What to Do When Things Go Wrong

by Frank Supovitz

  Someone else’s microphone captured 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney sharing a political perspective that might have ultimately cost him an election proving that nowadays, we don’t have to have a real microphone in front of us to be captured saying or doing something we would rather not have shared. There are enough mobile devices in enough hands to do that for us. An inadvisable text or e-mail sent in frustration with a single, unassuming “forward” click to just one person can inadvertently undo months of planning, team-building, and brand cultivation.

  If you don’t want to read what you said or wrote in the media someday, remember that your “mic” is always on, especially when something goes wrong. And, assume you are sending that e-mail directly to the New York Times.

  ASSUME NOTHING, DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING

  One last tip on managing project execution. Don’t let something go wrong because you’ve assumed that everyone and everything is ready to go just because you are ready. We may have provided precise instructions, clearly communicated expectations, and distributed the documentation that everyone needs to get their jobs done. As launch time approaches, you too should assume nothing and double check everything.

  Thanks to many painful experiences, I walk through every space to make sure it is staffed and ready to receive guests long before we open. I contact every direct report before we begin to ensure they can hear me and that I can hear them. I confirm with our talent team that every featured cast member has arrived well before their performance time approaches. I make certain that every stage manager is in their proper place. Having a preparatory double check checklist before pressing the start button on any project is a smart move to avoid making assumptions that everything is ready, and then find out that not everything is.

  My projects usually require time-sensitive actions and responses. Broadcast and live event producers use “standby cues” to ensure their team is ready when something important is about to happen. Those standby cues warn our team members 30 to 60 seconds ahead of time to remain alert for the next instruction. We then count down from 10 seconds to the precise moment we will have them execute their task. Your project may not need such a high degree of time precision, and important cues may unfold over days instead of minutes. But, don’t let something go wrong because you didn’t ask, “Are you ready?”

  Your project is now underway, and everything is going spectacularly well. Then, suddenly, it isn’t. You will have to respond quickly, decisively, and effectively now that something has gone wrong. Are you ready?

  STEP FOUR

  RESPOND

  18

  CONFRONTING THE “OOPS–DAMN” MOMENTS

  If you were enjoying a peaceful amble along the Waikiki shoreline at 8:07 a.m., on Saturday, January 13, 2018, you might have noticed fellow strollers suddenly bolt off the beach to join a stream of frenzied pedestrians running anxiously along Kalakaua Avenue. Had you not left your mobile phone in your room, you would have received the emergency alert that shattered the calm stillness of that Hawaiian morning:

  “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII.

  SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

  Damn, you would have thought, what do I do now? Anyone who asked Siri to find the “location of the public missile shelter closest to me,” would have found her answer disquieting: “I didn’t find any matching places.”

  Hawaii’s Emergency Management Authority estimates the time between an alert and an actual nuclear missile strike from North Korea to be between 12 and 15 minutes, not a lot of margin for error to find the best hiding spot. For future reference, take note of the nearest concrete building with a basement and make sure it has good phone service, because after 38 minutes of public pandemonium, a correction was finally sent:

  “THERE IS NO MISSILE THREAT OR DANGER TO THE STATE OF HAWAII. REPEAT. FALSE ALARM.”

  “Oops,” you would have thought, someone really messed up. A routine drill was, in fact, planned as an internal rehearsal for the Hawaii emergency operations center.

  What exactly went wrong? According to the investigative report submitted by the state’s director of Emergency Management, quite a number of things went wrong. But the factor that first started toppling the dominoes of disaster was human error. All missile drills, including this one, were preceded by a loudspeaker announcement in the emergency operations center: “Exercise! Exercise! Exercise!” Yet, for some inexplicable reason, one employee thought an actual missile attack was in progress and activated a “real-world alert.” The investigative report later stated that the system in place made it exceedingly easy for one confused or careless individual to activate the statewide alert because the software’s drop-down menu reportedly offered only two choices:

  • Test missile alert

  • Missile alert

  If you’re like me, a keyboard speedster who occasionally sends e-mails referencing something without including an important attachment, or you’ve ever hit “reply to all” to a companywide e-mail, you can understand how just one or two swift mouse clicks can cause just a little bit of trouble. That is not what happened, but you can understand how it also could have gone down that way.

  When everybody’s phones in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) received the warning text, they knew immediately that something had gone very, very wrong. The morning quickly transitioned from drill to damage control. Within the same minute, the EOC immediately began notifying an alphabet soup of government agencies of the error. Within three minutes, the Honolulu Police Department was informed. Soon after, the warning text was canceled, but that only deactivated the alert for cell phones that were not yet powered on. It did not send “all clear” messages to phones that had already received the warning.

