[00:00:00] Mel: Hi, and welcome to Less Chatter, More Matter, a podcast about all things communication without the waffle. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and in this show, I will give you short, punchy, practical communication tips and insights. You can start using in your communication practices right away. I'm a former corporate communication executive who happily took a redundancy, started my own business, and never looked back.

[00:00:27] Mel: These days, I use my 20 plus years of experience to help guide organisations of all shapes and sizes in how to communicate more effectively. I'm wife to Michael, cat mum to Cookie, aunty to 12 nieces and nephews, a yoga teacher, and a group fitness fanatic. I promise these episodes will always be short, sharp, and helpful, so let's get amongst it.

[00:00:52] Hi friends, and welcome to this week's episode of Less Chatter, More Matter. Thanks for tuning in for another week of learning [00:01:00] and a quick shout out to those of you who have shown you valued this learning and rated and reviewed the show.

[00:01:05] It means so much to me to know this is valuable stuff. One of my love languages is definitely acts of service. And speaking of acts of service, one of the things I love to do is help other people get started on their freelancing and consulting careers. Unfortunately, though, I just can't be everywhere at the same time, helping as many people as I'd like to, as much as I'd like to.

[00:01:30] So that's why I created my Fresh 2 Freelancing program, which kicks off next week on the 7th of February. Now, if that's of interest to you, check out the link I've popped in the show notes. It has all the details about what we cover in the program, what you get, all those sorts of things. Now, on to today's episode, which is all about crisis communication, but specifically scenario planning.

[00:01:52] Now, why this topic this week? Well, we're in well into a new year, so a lot of this planning would have hopefully been done already, but I know that's [00:02:00] just not the case. People run out of time and haven't just, I guess, prioritise this work as much as they should. And we really do need to prioritise it because every single business, no matter the size, should have a crisis communication plan in place ready to go because crises often occur out of the blue.

[00:02:19] You don't have time to sit back and thoughtfully plan when they happen, you just need to have a toolkit ready you can pull out at any moment and put into action. So for example, there's, let's say there's a safety incident at your workplace and that results in injuries or hackers break into your systems and steal a bunch of sensitive data.

[00:02:39] Those things are usually unplanned. Sometimes, though, we do have the luxury of a little bit more lead time. So, for example, there might be a court case that your company is involved with and you're waiting on the outcome, or you're heading into natural disaster season like we often do here in Australia.

[00:02:57] And so, you know, there's a good chance of [00:03:00] bushfires or cyclones occurring and impacting your customers and your staff. Maybe there's an upcoming shareholder vote that could result in big changes to your board or your company's constitution, for example. In all of these cases, it's not just a matter of having a few templates that you can whip out.

[00:03:17] You also need to have done the scenario planning to put yourself in the best position to respond well. Scenario planning is basically looking at a potential or current crisis. And then developing responses for different potential outcomes. Now, when you do this, even though it does take a bit of time, it means that you're not panicking and rushing around when that something does happen.

[00:03:40] Or when you finally get that outcome, you are well prepared and you can act quickly and during a crisis quickly. is important. Timely communication is everything because A, in some cases we need to keep people safe if there's imminent danger, but B, you want to be the first person to tell the story. [00:04:00] So in today's episode, I'm going to give you a quick step by step guide to crisis communication scenario planning.

[00:04:07] And step one is risk identification. So this is where you go through a process of identifying all the possible reputational risks to your business and then ranking them on how likely they are to occur and the impact if they did occur. Now that distinction is important, the reputational risks, because there are a bunch of other risks to business.

[00:04:27] But as comms professionals, we're focused on those that are likely to have a reputational risk. Now, it's not always an exact science. If you think back to COVID 19, I'm sure some companies had pandemic listed on their risk registers, but they probably didn't expect it to be so likely or so damaging. And there are other companies who would not have even thought a pandemic would impact us.

[00:04:50] But doing this process does help you be as prepared as possible and also understand if there are any gaps in the mitigation strategies for your business too. [00:05:00] So once you've identified Uh, all the reputational risks, then we rank them based on their likelihood to occur and the impact if they did occur.

[00:05:09] And I usually then recommend focusing on the top three to five for scenario planning. Now, if you do my crisis communications boot camp, I'll talk you through this process in much more detail and you will get a template for this. So don't stress. I'll share a link to that training in the show notes as well.

[00:05:25] Okay, so second step, once you've done the risk assessment, it's time to get more granular with those top three to five risks from your risk register. And this means identifying all the potential impacts of those risks. So, for example, if there's a fire at one of your factories, there could be impacts like death or injury, environmental pollution, disruption to sales and supplies, disruptions to customers, uh, reputational damage because you've had this safety incident, and so on.

[00:05:54] This is where scenario planning really starts. It's by looking at all the potential outcomes of [00:06:00] a situation. It's a little bit like a morbid version of choose your own adventure. If it's something less catastrophic and more long term, so let's say for example your company is in court being trialed for fraud or something, your scenario planning would focus on potential outcomes like you've been acquitted or you're found guilty, there's a big fine, there's potential for someone to go to jail, you're lodging an appeal, etc.

