example of the Dengvaxia vaccine, it builds a case that it is wiser to provide potentially scary information about small risks than to withhold this information. Even when people overreact – that is, even when the hazard salience effect overwhelms the outrage reduction effect – the crucial need to build and sustain trust makes honesty nonetheless the best policy.
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Posted: May 25, 2018
For decades I have maintained a file of articles in which experts claimed some precaution they disapproved of could give people a “false sense of security.” But until recently I didn’t focus enough on false sense of security as a genuine risk communication and risk management problem. Every precaution is also a communication; it tells people that they’re safer than they were previously, and thus implies that alternative precautions may be superfluous. Sometimes a precaution does a better job of making people feel safer than it does of making them actually safer – thus inculcating a false sense of security and potentially undermining other precautions. This column looks at both intentional and unintentional inculcation of a false sense of security. It tries to make a case for not overselling precautions. It also addresses some related phenomena: false sense of insecurity (precautions that work better than they seem); risk homeostasis and compensation; etc. The column makes substantial use of flu vaccination as an example, so I’ve indexed it under Infectious Diseases as well as Precaution Advocacy.
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Why Do Risk Communication When Nobody’s Endangered and Nobody’s Upset (Yet)?
Posted: April 19, 2018
Years ago I distinguished three paradigms of risk communication: precaution advocacy when hazard is high and outrage is low; outrage management when hazard is low and outrage is high; and crisis communication when both are high. But I have endlessly claimed that there’s no risk communication to be done when hazard and outrage are both low. That’s true when you’re pretty sure hazard and outrage will remain low. This column is a primer on what to do when one or the other is expected to climb: pre-precaution advocacy when hazard is likely to climb; pre-outrage management when outrage is likely to climb; and pre-crisis communication when both are likely to climb. There’s also an introductory section on how to surveil for increasing outrage. (Hazard surveillance isn’t my field.)
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2017
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Could It Happen Here? Talking about Somebody Else’s Accident
Posted: September 9, 2017
An accident at somebody else’s facility that’s similar to yours is a teachable moment. Whether or not your stakeholders (or activists or journalists) are loudly asking “Could it happen here?”, at least some of them are surely wondering … and worrying. Your options: Duck the teachable moment and keep mum. Misuse the teachable moment by telling a one-sided, over-reassuring story. Or seize the teachable moment and launch a candid dialogue about the risk. This column concedes the several persuasive reasons for keeping mum, and then builds a case for talking (and listening) instead. The same case applies to misbehaviors as well as to accidents; and to earlier times at your own facility as well as to similar facilities elsewhere.
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Posted: May 3, 2017
This column is not an argument leading to a single conclusion, but rather a compilation of everything you (might) want to know about expert disagreement. Some of the points it makes: (1) Both claims of expert consensus and claims of expert disagreement should be viewed skeptically. (2) Even expert opinions are mostly secondhand; experts who haven’t read the key studies opine on what other experts say the studies concluded. (3) Though they often claim otherwise, technical experts deserve no special credibility on values and policy questions. (4) Experts are always biased by factors such as financial self-interest, ideology, peer pressure, and consistency. (5) Whe n looking for an expert who will be credible to skeptics, pick one who leans the other way. (6) When experts can’t credibly claim consensus, they should acknowledge uncertainty rather than settle into a pattern of “dueling Ph.D.s.”
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Posted: March 7, 2017
Companies and government agencies are traditionally very reluctant to let employees speak out on controversies confronting the organization. Yet employees have special credibility in controversies; industrial hygiene employees have special credibility in controversies about risk. After making the case for using employees as external communicators when controversy strikes, this column focuses on two main recommendations. First, employees should speak for themselves, not for management, even though sometimes management won’t like what they say. And second, employees need some help understanding the rudiments of outrage management.
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2016
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Confirmation Bias (Part Two) How to Overcome Your Own Pre-Existing Beliefs
Posted: November 11, 2016
Confirmation bias is our universal tendency to hang onto our beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. Part One of my two-part discussion of confirmation bias focused on strategies risk communicators can use to overcome their audience’s confirmation bias. This is Part Two, a list of 16 ways to overcome your own confirmation bias – both by scrutinizing yourself and by scrutinizing your sources and evidence. Part One was about risk communication. Part Two isn’t really – it’s about trying to think more clearly, more openly, and more fairly.
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Posted: October 18, 2016
This column consists of my notes for an October 5, 2016 presentation I gave to the CIDRAP Leadership Forum in Minneapolis. Audio and video recordings of the presentation are also on this site. But the notes contain a lot of detail that I skipped in the actual presentation – both additional points and additional proof (with links) for the points I actually made in Minneapolis. The text version also has a Foreword written later. And it covers Zika funding; by the time I got to Zika funding in Minneapolis, I was nearly out of time.
The column continues and updates an argument I have been making for years: that the public health profession is far too willing to say or imply untrue things in its communications with the public.
In my introductory comments I discuss the dishonesty of public health professionals generically: why they do it; why they get away with it (compared to corporate leaders who are far likelier to be caught and crucified); how they feel about it; whether it undermines their credibility; whether they’re intentionally dishonest or self-deceptive or deceived by their leaders; the relationship between dishonesty and disrespect; etc.
Then comes the meat of the column, focusing on four detailed examples:
- The oral polio vaccine (see also this 2012 discussion)
- The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (see also this 2011 discussion)
- Ebola quarantine (see also this 2014 discussion)
- Zika funding (see also this June 2016 discussion, especially endnote 14)
Throughout the column, my position isn’t that public health professionals are wrong about these four controversies, but rather that they are too often dishonest and disrespectful in the way they make their case.
Link to written (html) file.
Link off-site to page with this video (1 hr. 41 min.)
Link launches an on-site audio file (143MB, 1 hr. 41 min.)
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Confirmation Bias (Part One): How to Counter Your Audience’s Pre-Existing Beliefs
Posted: October 12, 2016
Confirmation bias is our universal tendency to hang onto our beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. This column begins by describing the cognitive defenses that confirmation bias relies on: selective exposure, selective attention, selective perception, framing, selective interpretation, and selective retention. Then the column addresses strategies risk communicators can use to reduce their audience's confirmation bias. The key is to avoid challenging the audience more than necessary by finding things (sometimes even irrelevant ones) to reinforce or agree with. The column closes with pointers on how to disagree when disagreeing is necessary. The entire column is about ways to overcome your audience’s confirmation bias; a sequel on ways to overcome your own confirmation bias is also on this site.
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Posted: June 16, 2016
(Transcript of our side of Elizabeth Whitman’s telephone interview with Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard, May 27, 2016)On May 27, 2016, Elizabeth Whitman of International Business Times emailed me to request a telephone interview with both me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard about “how public health officials juggle the need to educate the public and convey a sense of urgency about the Zika virus without sending people into unnecessary panic.” We did the interview the same day.
But instead of focusing on education/urgency versus panic, we focused on our judgment that public health messaging about Zika risk in the continental U.S. had become much more alarmist starting around the beginning of April. That was when White House officials preempted one of the CDC’s key Zika messages: that domestic Zika outbreaks were very likely (but not guaranteed) to be small and local. Instead of preparing Americans to take limited domestic Zika outbreaks in stride, we told Elizabeth, the White House started preparing Americans to expect epidemic-level domestic Zika outbreaks; to see even small limited domestic Zika outbreaks as widespread and catastrophic; and to blame them on Republicans for failing to pass Zika funding.
Elizabeth’s June 9 story made only a little use of our interview. She ignored our main point about the hijacked message. Instead, her main point was how hard it is for public health officials to communicate nuance to a frightened population. And she wrongly attributed to us the view that there was a “media frenzy” to cover Zika that made “crucial nuances disappear.” We taped the interview. Since we didn’t have Elizabeth’s permission to record and publish her side of the conversation, a transcript of our side only is posted here, very slightly edited for clarity but not content. We have also added boldface headings, bracketed clarifications, links, and endnotes documenting a few of the many sources that led to our analysis. By the time we got done adding all that, we decided to post the resulting document as a column as well as posting it in “Peter M. Sandman in the News.“
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Some Additional Zika Risk Communication Notes
Posted: February 16, 2016
On January 31, 2016, Jody Lanard and I sent reporter Faye Flam answers to some questions she had asked about risk communication aspects of the Zika crisis in Latin America and its possible implications for the U.S. By the time we posted our responses on February 3, under the title “Zika Risk Communication: WHO and CDC Are Doing a Mostly Excellent Job So Far,” we had added four “boxes” with updated commentary. In the days that followed, we found more points we considered worth making about Zika risk communication – partly to illustrate generic principles and strategies of risk communication, and partly to shed additional light on Zika communication in particular. Rather than add ever more boxes, we decided to post a second document. So far this second shot has five sections: on Zika test prioritization and the role of abortion; on the importance of acknowledging that Zika may turn out less dangerous than it initially looked; on sexual transmission versus mosquito transmission; on the bias against even considering a Zika quarantine; and on whether anybody is panicking over Zika. We may or may not add additional topics in the weeks ahead.
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Three Ways to Manage Controversies
Posted: January 6, 2016
As the title suggests, this column compares three alternative ways to manage controversies (plus a fourth way: deciding to let the controversy rage unmanaged). You can focus on arousing your supporters; that’s support mobilization. You can focus on reaching out to neutrals; that’s public relations. Or you can focus on ameliorating the opposition; that’s outrage management. The column argues that the three strategies aren’t just competitors for internal resources. They are often in actual conflict with each other. Some ways of ameliorating opposition infuriate supporters, for example, while some ways of arousing supporters infuriate opponents. It is certainly worthwhile to search for compromises among the three strategies – but it’s also essential to figure out which of the three has the highest priority in the situation at hand.
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2015
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Strategic Safety Communication: The GAAMM Model to Inform People about Serious Risks
Posted: October 16, 2015
This column outlines a precaution advocacy message design strategy I have been teaching and using since the 1970s: GAAMM. Instead of starting by deciding what you want to say, you start with what you want to accomplish, your goals. Then you figure out whom you need to reach to achieve your goals; those are your audiences. Then comes the most complicated step: deciding what preexisting appeals you can harness to steer your audiences toward your goals. (Preexisting barriers are also worth considering, but they’re usually secondary.) Then you can choose media and messengers that are compatible with your audiences and appeals. Finally, based on your appeals, media, and messengers, you can draft your messages. As the column keeps stressing, GAAMM is a model that works only for precaution advocacy – trying to arouse concern in apathetic people. The strategy for reducing concern in overly upset people is completely different.