  At 8:19 a.m., approximately 12 minutes after the erroneous alert, local news outlets and social media feeds began spreading the word that the alert was a mistake. This would have been about the moment that missiles, had they been launched, would have begun pulverizing paradise. In the intense flurry of activity in the EOC, it wasn’t until 8:45 a.m., 26 minutes later, that the correction was sent to the cell phones of terrified tourists and residents.

  THAT “DAMN” MOMENT

  When we are confronted by something going wrong, it is generally of two varieties, and sometimes both simultaneously. There is the “damn” variety, which is something that impacts us from a source beyond our control, such as “Mother Nature,” a system failure, or a human action unrelated to anything we did or were doing. The possibilities are endless in their range and scale: receiving a civil defense alert, interference from a right-to-work protest, searching for a missing anthem singer, falling victim to a cyberattack, structural failure, or a contractual “force majeure” clause. These are the literal embodiment of the term “stuff happens.”

  The recently reseeded turf was still struggling to take root. The wispy, light green blades of grass were still hopeful of standing up to the first onslaught of well-fed, sharp-cleated linemen and backs. Almost 1,400 members of the Super Bowl XXII halftime cast arrived at a damp Jack Murphy Stadium in their full-show costumes for the dress rehearsal. George Toma, the NFL’s legendary “god of sod” and the man in charge of the field for every one of at least the first 50 Super Bowls, watched the long trail of 88 grand pianos arriving outside the field door on a soggy Friday evening, pulled in long trains by John Deere tractors. To preserve the still-immature grass, Toma made the only decision he could. He ordered that the rehearsal could only be set up once, on featureless black tarps, and the cast permitted on the field wearing only their socks. Suddenly, the concrete floor beneath the stands began accumulating mountains of identical, brand new, white Adidas sneakers. After a successful rehearsal, the entire flock of wet-footed cast members returned to scavenge through the randomly scattered piles of shoes for more than a half hour to find left and right sneakers in their sizes, amid excited shouts of “Anybody see a left men’s nine-and-

  a-half?”

  Most �
��damn” moments are not nearly that funny or as easily sorted out, for example, a blackout in New Orleans or a bogus missile alert. Although we may have had nothing to do with the root cause of the problem, it is still our responsibility to deal with it and our responsibility to manage, respond, and recover. If we had imagined scenarios with any similarity, we might have been able to activate a planned contingency. If we had not, we must still take control over the consequences by calling an audible, that is, adapt and set a new course of action.

  THE “OOPS” MOMENT

  Then, of course, there are the “oops” moments. Something goes wrong due to our own actions or because we failed to act when we should have. We, our teammates, or our company made an error, an omission, or failed to have a workable plan for something that we should have anticipated. Most careers are littered with “oops” moments that extend the term “stuff happens” to “stuff happens because we let it.” The chief characteristic of an “oops” moment is that it could have, and probably should have, been avoided.

  One such avoidable “oops” moment unfolded at the Closing Ceremonies of the U.S. Olympic Festival at the University of Oklahoma in July 1989. We had planned to salute more than 7,000 local volunteers who had contributed to the success of the competitions, marching them in as the evening’s honored guests into the stadium to the sounds of tumultuous cheers. All volunteers—resplendent in their uniforms and meticulously organized into a long queue snaking across the adjoining soccer field—had some of their excitement dampened when the automatic timers on the lawn sprinklers suddenly activated, irrigating the turf and everyone standing on it. Had we visited the soccer pitch at the exact same time at any point during the previous weeks, we might have noticed that the field was watered at the same time every sweltering Oklahoma afternoon. That “oops” moment was definitely on me. This was an example of an “oops” moment for which there was a swift and simple solution: get away from the sprinklers.

  Most “oops” moments don’t escape notice as easily or innocuously. The Hawaii Emergency Management Authority’s most infamous example started with an erroneously activated missile alert. Although the EMA team acted quickly to inform state and local agencies and media outlets that the alert was a mistake, direct communication with the public to correct the civil defense text notification seemed to take an inordinately long period of time. One contributing factor to the long delay was the agency’s apparent ignorance that they were both capable and authorized to issue an all-clear alert right away. Instead, under the mistaken impression that only FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, could send the official notification, time was wasted waiting to get unnecessary clearance to correct the public misinformation. In the intervening 38 minutes, confusion continued to reign.

  THE “OOPS–DAMN” DYNAMIC

  Whenever a human contributes to something going wrong, there is an “oops-damn” dynamic, that is, a little bit of both at play simultaneously and not always in equal portions. The Hawaii EMA had precipitated the error and was in control of every step of the response (“oops”). For those outside the command center, the most important thing was to find shelter in response to an imaginary threat over which they had no control at all (“damn”).

