The biases that hinder effective crisis response

My involvement in crisis work began with the McLibel trial and the MacPherson Inquiry that followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Many more have followed. 

Over the years, ‘being in the room’ as individuals have grappled with a crisis, you begin to see familiar mental and organisational biases emerge. As part of the launch of River Effra, not just working as a comms agency but as an advisory firm for leaders under pressure, we wanted to test through research how these emerge in a crisis scenario.

The question too often asked is about blame after the event; however the world would be a better place if it were framed to ask about how we help in the moment. That is what River Effra was designed to do. Crises create moments of difference, unfamiliarity, and extreme pressure when the stakes are highest. How leaders react matters. By understanding elite leadership in business in moments of intense stress, we can offer better counsel and support.

We have identified 11 leadership and culture biases. There isn’t space here to describe all of them but they include:

Crusader bias – Our purpose is so noble that goodwill will see us through.

We’ve Got This bias – We deal with stuff like this all the time, it’s an issue, never a crisis.

Business bias – We can’t be political, this doesn’t affect us, we are just a business.

Hero bias – I’m the boss and I’m gonna save the day.

Technically Correct bias – The rest of the world just needs to understand our data.

Disaster bias – This is terrible, we are under such an attack there isn’t going to be any way out of this. 

How we conducted the research

An online survey was completed by 74 C-suite and director level respondents in large corporations. Each participant was shown the same detailed crisis scenario (a data breach of highly personal information including politicians and celebrities that was generating lurid headlines) and asked to ‘trade off’ groups of statements, each time identifying which statement best described their attitude to the crisis scenario and which statement was least relevant to them.

The most striking finding was that at the outset of the exercise, the biggest grouping of respondents tended to demonstrate bias towards competence and confidence (roughly half began in the “We’ve Got This” and “Hero” categories) this fell to one in eight once the scenario demanded clear decisions between sometimes opposing courses of action.

Simulating a crisis is extremely hard and our aim was not to test processes or what people would say, but to examine logic and bias by forcing choices between options. 

Culture trumps comms

Understanding and navigating culture is more important than communications skills in a crisis.

All crises are characterised by uncertainty and contradictory information and this is where bias is key – information is scarce and leaders will at some point need to set a course on judgement and consider when to alter course again. For some people both of those points will be in conflict with their biases.  Our research revealed substantial weaknesses in important elements of the respondents’ own corporate cultures. One quarter of those surveyed described their leadership culture as dysfunctional, with just 21% believing the environment in which they operate to be truly collaborative.

The leader, alone

This perception amongst leaders of inadequacy within their own organisations is important for the adviser called in. 

Crisis teams are at their best when they are expert, dedicated and separated from the ‘business as usual’ functions.

We have all experienced ‘crisis tourists’ hanging around outside the room where the decisions are being made, eager to be let in. Crises are rare, exotic events and who doesn’t want to be part of that? 

To be effective as an adviser demands a certain fearlessness to challenge leaders under extreme pressure, when a strongly held bias comes to the fore.

However, to be effective as an adviser demands a certain fearlessness to challenge leaders under extreme pressure, when a strongly held bias comes to the fore. It is at this point that you need to live up to the promise of delivering the best possible outcome even if you are arguing for a course of action that might ultimately lead to people in that room losing their jobs, or taking decisions that will cost the company pain and money.

It is very difficult to give that advice if your normal day job (or your agency fee) will be compromised by having to pull ‘business as usual’ work or that campaign you have just launched.

At the heart of this approach is our own bias which we wear with pride – the belief that you can’t ‘PR’ your way out of a crisis. How you communicate really matters, but there is no elegant form of words that will make problems of fact and perception simply disappear.

At the heart of almost every crisis is a thing that has either changed or not changed when it should have.

Words alone will not explain that away and it is the job of the adviser to understand the bias of leaders under the most extreme pressures, for it is only then that you can help them towards addressing that truth.
 

George Hutchinson is the founder of River Effra, a reputation advisory firm.

This post was originally published by the CIPR Crisis Communications Network. Read the original post.

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