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A Promising Candidate for Most Dangerously Dishonest Public Health News Release of the Year
Posted: May 27, 2015
This column is about electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) – specifically about an April 2015 CDC survey report, news release, and press briefing announcing a substantial increase in teenage vaping (use of e-cigs) in the United States. What infuriated me – and led me to entitle this column “A Promising Candidate for Most Dangerously Dishonest Public Health News Release of the Year” – was the failure to pay appropriate attention to the decrease in teenage smoking, to the near-certainty that vaping is orders of magnitude less dangerous than smoking, and to the possibility that vaping might turn out to be a replacement for smoking rather than a gateway to smoking. The column documents these dishonesties not just in the release but in the report and briefing as well. In fact, the briefing is by a considerable margin the most misleading of the three. But the release undoubtedly had the most influence on how the media covered the story.
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10 Things You Need to Know about Outrage Management and Social Media
Posted: April 17, 2015
Clients almost always ask me how I think the rise of social media affects outrage management. After struggling to write something long and definitive on the topic, I finally settled instead for this “listicle”-like short column. The two most important takeaways from my ten numbered points are these. First, social media are an ideal vehicle for expressing and exacerbating outrage in front of a potentially huge audience. That makes outrage management all the more crucial, even for organizations that might previously have thought they could afford to leave stakeholder outrage unmanaged. And second, since social media are where outrage is most often and most effectively vented, social media are where outrage must be managed. Everything else follows from these two basics – what it takes to respond to social media complaints fast enough; how to organize your own social media platforms to make them conducive to controversy; etc.
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Warning, or False Alarm: Why Safety Professionals See Near Misses Differently than Everybody Else
Posted: January 4, 2015
When you do something that might have caused an accident but doesn’t, there are two ways to interpret the near miss: as a warning that you should be more careful, or as evidence that the behavior in question is actually pretty safe. Safety professionals tend toward the first interpretation; everybody else favors the second. This column discusses several factors that affect near miss perception: hindsight bias, the gambler’s fallacy, learned overconfidence, “resilient near misses” versus “vulnerable near misses,” and vividness. It hypothesizes that a crucial distinction is whether you know the behavior in question often causes an accident (so you see the near miss as a warning) or you don’t know how dangerous the behavior is (so you see the near miss as evidence the risk is low). The column ends with advice for safety communicators trying to use near misses as warnings.
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2014
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Ebola in the U.S. (So Far): The Public Health Establishment and the Quarantine Debate
Posted: November 15, 2014
This column is a slightly edited version of an email I sent on November 12, 2014 to the editor of Emergency Management magazine, in response to a November 10 email asking to interview me about Ebola risk communication in the U.S. It includes some brief points about risk communication errors with regard to the first U.S. case in Dallas, describing these as “the ordinary first half of this crisis communication story.” But the bulk of the column is devoted to the quarantine debate that arose after returning volunteer Craig Spencer was diagnosed in New York City. It focuses on my belief that the U.S. public health establishment was dishonest and uncivil in the way it misappropriated “the science” on behalf of the anti-quarantine position in the debate, and ridiculed the pro-quarantine position as unscientific and even idiotic.
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Ebola: Failures of Imagination
Posted: October 24, 2014
Almost since we started worrying about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, my wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I have been worrying about the prospect of its spreading to developing countries around the world – countries less able than the U.S. and Spain to extinguish Ebola “sparks.” This column fleshes out that worry a bit. It also addresses some reasons why our leaders might be reluctant to raise the possibility of an Ebola pandemic in the developing world, much less to discuss its likely impacts on the developed world. But mostly the column is about how difficult it is for anybody (officials, experts, reporters, us) to stay focused on something that horrible … and how important it is to try harder to sound the alarm.
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Ebola Risk Communication: Talking about Ebola in Dallas, West Africa, and the World
Posted: October 6, 2014
In early October, I started getting media inquiries about Ebola risk communication. Three such inquiries led me to write emails (two of them jointly with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard) that collectively summarized most of our thinking about how U.S. sources and the U.S. media were handling Ebola – the first U.S. case in Dallas, the disastrous epidemic in West Africa, and the global pandemic risk. Included in this column are: (a) Our October 3 response to Sharon Begley of Reuters; (b) Our much shorter October 5 response to Kai Kupferschmidt of Science; and (c) My short October 6 response to Paul Farhi of the Washington Post. The articles that Sharon, Kai, and Paul wrote are referenced and linked at the very end of this column, or will be once they’re published. (Note that I had some follow-up communications with Kai, by phone and email, that he relied on in his article but are not included in the column.)
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An Ebola Empathy Exercise (pure speculation, based on hypothetical what-ifs)
Posted: October 3, 2014
Throughout August and September, my wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I obsessed over Ebola. We wrote part or all of several Ebola risk communication columns, only to have our thinking overtaken by events. This short column, completed in one day, focuses on a very narrow question: What might have happened at Texas Health Dallas Presbyterian Hospital on September 25–26, 2014, when Thomas Eric Duncan came to the emergency room with fever and abdominal pain, said he was visiting from Liberia (the heart of West Africa’s Ebola hot zone), and was nonetheless sent home? Two days later, days in which he might have infected other people, Duncan was brought back to Texas Health Dallas by ambulance. That time Ebola was suspected, and later confirmed, making Duncan the first Ebola patient to be diagnosed outside Africa. Commentary has been understandably hostile to both Duncan and the hospital staff for what may turn out to have been a tragic miscommunication. Jody and I felt that anger too. We have tried to temper it with this Ebola empathy exercise, a purely speculative effort to look at a ghastly mistake without assuming reckless irresponsibility on either side. As more facts come out, our speculations may well be proven entirely false. Even so, the need for people to respond empathically to Ebola will not go away. Empathy is needed for the horrific conditions West Africans are enduring; for the threat to the rest of us; for the ways people at overwhelming risk may resort to denial, while people whose risk is much smaller may temporarily overreact; even for the officials who yield to the temptation to oversimplify or over-reassure. The column isn’t about all that, though. It’s just an attempt to imagine empathically what might have happened in that Dallas emergency room.
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Tell People What's Going On: Building Trust through Candor
Posted: May 2, 2014
One of the core strategies for preventing and addressing stakeholder outrage is to “acknowledge your current problems.”
This column covers three reasons for telling people what’s going on – especially telling them what’s going wrong before you get it solved: (1) To establish the rebuttable presumption (accepted until you break faith) that when you haven’t said anything you don’t have a problem. (2) To make your solution believable by letting people watch you figure it out and implement it. (3) To make sure people notice how much of the problem you have solved, so they don’t demand a more exhaustive and expensive solution than they would otherwise have found acceptable. As the column concludes, it all boils down to the counterintuitive recommendation to let your stakeholders – internal and external, and especially the hostile ones – watch you struggle. This column is categorized as:
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Other People’s Crisis: Talking to Bystanders
Posted: March 5, 2014
During a health or safety crisis, the most important audience is obviously the people who are at risk. But what about the people who aren’t at risk, but merely bystanders? This column argues that bystanders are also an important crisis communication audience, for six reasons: (1) They may find out about your crisis some other way if you don’t tell them, which could cause them to over-react. (2) They may feel at risk even if they’re not and intellectually know they’re not. (3) They may be feeling miserable about your crisis and what it’s doing to other people. (4) They may not actually be bystanders, but affected in some way you’re not noticing. (5) They may want to help – and helping may be psychologically important for them. (6) Other people’s crisis is a teachable moment, an opportunity to convince them to take seriously the possibility that it could happen to them too someday.
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2013
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Posted: December 9, 2013
The battle over fracking of shale gas and shale oil keeps getting hotter, in large part because the fracking industry does such a lousy job of communicating with its stakeholders. This column lays out some of the pluses (mostly economic) and minuses (mostly environmental) of fracking, and builds a case that the fracking industry should acknowledge the genuine minuses far more than it does, rather than focusing so much on selling the pluses of fracking and rebutting its not-so-genuine minuses. Other ways in which the fracking industry has forfeited trust are also discussed: using a narrow definition of “fracking” to mislead people about environmental risks; refusing to disclose the contents of frac fluid; insisting on nondisclosure agreements. But while it urges the fracking industry to become more trustworthy, the column puts more faith in accountability as a replacement for trust – accountability to neutral third parties, to governments (that is, regulation), and especially to neighbors and activists. The column ends with a list of eight additional recommendations for reducing stakeholder outrage about fracking.
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Pre-Crisis Communication: Talking about What-Ifs
Posted: September 13, 2013
This column is devoted not to crisis communication but to pre-crisis communication: how to talk to people about a possible future emergency. In building the case for communicating before you absolutely have to, the column examines four principal responses to pre-crisis communication: (1) People who were worried already are usually relieved that the issue is on the table. (2) People who have too many other things to worry about are usually apathetic and hard to reach. (3) People who were already too worried to bear it are usually in denial and hard to reach in a completely different way. (4) People who are hearing the scary news for the first time usually go through an adjustment reaction, a temporary and useful overreaction. If the crisis is actually coming, the column argues, pre-crisis communication has considerable upside and no downside. The column ends with recommendations for minimizing the downside of warning about a possible crisis that fizzles.
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H7N9 Risk Communication: Candor but No Push to Prepare
Posted: May 16, 2013
This is a sequel to my April 8, 2013 column, “H7N9: A Tale of Two CDCs.” My focus then was on the ways the U.S. CDC was over-reassuring the public about the possibility of an H7N9 pandemic – even avoiding the word “pandemic” as much as possible. As this follow-up column documents, the CDC has become much more candid about the pandemic risk posed by this newly discovered influenza virus; other officials and experts around the world are being similarly candid. The column then discusses two remaining concerns about H7N9 risk communication: the failure to be candid about the likelihood that we'll face the pandemic, if it comes, without vaccine; and – more important still – the failure to make any attempt to involve the public in pandemic preparedness. The column also documents that public interest in H7N9 has already declined from its (modest) peak in early April.
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Orienting Your Audience: Six Signposting Tips
Posted: April 18, 2013
I can’t prove it, but I fervently believe that as communicators have become more and more preoccupied with making everything short, simple, and interesting, they have lost track of the need to keep the audience oriented. Individual sentences may be clear enough, but the overall thread of the argument too often isn’t. So I decided to write a column on signposting – on how to keep readers and listeners from getting lost. The six signposting tips in this column aren’t specifically about risk communication. They’re basic communication … but you can’t do good risk communication without them.