  Our response to any incident should strive to avoid generating additional “oops” or “damn” moments that echo from our original actions. The Montreal ice storm, which struck on February 6, 1993, and held the Stanley Cup captive in a taxi cab before the NHL All-Star Game, was a “damn” shame over which we had no control. But the fact that we didn’t plan to move the Stanley Cup to the arena earlier was clearly an “oops” moment. That we didn’t change the plan once we knew about the ice storm was a bigger “oops” moment and ultimately, the Stanley Cup’s late arrival and subsequent surrender to the gravitational pull of the Earth was the biggest “oops” moment of all. Although we couldn’t prevent the ice storm or defy gravity, we could have prevented absolutely everything in between.

  REDUCING AFTERSHOCKS

  The term aftershock is most often associated with earthquakes. They are the subsequent tremors that are experienced after, and as a result of, the initial, larger quake. The characteristics of seismic aftershocks are strikingly similar to those encountered when something goes wrong and the response is either insufficiently or poorly managed. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, aftershocks can continue for weeks, months, or even years. So, too, can the ramifications of mismanaging an incident or crisis affect your company, brand, or project for an extended period. It is also not uncommon for an aftershock tremor to be stronger and more damaging than the first quake. A bungled response can magnify the effects of the original mistake and transform the incident into an even bigger disaster. In Hawaii, sending the erroneous alert was a terrifyingly bad mistake. What launched an investigation of even greater scrutiny was the 38-minute lapse in time between the initial alert and the all-clear alert.

  The best way to reduce aftershocks, if not eliminate them completely, is to activate a plan that is already in place to confront the first “oops” or “damn” moment. Following a decade as the CEO of “Just Say No” International, widely recognized for launching America’s youth empowerment and drug abuse prevention movement, Ivy Cohen launched Ivy Cohen Corporate Communications, a New York-based agency advising large and growing companies on reputation management and crisis communications. Cohen notes that few crises are “textbook cases,” and that most are characterized by a host of unknowns and unexpected elements.

  Cohen would be the first to agree that time is never your friend when something goes wrong, and she advocates having a crisis communications strategy in place well before the first “oops” or “damn” moment to help reduce the time between the perception of a problem and the implementation of a well-fashioned response. She recommends these important initial steps when designing your plan:

  “First, assess your existing resources. Take into account your normal operational needs, and then consider the additional resources you may have to mobilize in order to support the range of responses you might have to quickly undertake,” she suggests. Are they sufficient to allow other parts of the business to continue to operate without being entirely consumed when something goes wrong? Fill in the gaps where you believe your organization might be the most vulnerable when time and attention is being diverted to solving a problem.

  “Next,” Cohen advises, “formally identify which individuals will be responsible for communicating to the various audiences who will be affected.” There will often be a division of responsibility between communications professionals and media-trained senior leaders who will be tasked to speak with the media, and those who are best applied to communicating with internal stakeholders, outside agencies, business partners, and customers.

  The crisis communications plan is more than just a pipeline for framing messages and disseminating information. Your communications team can also be incredibly helpful in the overall response if they are leveraged as active and valued participants in the overall decision-making process.

  Consider the impact of the original incident in April 2017 involving United Airlines and Dr. David Dao, as compared to the incremental damage from aftershocks stemming from blaming the victim. The company’s response, both internally and externally, transformed the unnecessarily rough removal of a passenger from an overbooked flight from an extremely regrettable, but isolated, mistake into a brand statement that instead suggested an insensitivity to the welfare of the flying public. The immediate effect on United Airlines stock was a precipitous drop of 6.3 percent in premarket trading, a loss of $1.4 billion in market value. Although the stock recovered most of its value the following day, the reputational damage echoed beyond the expected lampooning by late-night talk show hosts. The following week, the New York Times reported on a survey that public perception of the United Airlines brand had been seriously affected. When respondents were asked to select from two flights to Chicago that were identical in price and schedule,
only 21 percent selected United Airlines over American Airlines from among those who had heard about the incident involving Dr. Dao, versus nearly half, 49 percent, of those who had not.

  PREPARING YOUR COMMS BEFORE THE STORM

  Developing your crisis communications strategies should be as integral a part of the project-planning process as the operational contingencies you put in place. Just as decision making will be immeasurably easier if you have a plan on what to DO when confronted with the most probable challenges, so too can the aftershocks be less damaging by focusing on what to SAY. For this reason, Ivy Cohen recommends that senior communications executives participate as active partners and advisors on any response team. She strongly suggests adding legal representation to provide a liability perspective to the communications team. Also, she recommends involving the human resources department to give guidance on sharing essential information with the teammates who are not directly participating in the response. We will return to these important notions in Chapter 22—Managing the Message.

  The crisis communications plan should also focus on HOW to best deliver messages—through direct contact by phone, e-mail, text, releases, press conferences, interviews, social media platforms, on websites, or using other platforms. For the Super Bowl, we could communicate with fans already in the stadium through our public address announcer, but to be able to reach the fans before they even entered the building, we printed a text registration option on the face of the game ticket that read: “For exclusive information, text [number] or follow us at @[Twitter handle].”