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Posted: April 8, 2013
As I write this on April 8, 2013, I have no idea – nor does anyone else – whether H7N9 will launch a devastating pandemic, or become endemic and minor, or disappear without a trace, or what. What we all know so far is that a strain of flu never before seen in humans has made a sudden appearance in eastern China, where it has infected 24 people and killed seven of them so far. This column reports on the first week of H7N9 messaging of two national health agencies: The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. China CDC was surprisingly candid in its prompt release of information and its avoidance of the temptation to over-reassure the very anxious Chinese public. The U.S. CDC, faced with a much less anxious (and perhaps even skeptical) U.S. public, chose to go along with the mood of mild, casual interest. It didn’t withhold any information that I am aware of, but it certainly didn’t seize the opportunity to warn people to prepare for a possible pandemic. Its first H7N9 press briefing sounded much less concerned than I believe its experts actually are.
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Postscript: The CDC Is Up to Its Old Tricks Again re Flu Vaccine Effectiveness
Posted: February 24 , 2013
On February 1, 2013 I posted “The CDC Tells More of the Truth than Usual about Flu Vaccine Effectiveness,” praising the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for unusual candor about some disappointing flu vaccine effectiveness data. Sadly, the CDC’s new spirit of candor about flu vaccine effectiveness didn’t last. The research the agency was so candid about in January 2013 continued. By February, with a larger sample, it was possible to analyze effectiveness separately for different age groups – and the data for people 65 and older turned out very disappointing. The updated study showed only 9% vaccine effectiveness for seniors against H3N2 – that is, virtually no protection for the most vulnerable age group against the most dangerous flu strain now circulating in humans. To its credit, the CDC didn’t suppress this discouraging new evidence. It published it. But it did everything it could to spin it in a more positive direction.
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The CDC Tells More of the Truth than Usual about Flu Vaccine Effectiveness
Posted: February 1, 2013
Though far better than nothing, the influenza vaccine is surprisingly ineffective, working only 50–70% of the time in healthy young adults and significantly less than that in the people who need it most, the sick and the elderly. For years the CDC and other public health agencies have hyped flu vaccine effectiveness. And for years Jody Lanard and I have criticized the hype, fearful that it could ultimately undermine the credibility of flu vaccination, vaccination generally, the CDC, and public health itself. So we were surprised and delighted at the tenor of the CDC’s January 11, 2013 flu press briefing, which showcased a preliminary CDC finding that the 2012–2013 flu vaccine was only about 62% effective. It remains to be seen whether the CDC’s unprecedented candor is a one-off or the start of a new era. Either way, this column annotates the press briefing, finding much to praise and, inevitably, some things to criticize as well.
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2012
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Posted: November 3, 2012
Familiar risks lose their capacity to provoke outrage, and people get careless. Unfamiliar risks, on the other hand, are likelier to be upsetting. So if you’re doing outrage management – if you’re a factory manager trying to keep your neighbors calm, for example – familiarity is your ally. But if you’re doing precaution advocacy – an activist trying to arouse public concern, or a safety professional trying to motivate employees to wear their hardhats – familiarity is your enemy. Either way, managing familiarity is a significant part of the risk communication job. Those are the basics. But this column goes beyond the basics, getting down in the weeds of managing risk familiarity. It focuses especially on two distinctions: the distinction between familiarity and perceived familiarity (fluency); and the distinction among familiarity with the overall situation, familiarity with the risk, and familiarity with the bad outcome (memorability).
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Seven Sources of Your Safety Problem: Where Does Risk Communication Fit?
Posted: September 5, 2012
I started my career doing what I now call “precaution advocacy,” helping activist groups figure out how to arouse environmental concern in apathetic publics. But the bulk of my corporate consulting over the past 40 years has focused instead on “outrage management,” figuring out how to calm people who are excessively concerned. Most of my outrage management clients have never asked my advice on precaution advocacy, not even in its most obviously relevant manifestation: improving worker safety. This column addresses seven sorts of safety problems, and outlines where I think risk communication can help with each. I’m particularly interested in the last of the seven: whether my signature concept of outrage might conceivably be the next new thing in occupational safety.
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Misoversimplification: The Communicative Accuracy Standard Distinguishes Simplifying from Misleading
Posted: June 5, 2012
The need to simplify technical content is not an acceptable excuse for “simplifying out” information that is essential to credibility – especially information that seems to contradict your message, and that will therefore undermine your credibility if you leave it out and your audience learns it elsewhere. The obligation to include that sort of information is called the communicative accuracy standard; the failure to include it might appropriately be called “misoversimplification.” The column distinguishes three levels of misoversimplification, depending partly on how controversial the issue is and partly on whether you’re on the warning (precaution advocacy) or reassuring (outrage management) side. The three levels are illustrated with infectious disease examples: whooping cough, bird flu, and polio.
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Motivating Attention: Why People Learn about Risk … or Anything Else
Posted: March 31, 2012
The audience of precaution advocacy messages is quite likely to be apathetic, to find the information (safety information, for example) boring. This column outlines the only four ways I know to get people to learn risk information or any information. The first answer, learning without involvement, requires more budget than precaution advocacy campaigns usually have. The second answer, interest/entertainment, is also tough to achieve, though it’s always worth trying. So the column focuses mostly on the remaining two options. Giving people a “need to know,” such as a pending decision that requires the information, is a powerful tool of precaution advocacy. Also powerful, and psychologically much more complex, is getting people to see the information as ammunition – for example, motivating them to do something they’ve never done before, and then offering the information as a rationale that helps them makes sense of the new behavior.
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2011
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Posted: December 8, 2011
The flooding that began in northern Thailand in late July 2011 has been Thailand’s worst flood in at least five decades. This column assesses the Thai government’s crisis communication at the height of the flood, especially its tendency to over-reassure. The column puts this performance into context by reviewing other examples of Thai over-reassurance from our files, and speculates on whether and why over-reassuring the public during emergencies might be more characteristic of Thai crisis communication than of crisis communication in other countries. A final section addresses how the Thai government (or any government or company) might begin to dig itself out from such a history – that is, what to do when your audience has learned to expect dishonest over-reassurance from you.
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Posted: October 21, 2011
One key purpose of advisory groups is to provide a credible accountability mechanism, especially in situations where regulators are not so credible. Advisory groups are also both a conduit and an early warning system for stakeholder outrage; they’re a two-way communications medium and a venue for visibly giving in; and of course they give advice. After reviewing the purposes of advisory groups, this column focuses on two contentious issues: who should be in the advisory group, and what its prerogatives should be. The column makes a case for flexible membership (“chaotic is probably better than stultified”) and for inviting extremists to join. Among the prerogatives discussed are the power to investigate, the power to publicize, and the power to manage themselves – but not the power to keep you from dialoguing with stakeholders in other venues as well.
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Posted: August 14, 2011
Together with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, I have long advised clients to release risk information early – and since early information is almost always uncertain, to acknowledge the uncertainty. But even when clients (and non-clients) do what we consider a pretty decent job of acknowledging uncertainty, they often end up in reputational trouble when they turn out wrong, largely because journalists and the public misperceive and misremember their statements as having been far more confident than they actually were. So we have come to believe that it’s not enough to acknowledge uncertainty; you have to proclaim uncertainty, repeatedly and emphatically. This long column uses a severe German E. coli food poisoning outbreak in 2011 to explore the complexities of proclaiming uncertainty: the myriad ways government agencies and industry spokespeople get it wrong, and some recommendations for getting it right … or at least righter. Proclaiming uncertainty is important in all kinds of risk communication – outrage management as much as precaution advocacy and crisis communication. But our focus here is mostly on how to warn people about an imminent, uncertain risk: in this case, how to tell people which foods not to eat because you think they might be contaminated and deadly.
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The Law of Conservation of Outrage: Outrage Is Limited – Do You Need More or Less?
Posted: April 14, 2011
I speak and write endlessly about ways to increase people’s outrage when you think they’re insufficiently upset about a serious risk and ways to decrease their outrage when you think they’re excessively upset about a not-so-serious risk. I call these two kinds of risk communication “precaution advocacy” and “outrage management” respectively. This column makes a point I too often forget to mention: Except in emergencies (real or imagined), it’s impossible to get people more or less outraged. Mostly what we do is reallocate their outrage. The column calls this “the Law of Conservation of Outrage,” and discusses six corollaries that are fundamental to risk communication: the natural state of humankind vis-à-vis any specific risk is apathy; outrage is a competition; there’s no reason to worry about turning people into scaredy-cats; if people are more outraged at you than the situation justifies, you’re doing something wrong; excessive outrage aimed at you isn’t your critics’ fault; and outrage causes hazard perception – and we know what causes outrage.
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Full Disclosure: The Risk Communication Case for Revealing Small-but-Scary Risks
Posted: January 30, 2011
One of the toughest questions in risk communication is what to say – if anything – about the strongest arguments against the position you’re advocating for. The aspirational goal is presumably full disclosure. But most risk communicators fall far short of that goal, preferring to ignore or dismiss opposition arguments. The temptation not to disclose is especially powerful when you're urging people to do something that entails small-but-scary risks; when you’re confident that the benefits to your audience greatly exceed the risks; and when you’re worried that the audience won’t see it that way if you’re completely candid. This column offers two examples: trying to convince a community to accept a new chemical factory and trying to convince parents to vaccinate their children against polio. The column discusses eight reasons why full disclosure of small-but-scary risks isn’t just the most ethical strategy. In many cases it is also the most effective.
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2010
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Two Kinds of Reputation Management
Posted: December 3, 2010
Just about everything I have read about reputation assumes that it’s a single variable. Good reputation is on one side of the scale, bad reputation is on the other side, and zero is in the middle. I don’t buy it. I think it makes much more sense to conceive of “good reputation” and “bad reputation” as separate variables. How loved you are is virtually unrelated to how hated you are; plenty of companies (and individuals) are both much-loved and much-hated. So which is more important, increasing your positives or decreasing your negatives? This column argues that buffing your good reputation has upsides and downsides, while ameliorating your bad reputation is all upside. It argues that when a controversy or a crisis arises, a prior bad reputation is sure to make things worse, while a prior good reputation may or may not provide some protection. And it argues that talking about your reputational strengths always backfires when the audience is focused on your current misbehavior.
A Polish translation was published in two parts in September 2011 and December 2011 in Bezpieczeństwo i Technika Pożarnicza (Safety & Fire Technique).
Polish translation available
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Risk Communication Lessons from the BP Spill
Posted: September 13, 2010
This is my eighth (but probably not my last) website commentary on the April 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This one also appeared in the September 2010 issue of The Synergist, published by the American Industrial Hygiene Association. So it starts with two risk communication lessons especially appropriate to industrial hygienists: Don’t believe your own propaganda about safety and emergency preparedness, and work to build a safety culture where employees are willing to blow the whistle about unsafe conditions. Then it discusses four more traditional crisis communication lessons: Don’t over-reassure; make contrition credible; make compassion and determination credible; and say how stupid you feel.
An Italian translation was published in Darwin, November–December 2010, pp. 26–31.
Italian translation available
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The “Fake Pandemic” Charge Goes Mainstream and WHO’s Credibility Nosedives
Posted: June 29, 2010
In June 2010, one year after the World Health Organization declared swine flu a full-fledged pandemic, WHO’s credibility nosedived as even mainstream sources began to take seriously the absurd allegation that WHO had invented a “fake pandemic” in order to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. This column assesses at great length the three main reasons why this allegation made the move from fringe to mainstream: (a) WHO’s failure to acknowledge the ongoing mildness and current low incidence of the pandemic; (b) WHO’s failure to acknowledge that it changed some flu pandemic definitions and descriptions just as H1N1 was emerging; and (c) WHO’s failure to acknowledge until recently the legitimacy of concerns about transparency and conflict of interest. In a nutshell, the credibility of the World Health Organization crashed and burned because WHO mishandled some essential aspects of pandemic risk communication.
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Empathic Communication in High-Stress Situations
Posted: June 8, 2010
These are the notes I developed for a multinational management consulting firm that asked me to help give empathy training to its top consultant-managers. Though applied (as best I could) to a management consulting context, these notes are based largely on my 2007 column “Empathy in Risk Communication,” supplemented with such risk communication basics as the “donkey” game, the risk communication seesaw, and acknowledging uncertainty.
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What Did Goldman Sachs Do Wrong?
Posted: May 2, 2010
I have been following the Goldman Sachs controversy with considerable outrage – not at the company but at the widespread conviction that it obviously did something both wrong and illegal. In a series of email exchanges with my daughter’s fiancé, a banker named Daniel, and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, I have been trying to figure out what Goldman Sachs did wrong. This column consists of the emails themselves (lightly edited), preceded by an introduction that addresses why people interested in risk communication might want to pay attention to what's happening to Goldman Sachs.
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Hostile Meetings: When Opponents Want to Talk
Posted: March 30, 2010
When opponents seek a meeting with your embattled company or agency, it’s as much a dare as an invitation, and in most cases you would be wise to say yes. Getting invited onto your opponents’ turf poses special problems and special opportunities. It’s not mostly a chance to win converts by rebutting false arguments. Rather, it is a chance to ameliorate outrage (especially on the part of those in the room who are more worried than hostile) by demonstrating that you are willing to listen respectfully to your most vituperative critics and to take at least some of their concerns onboard. Some of the recommendations in this column apply to all meetings with opponents, even if you're running the meeting; other recommendations are particular to meetings that are actually run by your opponents.
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Telling People You Got It Wrong
Posted: February 18, 2010
Honest mistakes turn into culpable deceptions when organizations hesitate to come clean. This column outlines ten key recommendations for telling people you got it wrong. It starts with the basics: “Don’t stick to your guns.” “Don’t think that quietly publishing the data protects you.” “Don’t expect misleading ambiguities to save you.” Then it works its way to more complicated advice: “Explain what happened.” “Explain what’s going to happen.” “Explain what else might need to be rethought.” Of course it’s also important to acknowledge uncertainty from the outset. As the column points out, “It’s a lot easier to tell people you got it wrong if you didn’t sound cocksure in the first place.”
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2009
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U.S. Pandemic Vaccine Supply and Distribution: Addressing the Outrage
Posted: November 18, 2009
As in most other developed countries, the fall rollout of the U.S. pandemic vaccination program has been hampered by a shortage of vaccine. The result is outrage – outrage that there isn’t as much vaccine as people wanted and expected, and outrage that the distribution process feels so chaotic, frustrating, and in some cases unfair. The shortage itself is nobody’s fault; the vaccine virus turned out to be difficult to grow. But officials are very much at fault for having overpromised, frequently predicting that there would be ample vaccine by mid-October. Even before the pandemic began, in fact, the meme was established that it would require only three to six months after the emergence of a pandemic influenza strain to manufacture sufficient vaccine. Managing public (and health care provider) outrage about vaccine supply and vaccine distribution has thus become an important pandemic risk communication task, a necessary distraction from the paramount task of convincing people to get vaccinated. This column describes how officials are handling the outrage so far, and proposes some improvements.
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Flu Preparedness: An Even Tougher Sell than Usual
Posted: September 9, 2009
I wrote this short column in early June 2009 for The Synergist, a magazine for industrial hygienists, on some ways of communicating about flu – seasonal and pandemic – in the workplace. When I wrote it, most people had “recovered” from what they considered the spring “swine flu scare,” and they were in no mood to listen to any more influenza warnings. By the time the column was published in September 2009, some of the complacency had waned, and people were actually girding up (a bit) for another wave of mild-but-pervasive pandemic illness. So the column’s claim that flu preparedness is a tough sell needs to be modified somewhat. But its actual recommendations still stand.
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Containment as Signal: Swine Flu Risk Miscommunication
Posted: June 29, 2009
The swine flu pandemic started in North America, and by the time the virus was identified it was already widely seeded in the U.S. So the experts judged that it was too late to try to “contain” its U.S. spread; from Day One, the U.S. was focused mostly on coping with the disease, not stopping or even slowing it. Outside North America, on the other hand, an initial containment strategy made public health sense. But containment isn’t just a public health strategy. It is also a risk communication signal of enormous importance. Containment sends a signal that the pandemic can be contained and that it must be contained – that it is stoppable and severe. Instead of countering these misleading signals, the governments of many countries have issued misleading messages to match. This is doing significant damage to the world’s preparedness to cope with the unstoppable (and soon to be pervasive) but so far mild pandemic that is just beginning.
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Posted: April 29, 2009
This was my first substantial piece of writing about swine flu. I have resisted the temptation to update the description that follows. When I started criticizing the government for talking about swine flu as if there were nothing for the public to do but watch and practice good hygiene, we were at WHO Pandemic Phase 3. When I started this column (this morning) we were at Phase 4. When I finished the column (this evening), it was already Phase 5. The focus of this column is why the U.S. government is reluctant to urge the public to prepare now for a possibly imminent pandemic, and why I think the government should overcome its reluctance and do it! If you’re skeptical about advising people to imagine The Big One, get used to that knot in their stomachs, and then get started on preparedness, read this column. If you’re not skeptical and want to know what I think the important messages for right now are, skip this column and instead read “What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five.”
On May 21, 2009, Nature published a major abridgment and minor updating of this column under the title “Pandemics: good hygiene is not enough.” An Adobe Acrobat file (707-kB pdf) of the complete article
is available. (Note: The Nature links require payment. Free access to a copy is available.) French translations of my column and the Nature article, originally posted on the website Zone Grippe Aviaire (which has disappeared) are also available on this site. French translations available
En Français: Pandémie: une bonne hygiène ne suffit pas (Nature)
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Recession Risk Communication: How to Focus on Safety When Employees Are Demoralized
Posted: April 19, 2009
Tough economic times are tough on safety. Workers may be distracted or distressed, while safety budgets (like all budgets) may be reduced. Tough economic times are also tough on safety controversies. Not only do workers have real reasons to suspect that they might be more endangered than usual; they also have less patience and forbearance, and perhaps more motivation to project their economic worries onto an on-the-job safety situation. This short column for industrial hygienists offers some tips on ways to adjust safety risk communication when the economic situation is bad.
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Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial
Posted: February 11, 2009
Arousing apathetic people to care enough about global warming that they’re actually willing to do something about it is a difficult precaution advocacy challenge. Activists are chipping away at that task with slow but significant success. But there’s another audience for climate change risk communication that I think activists aren’t paying nearly enough attention to: people who are in denial about the crisis because it threatens the way they see the world or because it arouses intolerable levels of fear, guilt, sadness, hopelessness, or other emotions. For people in or near denial, outrage is high, not low; the risk communication paradigm is crisis communication, not precaution advocacy. This long column builds a case that global warming denial is a growing problem, and that messaging designed to work on apathetic audiences can easily backfire on audiences in denial. The column focuses on six common activist messages that need to be rethought in terms of their likely negative impact on people who are in or near global warming denial: fear-mongering; guilt-tripping; excessive hostility to narrow technological solutions; unwillingness to pay attention to climate change adaptation; over-reliance on depressing information and imagery; and one-sided contempt for contrarian arguments.
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Convincing Health Care Workers to Get a Flu Shot … Without the Hype
Posted: January 10, 2009
Convincing health care workers to get a flu shot might normally be seen as a straightforward problem in precaution advocacy, but this column focuses on an aspect of the problem that’s grounded in outrage management: flu protection hype. By means of three case studies, Jody Lanard and I document that hype – misleading, one-sided messaging on behalf of vaccination and other flu precautions – does in fact characterize much of what’s produced by flu prevention campaigners. We also argue, with much less evidence, that the hype leads health care workers to mistrust what the campaigners are telling them, and that the mistrust probably reduces their willingness to get vaccinated. The column ends with a list of less tendentious recommendations for convincing health care workers to get a flu shot.
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2008
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Managing Justified Outrage: Outrage Management When Your Opponents Are Substantively Right
Posted: November 19, 2008
This long column tries to correct a serious oversimplification in my previous writing about risk communication. Outrage management isn’t just for calming people down when they mistakenly believe they have substantive reasons to oppose you. It is also for calming people down when they rightly believe they have substantive reasons to oppose you. Converting justified opposition that’s outraged into justified opposition that’s calm doesn’t (and shouldn’t) eliminate the opposition, but it does accomplish several things: It lowers the level of passion; it opens people up to the possibility of altruism; it gets them in a mood to negotiate; and it enables them to be more realistic in defeat or more generous in victory. While all the usual outrage management strategies apply, two strategies are particularly crucial when your critics are substantively right: acknowledging that they are right, and being candid about the distribution of power. The column also has an important “postscript” on the role of outrage management in a genuine high-hazard, high-outrage crisis.
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Posted: September 20, 2008
Communicators (including risk communicators) almost invariably know too much about their topic – possibly more than their audience is capable of learning, and certainly more than their audience wants to learn. So they have to simplify. This column is a primer on simplification. It offers some tips on how to simplify language and graphics, but its main thrust is how to simplify content. Particularly important is the column’s advice on what you can’t simplify out of your communications without sacrificing credibility and integrity: information that conflicts with your conclusions or casts a bad light on your organization.
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Posted: August 18, 2008
When companies are doing things the public disapproves of, you don’t have to make them stop; all you have to do is make them tell, and the public will make them stop. This is the genius of the right-to-know concept. In the environmental arena, the most important U.S. right-to-know law is Section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986, which requires the Environmental Protection Agency to collect and publish an annual Toxics Release Inventory of the chemicals emitted by thousands of covered facilities. This column, written for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, examines how Section 313 used transparency to force emissions reductions – and how the law fostered the development of risk communication, as companies sought to figure out how best to talk to their neighbors about their emissions.
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Posted: June 5, 2008
When Barack Obama accumulated enough delegate commitments to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, the defeated Hillary Clinton faced a classic risk communication challenge – managing her followers’ outrage (and her own) so as to enable them to transfer their loyalty to Obama. Politicians were of course giving her traditional public relations advice – stress your enthusiasm about Obama; don’t mention your followers’ anger or your own; etc. But her problem wasn’t a public relations problem. So Jody Lanard and I decided to give Sen. Clinton some risk communication advice. This column is the result.
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Rumors: Information Is the Antidote
Posted: April 25, 2008
Everybody’s interested in how to respond to rumors, especially false ones. Do you ignore them? Rebut them? Acknowledge the accurate bits? This short column covers all that, but it also addresses a less sexy but ultimately more important topic: the importance of tracking down rumors that may be true.
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Meeting Management: Where Does Risk Communication Fit in Public Participation?
Posted: March 19, 2008
Whenever I advise clients on how to manage meetings with angry stakeholders, I’m aware that I’m impinging on a kindred field, public participation (also called public consultation). Our goals aren’t incompatible, but they’re certainly different: Public participation professionals want to facilitate a substantively productive meeting, whereas I want to help calm the meeting’s most outraged stakeholders (which can help clear the way for a substantively productive meeting). This column outlines five differences between outrage management and public participation – the value of venting, who you want at the meeting, whose side you’re on, the relative importance of substance and process, and what skills you need. It then tries to assess the proper role of outrage management in public participation.
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Posted: February 17, 2008
Written for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, this short column tries to free the NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) impulse from its pejorative connotations. It distinguishes the literal NIMBY position (“this is okay, but not here”) from closely related positions (such as “this shouldn’t be built anywhere”), and discusses its role in siting controversies. The column argues that managing outrage – either upward or downward – is the key to arousing or diminishing NIMBY, and thus to stopping or siting locally controversial land uses (LULUs).
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Who’s Irrational? When People “Ignore” Risk Data
Posted: January 15, 2008
My clients endlessly claim not just that the risk of X is tiny, but that anybody who thinks otherwise is “irrational.” This short column takes the irrationality claim seriously, and examines some alternative hypotheses. Even assuming your worried stakeholder is wrong about X, he or she may not be irrational – but rather mistrustful, postmodernist, cautious, uninformed, misinformed, intuitive, emotionally upset, motivated by personal or social values, or pursuing a different agenda. When we ignore these possibilities and assume our risk-averse stakeholders are irrational, the column suggests, we raise questions about our own rationality.
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2007
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“Watch Out!” – How to Warn Apathetic People
Posted: November 9, 2007
This column is a primer on precaution advocacy – that is, on high-hazard low-outrage risk communication, where the job is to increase outrage and thus to motivate apathetic people to take precautions (or demand precautions). Apathy isn’t always the problem when people are ignoring a serious risk – they could be in denial, for example, or they could have reasons to dislike the recommended precautions. But when apathy is the problem, this column is a good place to start. It’s a quick rundown on twenty precaution advocacy basic principles.
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Indoor Air Quality Risk Communication: Before You Fix Anything, Talk!
Posted: September 12, 2007
The basic risk communication dilemma in most IAQ controversies is that indoor air quality usually has genuine deficiencies, but if people’s IAQ complaints and symptoms are largely psychogenic – more an outcome of bad process (and the resulting outrage) than of bad air – then just fixing the air quality deficiencies isn’t likely to relieve the symptoms or reduce the controversy. The core of the solution, this short column argues, is to talk – and listen! – before you fix anything.
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Posted: July 30, 2007
Everyone knows risk communicators need to be empathic, but all too often empathy gets operationalized as telling people you know how they feel – or, worse yet, telling them how they feel. This long column argues that the essence of empathy is “sort-of acknowledgment,” finding a middle ground between obliviousness and intrusiveness. The column goes on to discuss ten elements of empathic communication. Some are pretty obvious (listening and echoing, for example); some are easy-to-learn tactics (such as suggesting that “some people” might feel a particular way instead of accusing your stakeholders of feeling that way); some are complicated and counterintuitive. The most complicated and counterintuitive ones are grounded in the work of psychiatrist Leston Havens.
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The Boss’s Outrage, parts II and III
Posted: May 7, 2007
These two closely related columns address why outrage management is a tough sell to most corporate and government executives. It focuses particularly on the fact that when stakeholders are outraged at an organization, that organization’s leaders are almost always outraged right back. So if you want to get the okay to address stakeholder outrage more responsively, you will first need to address your own management’s outrage at the very idea that you’re not proposing to fight back. The columns offer some suggestions, grounded largely in the seesaw concept. I love the title of Part III: “Managing Management’s Outrage at Outrage Management.” That’s it in a nutshell.
Part II: Talking with Top Management about Risk Communication
Part III: Managing Management’s Outrage at Outrage Management
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What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five
Posted: March 15, 2007
If and when a serious pandemic arrives, messaging will shift from precaution advocacy (high-hazard, low-outrage) to crisis communication (high-hazard, high-outrage). There will be a transition period between the two, when the pandemic looks imminent and outrage is rising fast. This very long column – split into four parts – identifies 25 “standby messages” for that transition period. It elaborates both the messages and their risk communication rationales. Jody Lanard and I wrote the column with two goals in mind: to help officials prepare their communications for the early days of a pandemic that looks like it might be severe, and to help them decide to be more candid (and thus more alarming) in their pre-pandemic communications now in order to make those early days less of a shock.
A French translation of the 25 messages, originally posted on the website Zone Grippe Aviaire (which has disappeared), is now available on this site.
French translations available
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The Boss’s Outrage (Part I): Talking with Top Management about Safety
Posted: January 7, 2007
I have long been interested in why corporate managements reject safety improvements that look eminently cost-effective – in some cases, improvements that have a better return-on-investment than the company’s principal product line. This short column explores some outrage-grounded reasons why senior managers might shy away from sensible safety investments. Among them: guilt/responsibility, ego/stature, hostility/contempt, fear/denial, and performance anxiety. The column suggests some ways safety professionals can break the logjam when factors like these are keeping their companies from making safety progress.
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2006
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Posted: December 12, 2006
Month after month, this is one of the least often read of my major columns. I’m not sure why. It covers an outrage management strategy I consider one of the most important (and most difficult) of any on my list: attributing your desirable behavior not to your saintliness (the “responsibility” claim) but rather to pressure from your stakeholders (the “responsiveness” claim, which is usually much closer to the truth). The column outlines the main reasons for giving away the credit, from the practical (it meets your critics’ ego needs) to the theoretical (it nurtures the public’s understanding of how capitalism works), and it addresses the main reasons why my clients resist giving away the credit. If you’re trying to think through how to reduce stakeholder outrage, this is one you ought to read.
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Media Sensationalism and Risk: Talking to Stakeholders with Reporters in the Room
Posted: September 6, 2006
This short column discusses seven principles for understanding and coping with the media’s entirely appropriate inclination to focus on the most newsworthy things you say – an inclination often labeled sensationalism. Of particular importance is the problem this raises for outrage management. The very same meeting at which you hope to say responsive, apologetic things in order to help reduce the outrage of angry stakeholders will also be attended by journalists, who will naturally convey your revealing admissions to readers and viewers who might otherwise never know. Managing a controversy well, in other words, is in some ways antithetical to managing the news clips well. You have to decide which task is more important. The column recommends managing the controversy.
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“Speak with One Voice” – Why I Disagree
Posted: July 27, 2006
This column dissects an issue – one of the few – on which I disagree with most risk communication and crisis communication professionals: what to do when there are differences of opinion within your organization. The conventional advice is to “speak with one voice” – that is, to paper over the disagreements. I urge my clients to let the disagreements show. The column distinguishes the ways of showing opinion diversity that really do undermine public confidence from the ways that (in my judgment) do not, and identifies many reasons why it is beneficial to let the public know that you’re not all on the same page about every issue. Perhaps most importantly, it details what tends to go wrong when organizations muzzle their staff in order to speak with one voice.
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Bird Flu, Pandemic Flu, and Poultry Markets: Playing Ostrich or Talking Turkey?
Posted: May 29, 2006
When the next influenza pandemic finally arrives, it will be carried by people, not birds. In the meantime, the public is understandably confused about the distinction between the “bird flu” that threatens poultry flocks and the poultry industry (and an occasional unlucky person) right now and the “bird flu” that may someday mutate to facilitate human-to-human transmission and threaten us all. In this column, Jody Lanard and I try to disentangle bird flu from pandemic flu. And then we address the most common risk communication errors committed by government and industry in virtually every country beset by bird flu, when they set out to convince consumers not to worry and not to stop eating poultry.
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How Safe Is Safe Enough: Sharing the Dilemma
Posted: April 20, 2006
This short column has two goals. It introduces readers to the invaluable risk communication strategy of dilemma sharing – telling people you’re torn between options and not sure what to do. This strategy is fundamental to both crisis communication and outrage management, but it is seldom utilized, largely because it threatens management egos. The second goal of the column is to apply the dilemma-sharing approach to the specific problem of “how safe is safe enough.” Risk managers have no choice but to prioritize precautions and decide which ones they can implement. The claim to be taking “every possible precaution” is always a lie. Risk managers who don’t want to lie can use dilemma sharing to explain why they have chosen not to take some possible precautions.
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The Outrage Industries: The Role of Journalists and Activists in Risk Controversies
Posted: March 21, 2006
This column describes the battles that ensue when activists or journalists are trying to arouse stakeholder outrage about some situation while companies or agencies are trying to reduce that outrage. Some of what goes on in these battles is symmetrical. Both sides lie only occasionally; both sides routinely mislead without lying; both sides see their own misleading statements as much less dishonest than the other side’s. Some of what goes on is not symmetrical. Misleading works when you’re trying to arouse outrage and backfires when you’re trying to reduce it. Another asymmetry: The outrage-arousing side should aim to show that the other side is simply wrong, whereas the outrage-reducing side should aim to show that it has taken the other side’s criticisms to heart.
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The Dilemma of Personal Tamiflu Stockpiling
Posted: January 10, 2006
When Jody Lanard and I wrote this long column, there was a shortage of Tamiflu. Officials and physicians argued that the available supply should be saved for current use against the seasonal flu and government stockpiles against a possible pandemic – but should not be stockpiled by individuals. We wrote the column to expose the many illogical, inconsistent, and inaccurate arguments being used against personal Tamiflu stockpiling, but we conceded that the competition with other uses was a valid issue. Now the Tamiflu supply exceeds the demand; “excess” manufacturing capacity has been mothballed. The competition argument is dead in the water. Officials and physicians still oppose personal Tamiflu stockpiling, but the only arguments they have left are the specious ones analyzed in this column.
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2005
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Games Risk Communicators Play: Follow-the-Leader, Echo, Donkey, and Seesaw
Posted: December 13, 2005
This short column considers the four possibilities when you are trying to convince me of X: I could have no prior opinion about X; I could believe X already; I could believe Y instead; or I could be ambivalent, torn between X and Y. Each of these four situations has its own risk communication game, described in the column: follow-the-leader, echo, donkey, and seesaw. Good risk communicators need to master all four games. And they need to know how to decide which game they’re playing – or, if they’re playing several at once, which game is most crucial to their communication goals.
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The Flu Pandemic Preparedness Snowball
Posted: October 10, 2005
I published this column in late 2005, when the U.S. public’s interest in pandemic preparedness was as high as it’s been so far. This was the teachable moment, I wrote. It wouldn’t last, so preparedness advocates needed to make the most of it. The column discusses nine recommendations to improve pandemic preparedness advocacy. Among the highlights: Focus less on the pharmaceutical fix; focus more on worst case scenarios, non-medical preparedness, and non-governmental preparedness; stop implying that a pandemic is imminent. Much of this advice is relevant even in periods of diminished attention, and most of it will still be on-target the next time pandemic preparedness is hot.
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Katrina: Hurricanes, Catastrophes, and Risk Communication
Posted: September 8, 2005
When I wrote this column shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck, I didn’t realize that it would still be an ongoing disaster years later. So the column focuses on risk communication failures before the hurricane reached New Orleans (especially the failure to scare people sufficiently) and immediately after the hurricane reached New Orleans (especially the failure to acknowledge emergency response inadequacies and to communicate with victims desperate for information). I saw these failures not as unique to Katrina but as warnings relevant to the next big earthquake or infectious disease outbreak. This perspective may have led me to go too easy on the specific defects of Katrina response.
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Posted: August 15, 2005
This short column discusses some words that have different meanings to risk professionals than to normal people – and that are therefore likely to be misunderstood when used to explain risk to a nonprofessional audience. Among the words: conservative, significant/insignificant, positive/negative, bias, anecdotal, safe, prepared, confident, and even the word “risk” itself.
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Superb Flu Pandemic Risk Communication: A Role Model from Australia
Posted: July 6, 2005
On May 2, 2005, Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott gave a speech on pandemic preparedness. It wasn’t especially earthshaking; in fact, it attracted fairly little media attention. But Jody Lanard and I thought it was terrific – candid, alarming, tentative, all the things most official pandemic presentations were not (and are not). So we sat down to annotate the speech in terms of 25 crisis communication recommendations we had published previously. If you just read the speech, you’ll discover that good risk communication can sound just as ordinary as bad risk communication. If you read the column’s annotations, you’ll discover how extraordinary this particular speech really was.
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Posted: June 16, 2005
This column argues that western society has a blind spot for bad guys – that our vision of an actionable emergency is an accident, not an attack. It discusses several examples, from the resistance to evidence that the 1984 Bhopal “accident” was probably sabotage to the opposition of the U.S. public health profession to the possibility that smallpox might constitute a weapon of mass destruction that could justify a vaccination program. The best example – detailed in the column – happened in April 2005, when it was learned that an infectious disease testing company had mistakenly sent samples of a potentially pandemic strain of influenza to labs all over the world. So a fax went out to all the labs telling them so, and asking them to destroy the sample – thus converting a small accident risk into a much larger terrorism risk. The facts were public at the time, but a society with a blind spot for bad guys simply ignored their implications.
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When to Release Risk Information: Early – But Expect Criticism Anyway
Posted: April 16, 2005
In February 2005, the New York City health department issued a warning about a possibly disastrous new strain of AIDS. It was widely criticized for alarming people before it had solid evidence that the strain was spreading. Also in February 2005, the United Kingdom’s Food Safety Authority held off announcing that many prepared foods were contaminated with tiny amounts of the banned red dye Sudan 1, because it wanted to prepare a list of affected products first. It was widely criticized for the delay. Obviously, when to release risk information is a tough call. In this column, Jody Lanard and I lay out the pros and cons, and conclude that early is almost always better than late. We also analyze the New York City decision in detail, and offer some ways to reduce the downsides of early release.
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Talking about Dead Bodies: Risk Communication after a Catastrophe
Posted: February 8, 2005
After nearly every natural disaster (earthquake, flood, etc.), the survivors feel an urgent need to bury the dead, often in mass graves that later complicate everything from mourning to inheritance. Yet with some exceptions, the bodies of natural disaster victims are not a significant disease threat to the living, and burying them should therefore have a lower priority than other rescue and recovery tasks. International emergency response agencies do their best to convince local officials and local populations that this is so – but more often than not they fail. In this column, Jody Lanard and I discuss the reasons why the impulse to bury the bodies is so powerful, and offer some empathic ways to counter that impulse, rather than simply explaining the scientific data.
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Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication
Posted: January 17, 2005
When people first learn about a new risk, they go through a temporary over-reaction that is natural, healthy, and useful. Psychiatrists call this the “adjustment reaction.” Having one is virtually a prerequisite to crisis preparedness. This short column outlines the characteristics of adjustment reactions. It advises crisis communicators to guide the public through its pre-crisis or early-crisis adjustment reaction, rather than trying to persuade people to skip this essential step toward being ready to cope.
Spanish translation available
Traducción en Español: Reacciones de ajuste: el momento enseñable en la comunicación de Crisis
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Tsunami Risk Communication: Warnings and the Myth of Panic
Posted: January 6, 2005
One of the reasons the Thai government neglected to warn its people in advance of the devastating December 2004 tsunami was a fear of panicking them. As if to prove this deadly decision right, a few days later there were warnings that aftershocks might produce another tsunami. Thousands of seaside residents fled to higher ground – and when it turned out there was no second tsunami, media reports said they had panicked. Jody Lanard and I had written before about the tendency of officials and journalists to misdiagnose caution as panic, but the tsunami impelled us to revisit the issue. This time we focused more narrowly on how rare panic is in response to natural disasters – or to warnings about natural disasters.
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2004
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Pandemic Influenza Risk Communication: The Teachable Moment
Posted: December 4, 2004
This is the first column Jody Lanard and I wrote about pandemic preparedness. We wrote it when many experts believed a devastating H5N1 flu pandemic might be just around the corner – and so we thought so too. (We still think the risk is serious, but there’s much less sense of imminence as I write this blurb in mid-2008.) The thrust of this long column is how to sound the alarm. After a primer on why H5N1 is “not your garden variety flu,” the column proposes a list of pre-crisis pandemic talking points. Then it assesses how well experts and officials were addressing those points as of late 2004. The experts, we wrote, were doing their best to arouse the public. But governments and international agencies were undermining the sense of urgency with grossly over-optimistic claims about pharmaceutical solutions.
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Posted: November 11, 2004
This column is in two parts. Part One lists some basic tips for overcoming the universal temptation to sound overconfident; it’s a primer on how to sound uncertain instead. Part Two goes into detail on the toughest part of acknowledging uncertainty: deciding just how uncertain you ought to sound, and then coming up with words (or numbers) that capture the right level of uncertainty. It assesses five biases that tend to distort our judgments about how uncertain to sound, even after we have accepted the principle that we should acknowledge our uncertainty. Compare “I can’t guarantee that it’s safe” with “I don’t know if it’s safe.” Both acknowledge uncertainty – but very different levels of uncertainty. Which of the two is likelier to get said when the other would have been closer to the truth?
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Flu Vaccine Shortage: Segmenting the Audience
Posted: October 22, 2004
Because of manufacturing problems, the U.S. had less vaccine for the 2004–05 flu season than it expected to need. The shortfall actually increased the demand, as people who don’t usually get vaccinated decided that this year they would. Jody Lanard and I were critical of what officials were telling the American public about the situation. We were especially critical of the failure to segment the audience – both according to the medical importance of vaccinating each segment and according to whether members of that segment bother to get vaccinated in a normal year. Since audience segmentation is a basic principle of risk communication (and all communication), we decided to show how it’s done by developing different flu vaccination messages for each segment. This column is the result.
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Posted: August 28, 2004
Most of this long column is addressed to risk communicators whose goal is to keep their audience unconcerned. So naturally they’d rather not talk about awful but unlikely worst case scenarios. The column details their reluctance even to mention worst case scenarios, and their tendency when they finally get around to discussing them to do so over-reassuringly. It explains why this is unwise – why people (especially outraged people) tend to overreact to worst case scenarios when the available information is scanty or over-reassuring. Then the column lists 25 guidelines for explaining worst case scenarios properly. Finally, a postscript addresses the opposite problem. Suppose you’re not trying to reassure people about worst case scenarios; you’re trying to warn them. How can you do that more effectively?
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When People Are “Under-Reacting” to Risk
Posted: July 14, 2004
When you think people are under-reacting to a risk, the usual diagnosis is “apathy” and the usual prescription is some sort of precaution advocacy: “This could kill you! Here’s how to protect yourself.” This short column is a checklist of questions to consider – in sequence – before jumping to the conclusion that apathy is the right diagnosis and precaution advocacy is the right prescription. Some of the alternatives (not paying attention, for example) are very familiar to safety professionals. Others (such as problems with self-efficacy and fatalism) are often missed.
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Sharing and Bearing Dilemmas: The USDA’s Transparent Mad Cow Risk Communication
Posted: July 2, 2004
Jody Lanard and I had already written a critique of how the U.S. Department of Agriculture handled the discovery of the first known case of mad cow disease in the U.S. So when the USDA did an excellent job a few months later with two inconclusive screening test positives for possible mad cow disease, we felt we ought to write about it. This short column covers the agency’s wise (and courageous) decision to announce the screening test results without waiting for follow-up testing, and to do so with candor about the dilemma of whether to report preliminary findings.
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Between Required and Forbidden: The Value of Voluntary Precautions
Posted: May 30, 2004
Risk isn’t dichotomous. It is always possible to take more or fewer precautions and end up with a higher or lower risk. Since such decisions are matters of judgment, this column argues, people should be allowed to make their own judgments. Of course in many situations some (minimum) precautions may need to be required, and some (excessive) precautions may need to be forbidden. But between required and forbidden is a fruitful space for voluntary precautions. The column focuses especially on three examples: supplied air for cleanup workers (should the employer ever leave it up to the worker?); boiling water that might be contaminated (should the authorities ever leave it up to consumers?); and testing beef cattle for mad cow disease (should the government ever leave it up to the slaughterhouses?).
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Crisis Communication: A Very Quick Introduction
Posted: April 15, 2004
This short column is made up of two lists. First comes a list of six “focus areas” of crisis communication – including the one I consider most in need of improvement: metamessaging. (This jargony word is the best I can come up with to describe all the content of crisis communications other than information content: how reassuring to be, how confident to sound, how to address emotion, etc.) The rest of the column is a list of 25 crisis communication recommendations – most of them about metamessaging. The 25 recommendations are discussed in more detail in my crisis communication handouts. But this column lists them all conveniently on one page.
Spanish translation available
Traducción en Español: Comunicación de crisis: una introducción muy rápida
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Posted: March 18, 2004
Mad cow disease has never been a serious threat to human health in the United States. When it tries to convince people of this truth, the U.S. Department of Agriculture often says things that aren’t quite true. In this long column, Jody Lanard and I painstakingly dissect nine instances of misleading USDA mad cow risk communication in the wake of the December 2003 discovery of the first known mad cow in the U.S. Not that the USDA was unusually dishonest. This sort of dishonesty is routine in risk communication, especially when its perpetrators know they are in the right. This column introduces the phrase “misleading toward the truth” to describe the well-intentioned – but ultimately ineffective – dishonesty of information sources who are convinced the unvarnished facts might themselves be misleading.
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When People Are “Over-Reacting” to Risk
Posted: February 6, 2004
This short column offers a checklist of 15 possibilities to consider when you believe people are over-reacting to a risk you consider small. The #1 possibility – mentioned but not discussed in the column – is that outrage at some aspect of the situation might be clouding their judgment. That’s the core of my “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula and my approach to risk communication when hazard is low and outrage is high. But the column identifies 14 other possibilities that ought to be considered before jumping to the conclusion that people are outraged … including #15, the possibility that they might be right and you might be under-reacting to a serious hazard.
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Scientists and the Public: Barriers to Cross-Species Risk Communication
Posted: January 4, 2004
Scientists are from Mars and everyone else is from Venus. In this column, Jody Lanard and I focus on ten systematic differences between scientists and the public that make things difficult when scientists try to do risk communication. Among them: Many scientists don’t approve of communicating with nonscientists; many scientists overvalue rationality, and mistrust – and even disdain – emotion; many scientists fail to allow for the public’s mistrust; many scientists do not trust the public. Understanding these differences can help scientist-communicators overcome them and find common ground with their audience. And understanding these differences can help members of the public make allowances when scientists mishandle their risk communication efforts.
2003
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Practicing for The Big One: Pennsylvania’s Hepatitis A Outbreak and Risk Communication
Posted: December 4, 2003
In late 2003, an outbreak of hepatitis A in Western Pennsylvania provided a neat case study of pretty good risk communication (not perfect, but not bad) about a pretty serious problem (not huge, but not tiny). In this column, Jody Lanard and I use Pennsylvania’s hepatitis outbreak to illustrate four basic dilemmas in crisis communication – dilemmas that are sure to come up in bigger emergencies: preoccupation with panic; trust and secrecy; over-reassurance; and anticipatory guidance.
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What’s Different about Employees?
Posted: October 29, 2003
Most of my risk communication consulting focuses on external stakeholders – neighbors, activists, customers, etc. But sometimes I’m asked to address a controversy between a company (or a government agency) and its own employees. Outrage is outrage, and for the most part labor-management controversies play out the same way external controversies do. But there are a few ways employee outrage is different. This short column discusses five differences.
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It Is Never Too Soon to Speculate
Posted: September 17, 2003
Risk communication and crisis communication professionals sometimes urge their clients not to speculate. But they can’t mean it literally. Speculation is talking about things you’re not sure about … and that’s pretty much what risk communication is. In this short column, Jody Lanard and I make the case on behalf of responsible speculation – that is, speculation that sounds suitably speculative (that isn’t overconfident); speculation that pays sufficient attention to dire scenarios (that isn’t over-optimistic); and speculation that explicitly addresses the difficult question of which precautions are appropriate even while the information is still uncertain and which precautions should await less speculative knowledge.
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Fear of Fear: The Role of Fear in Preparedness ... and Why It Terrifies Officials
Posted: September 8, 2003
My government clients often tell me they want to persuade the public to take precautions against some risk … but not if they have to frighten anybody. Jody Lanard and I wrote this long column not just to argue the necessity for warnings to be frightening, but also to analyze the widespread official “fear of fear.” We explore its origins in officials’ justified concern that they will be criticized for frightening people, and in their unjustified concern that the people they frighten will find the experience permanent and unbearable. We also investigate a closely allied phenomenon, “panic panic” – the panicky feelings officials experience when they wrongly judge that the public is about to panic, and the unwise crisis management strategies they typically attempt in order to “allay” the public’s panic.
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Posted: June 12, 2003
This column covers everything I think my clients need to know about stakeholders, especially hostile stakeholders – the difference between stakeholders and publics; the kinds of stakeholders, depending mostly on their level of arousal and the actual hazard they face; the key guidelines for stakeholder involvement, grounded in the distinction among “fanatics,” “attentives,” “browsers,” and “inattentives”; and the complications caused by the presence of stakeholders who aren’t hostile (supporters, involved neutrals, and uninvolved neutrals). The column ends with this wrap-up: “Managing risk communication requires analyzing your stakeholders.… Which analytic scheme works best depends on the situation. Somewhere in this column I hope you can find a scheme (or several) that helps make sense of the situation you’re facing at the moment.”
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“Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS” – And So It Should!
Posted: April 28, 2003
Until it turned out less contagious than initially thought, SARS looked to many experts like it might very well be the devastating pandemic they had spent decades fearfully awaiting. When Jody Lanard and I wrote this column in April 2003, that was still an open question. The public’s SARS fears were entirely justifiable – yet many governments, experts, and even journalists were working overtime to dampen those fears. The column describes this “soft cover-up” of SARS over-optimism, tries to explain why so many officials were seduced by it, and offers both good examples of guiding the public’s fear and bad examples of trying to allay that fear. The column concludes with a list of 18 specific risk communication recommendations for talking about SARS.
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Four Kinds of Risk Communication
Posted: April 11, 2003
This short column was an early attempt to lay out what I see as the four kinds of risk communication. Some of my labels have changed since 2003. When hazard is high and outrage is low, the job is warning apathetic people about serious risks. I now call that precaution advocacy; the column called it public relations. When hazard is low and outrage is high, the job is calming upset people about small risks. I called that outrage management in the column, and that’s still what I call it. When hazard and outrage are both high, the job is helping rightly upset people bear a dangerous situation. No change in that label either; it’s crisis communication. Finally, when hazard and outrage are both intermediate, the job is chatting with interested people about a real but not urgent risk. The column called that stakeholder relations; I now call it “the sweet spot.”
Spanish translation available
Traducción en Español: Cuatro clases de comunicación de riesgos
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Posted: February 20, 2003
One of the things the U.S. government got wrong after 9/11 was its failure to offer people things to do. So when it started listing some steps ordinary people could take to help prepare for the possibility of more terrorist attacks, Jody Lanard and I noted with interest the widespread disdainful response, most of it linked to the inclusion of duct tape on the government’s list of items a prepared citizen ought to have on hand. In this column, we analyze the reasons for this weird response, which we liken to a similar cynicism about anti-nuclear precautions in the 1950s. The column ends with suggestions for improving the U.S. government’s post-9/11 risk communication, starting with the need to ask more of people.
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2002
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Smallpox Vaccination: Some Risk Communication Linchpins
Public Health Outrage and Smallpox Vaccination: An Afterthought
Posted: December 30, 2002 and January 19, 2003
In December 2002, I was asked to help plan and run a meeting on risk communication recommendations for the U.S. program to vaccinate healthcare workers and emergency responders against smallpox. The first column is an edited version of my introductory remarks. It addresses some familiar “risk communication linchpins” – paying attention to outrage, doing anticipatory guidance, expressing wishes and feelings, tolerating uncertainty, sharing dilemmas, riding the seesaw, etc. – all customized for the controversies I thought likeliest to emerge over smallpox vaccination. What I learned from the meeting was that most of the public health professionals implementing the smallpox vaccination program were themselves outraged that it even existed. So I wrote an “afterthought” on the sources of that outrage, and the need to deal with it lest it undermine the program … which, in my judgment, it later did.
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Posted: October 28, 2002
One of the core outrage management recommendations on my shortlist is accountability. I see it both as a replacement for trust and as a step in the direction of sharing control. This column covers everything I want my clients to know about accountability, especially its relationship to trust and control, to “being small,” to giving away credit, and to contractual agreements. The last section of the column addresses the question of “accountability to whom.” The short answer: Everybody – but especially the “extremists” you least want to be accountable to. “Remember,” the column concludes, “the purpose of accountability is to reduce stakeholder outrage…. If you really hate it there’s a good chance you’re doing it right.”
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Posted: August 15, 2002
This column was inspired by the Enron debacle, and the lesson (re)learned from that debacle that corporate financial audits can be pretty slippery. (In case you’ve forgotten, Arthur Andersen audited Enron’s books and said everything was hunky-dory; it wasn’t, and the accounting firm went down with its client.) The column asserts that corporate environmental audits can be similarly slippery, and asks whether there are any lessons companies can learn from Enron about their environmental auditing. It offers six ways to make environmental audits more reliable and more credible, focusing especially on the virtues of picking not just an auditor who doesn’t rely on the company for other business, but also an auditor whose natural biases are more activist than corporate.
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Lawyers and Outrage Management
Posted: July 11, 2002
I almost entitled this column “Lawyers v. Outrage Management,” because it’s mostly about the conflicts between what I advise my clients and what their attorneys advise them. The column starts by acknowledging that a legally ill-advised outrage management strategy can have disastrous legal repercussions. That said, it addresses a variety of reasons why most lawyers dislike outrage management even in situations where there are unlikely to be any legal ill effects. After a section on what outrage management can offer the legal process – that is, how lawyers might actually benefit from paying attention to outrage issues – the column zeros in on five genuine areas of conflict between law and outrage management: ignorance, silence, candor, apology, and tone. These are the areas where wise clients force their legal and communication advisors to find a middle path.
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Yellow Flags: The Acid Test of Transparency
Posted: April 10, 2002
When things go badly wrong for a company or government agency, there were usually precursors, and the failure to heed these warnings is a familiar feature of post-disaster recriminations. I call the precursors/warnings “yellow flags” – yellow, not red, because in real time it’s usually impossible to tell whether they’ll turn out to be a minor wrinkle or a major flaw. This column addresses the choices companies and agencies face with regard to yellow flags: whether to let yourself know about them at all; whether to investigate the ones you know about; whether to stop what you’re doing while you await the results; and whether to tell the rest of us what’s up. The column focuses on the last of these choices, arguing that transparency about yellow flags is not just the best way to get them investigated properly; it is also the only way to prevent people from imagining afterwards that they were red flags.
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Laundry List of 50 Outrage Reducers
Posted: February 21, 2002
My shortlist of principal strategies
for reducing stakeholder outrage lists six recommendations; in seminars it takes me a half-day or more just to cover these six. I wrote this column for clients who thought that six wasn’t enough. I stopped (pretty arbitrarily) at 50, and invited readers to send me more. But so far I’ve received only one suggestion. So maybe 50 was enough, even if six wasn’t.This column is categorized as:
2001
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Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action
Posted: December 29, 2001
Accustomed to naturally occurring diseases, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had a difficult time coping with the anthrax bioattacks of late 2001. Since risk communication was one of its core problems, it asked me to come to Atlanta and help. This four-part “column” grew out of my Atlanta notes. If the CDC was adjusting to bioterrorism, so was I. I put aside my usual outrage management recommendations and developed 26 recommendations specifically on the anthrax crisis. These became the basis for my (sadly) expanding work in crisis communication, and for the crisis communication CD-ROM and DVD Jody Lanard and I ultimately put out in 2004. This column was my first extended discussion of most of these crisis communication recommendations, and it is my only published assessment of the CDC’s anthrax communication efforts.
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Risk Communication and the War Against Terrorism: High Hazard, High Outrage
Posted: October 22, 2001
It took more than a month after the 9/11 attacks for me to decide that I had relevant expertise to offer. (This column was first posted on October 22, 2001, revised and reposted on November 10.) My wife Jody Lanard crystallized it for me when she said, “You’ve been doing high-hazard, low-outrage risk communication and low-hazard, high-outrage risk communication for years. This time it’s high-hazard, high-outrage risk communication.” But this column isn’t my first crack at a list of generic recommendations for communicating in high-hazard, high-outrage situations; that didn’t come till my anthrax column a couple of months later. This one is more a meditation on the risk communication significance of 9/11, a very tentative first effort to consider how best to talk to people in the wake of that still-shocking event.
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Posted: September 5, 2001
The term “sound science” is almost always a way of pulling rank, of harnessing the high stature of science on behalf of one side in a policy debate – usually the side less protective of health or the environment. This column exposes some of the pretenses that typically underlie the term: the pretense that your scientific support is stronger than it is; the pretense that your actions are grounded in science when they are grounded mostly in other considerations; and the pretense that your disputes with critics are about science when they are mostly about trans-scientific issues. The column is also about my clients’ tendency to believe their own pretenses – to forget that they are using or even misusing science to achieve their goals and imagine instead that they are science’s virtuous handmaidens.
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Advice for President Bartlet: Riding the Seesaw
Posted: July 14, 2001
Readers who were never fans of the “West Wing” television series may not remember when U.S. President Jed Bartlet finally decided to come clean about his multiple sclerosis. The tough question: How to address his desire to run for reelection, despite his illness and despite his having kept it secret. I used this setup as an excuse to write a column about a crucial risk communication strategy for coping with audience ambivalence: the seesaw. When people are ambivalent about X versus Y – for example, when they approve of your presidency and want you back for a second term, but worry that your MS and your dishonesty about it might disqualify you – they tend to go to the side of their ambivalence that is neglected elsewhere in their communication environment. The column outlines the various locations on the seesaw a risk communicator can decide to occupy, and the pros and cons of each. It offers plenty of nonfictional examples as well.
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Posted: May 4, 2001
If you want to know how apology and forgiveness work, ask a Catholic. The secular process, outlined in this column, closely tracks the Catholic process: admit you did it; then say you’re sorry; then correct the problem and compensate your victims; then do a penance. The evidence that going through this process reduces people’s outrage is even stronger than when I wrote the column. Today, even medical malpractice lawyers routinely urge their clients to apologize. But mostly for ego reasons, companies and government agencies still resist admitting they did it, letting themselves get yelled at, saying they’re sorry, or doing a penance. They are comfortable correcting the problem and compensating the victims – which rarely does much good without the other, more humiliating steps.
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Posted: March 17, 2001
I wrote this column after doing a radio talk show with Sheldon Rampton, in which he argued that corporate experts misuse their scientific expertise to defend corporate misbehavior. The column doesn’t really disagree with Rampton’s claim that many company experts can’t be trusted. But it does dispute his view that anti-company experts can; ideology, I think, distorts science as much as avarice. And the column also disputes Rampton’s conviction that one-sided science is working stunningly well for evil corporations. It argues to the contrary that companies sacrifice credibility when they employ experts who reliably favor their position regardless of the data. Activists can get away with that kind of one-sidedness, the column suggests, but companies are better off hiring activist-leaning experts, who will be hugely credible when they reluctantly admit the company is actually right about something.
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Posted: January 29, 2001
Whenever a company does something wrong, the public wants to know why. The two contending explanations are stupidity and evil – you made a dumb mistake or you did it on purpose. Since most people imagine that corporate evil is far more common than corporate stupidity, the “evil” explanation is the default. (Government agencies are different; people believe governments make stupid mistakes all the time.) Of course the “evil” explanation also does more harm to corporate reputation than the “stupid” explanation. What follows from this reasoning is what I call the stupidity defense. As this column argues, when a company makes a stupid mistake, it needs to say so – early, often, and penitently. That’s its only shot at avoiding the assumption of evil.
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2000
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Risk Communication and the Palm Beach Presidency
Posted: November 9, 2000
I wrote my first website column at the very start of the Bush-Gore cliffhanger in Florida, when the key issue still looked to be thousands of Gore voters in Palm Beach who had been misled by a confusing ballot to vote for Pat Buchanan instead. For the most part, this column notes, risk communication is for dealing with stakeholders – small groups of highly involved people – whereas traditional public relations is the right toolkit when addressing the wider public. But not in a crisis like Palm Beach. Since the whole country is highly involved, the column asserts, both candidates need to put aside their PR toolkits and work at managing the other side’s outrage. The column’s specific outrage-sensitive talking points were irrelevant within hours, lost in a forest of hanging chads. But the principle that in crisis situations politicians need to switch from public relations to outrage management remains sound.
Pandemic Flu Preparedness Columns from
CIDRAP Business Source Weekly Briefing
In late 2006, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota launched a dedicated pandemic preparedness website for business called CIDRAP Business Source, and an associated newsletter called CIDRAP Business Source Weekly Briefing. I agreed to serve as Deputy Editor, and to write a short column on pandemic risk communication for every other issue of the Briefing. It was agreed that I could post the columns on my website after a three-month lag. In mid-2007 the newsletter was reconfigured as the Osterholm Briefing, written by Editor-in-Chief (and infectious diseases expert) Michael Osterholm. I remained Deputy Editor of CIDRAP Business Source.
Many of the Briefing columns listed below cover content that is elsewhere on this website in greater detail. (See the “Pandemic Flu and Other Infectious Diseases Index.”) Others are new, and all are recast for the business continuity audience.
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Read “FAFfing About” if you need some motivation
July 17, 2007
Whenever my commitment to pandemic preparedness starts to flag, I read something wrongheaded by an opponent of preparedness. Here’s my take on an example from a major medical journal.
The bird flu / pandemic flu confusion
(Never published by CIDRAP)
We have told people to worry about a “bird flu pandemic.” No wonder they think the danger comes from birds.
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June 14, 2007
Far from being fatigued by pandemic warnings, the public is just beginning to hear the message. As planners, we’re the ones at risk of pandemic fatigue, as we slog our way forward.
Why talk now: The case for communicating with employees before the pandemic arrives
June 7, 2007
Your company is preparing for a pandemic, but your employees aren’t. Can that possibly make sense?
Corporate pandemic precaution advocacy: The time is now
May 17, 2007
Business continuity planners say they’re talking to their employees and other stakeholders about pandemic preparedness. Is it really happening?
What kind of risk communication does pandemic preparedness require?
May 3, 2007
When the virus hits the fan, it’ll be crisis communication. But what it is now depends on your opinions and your audience.
Start thinking in phases – risk communication phases
April 19, 2007
You have a few crucial moments for talking about pandemic preparedness. Use them well.
Riding the many pandemic seesaws
April 5, 2007
Because most people feel ambivalent about possible future pandemics, communicating effectively with them requires skillful balance on a wide range of communication “seesaws.”
Seesaw your way through ambivalence
March 22, 2007
Most people think about possible future pandemics – when they think about them at all – with a good deal of ambivalence. To communicate with ambivalent people, you need to understand the “risk communication seesaw.”
Talking about a flu pandemic worst case scenario
March 8, 2007
The pandemic worst case is: (a) Truly horrific, (b) Truly unlikely, (c) Truly worth planning for, (d) All of the above. The right answer: (d) All of the above.
A severe pandemic is not overdue – it’s not when but if
February 22, 2007
We have no grounds for confidence that a severe pandemic is imminent. Our communications shouldn’t imply otherwise.
“Might help a lot, might help a little, might not help at all – and worth trying!”
February 7, 2007
There are no perfect pandemic precautions. We need to say so – and push hard for imperfect precautions.
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January 24, 2007
Bird flu is four problems, not one. Keeping them straight is a prerequisite to sensible risk communication – and sensible preparedness.
Get your slice of the “fearfulness” pie
January 10, 2007
Fear is like a pie (or money): There’s usually not enough to go around. If you want people to take precautions, you have to compete for your share.
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December 20, 2006
We are all likeliest to take precautions when we’re frightened. But “fear of fear” is widespread – and a major barrier to pandemic communication.
How’s your business discontinuity program?
November 29, 2006
More and more companies are starting to integrate pandemic preparedness into their business continuity programs. That’s good news – and helping to facilitate it is one of the reasons this newsletter was launched. But….