[00:06:24] There's all the possible scenarios you need to plan for. So that's step two, identifying the impacts. So step three becomes identifying the audiences or the stakeholders for each one of those scenarios. We're getting even more granular here, and this is where it can help to use a stakeholder matrix. So on one axis, you've got the level of impact of the scenario on different stakeholders, and the other access is the level of influence they may have in the business or the public domain, even.

[00:06:56] Now, this will then help you determine how you're going [00:07:00] to prioritise your communication when the time comes. And what level of effort you're going to put into each stakeholder group. So for example, if staff are likely to be highly impacted and would have a big, uh, influence over the future of the company, we are absolutely going to prioritize them over Joe blogs in the community, for example, who may not be as impacted.

[00:07:22] So, for example, let's say we have a situation where a company becomes the victim of a cyber attack, which we are seeing all the time now. Now, there's many possible scenarios like that, like the hackers breached security but didn't steal any data. Or they did steal data, but you're not sure how much or what exactly they stole.

[00:07:40] Another scenario might be that you do know what they stole and it's not that significant, or maybe it was significant, like the private and personal details of customers. Each one of those scenarios impacts audiences in different ways, including customers, team members, third party suppliers, and then you've got the media and the [00:08:00] general public as well.

[00:08:01] You need to be prepared with different communications for each audience group for each scenario. Now, I know that sounds like a lot of work, but trust me, you can really tell when companies are not prepared. The long term reputational risk is just not worth it. So step four becomes drafting your messaging and plans and as well as your FAQs for each scenarios.

[00:08:26] So this involves drafting out a sequence of communication showing who you're going to communicate with, when and how. You may also stand up some temporary channels to respond to different scenarios like a dedicated website or an intranet site, maybe a customer hotline, even a chat bot. All of those channels that might be just dedicated to communicating about this crisis scenario.

[00:08:50] Now, the usual rules of crisis messaging apply to all scenarios, and they are be transparent, be timely and be thoughtful. It's what I call the three T's of [00:09:00] trust. And I spoke more about those in one of our very first episodes, episode nine. You can find that by going to heymelcomms.com.au forward slash zero zero nine, or just scroll back through your podcast app.

[00:09:12] And the FAQs are really important as well, because if you can draft those out first, they help you draft your key messages. It also helps you think through, from your audience's perspective, what are the things they are likely wanting to know in each one of those scenarios. And you can use these as a basis for FAQs on your website and your intranet, for example.

[00:09:33] Okay, that's step four. We are up to step five, the final step in scenario planning, and that is testing. Test your comms plans. So this means you're going to run hypothetical situations with different internal stakeholders to make sure that everybody knows what the potential responses will be and their roles and responsibilities in the event of this crisis and these scenarios occur.

[00:09:57] So, for example, everyone should know who the [00:10:00] media spokesperson is and what to do if there are media or customer inquiries. The comms team should know who is reviewing and approving content and who is updating particular channels. So, testing these scenarios at least once a year puts you in the best position to have the confidence to respond quickly and effectively when, not if, but when, a crisis happens.

[00:10:22] And by testing, you can make sure that not only is everyone aware of what they need to do and when and how, but also you can tweak what isn't working and avoid even more chaos when the time comes. Okay, it's time for your episode recap. And on today's short but spicy episode, I've talked through the five steps of crisis communication scenario planning and why it's so important to do it.

[00:10:47] The first step is identify risks. So take the time to work with your internal stakeholders to understand the potential reputational risks to your business. And remember that some crises you'll have a long lead time on, [00:11:00] like the usual disaster season or court cases, but others come along when you least expect them.

[00:11:05] The best thing you can do is just be prepared. go through every possible risk that could impact your business's reputation. The second is identify potential impacts. So as we work through this list, we start to become more and more granular, more and more specific. So each crisis has multiple potential outcomes or impacts.

[00:11:26] So for example, a flood might just close down your operations for a few days, or it could result in long term closure to your business. It could also mean your staff and customers own homes and belongings are damaged. So this step is about getting more granular with the possible outcomes or your scenarios.

[00:11:44] The third step is identify your audiences and stakeholders for each scenario, and then rank them for each scenario according to the level of impact and the level of influence they have on your business's reputation. That's going to help you prioritize who you talk [00:12:00] to and how you talk to them in different scenarios, which leads us to step four, draft plans and messaging.

[00:12:07] So for each scenario, you will now draft a communication sequence and messaging and FAQs for the different stakeholder groups. Now, keep in mind, these will likely be high level and fairly general for now because every crisis is different, but they are a starting point and you can use them to make sure you tick all the boxes when the time comes.

[00:12:28] And step five, test your plans, run hypothetical scenarios every year and make sure the messaging is still accurate and make sure that your potential audiences, risks and impacts are still accurate and up to date too. And this is your opportunity to test your crisis communication processes, but also make sure everyone is aware of their roles and responsibilities.

[00:12:50] Now, if you are a savvy communicator, business leader, or business owner, then you want to make sure you are well prepared for when a crisis occurs. And remember, it [00:13:00] will at some point, unfortunately. If that is you, then do consider attending one of my Crisis Comms Boot Camps this Yeah, these are just one hour webinars once a day for five days with Q& A time, and I'll give you all the templates and the knowledge you need to develop your crisis comms plans and materials so you're confident you can respond well and protect your business's reputation.

[00:13:22] I've put a link in the show notes, or you can DM me if you have any questions. In the training, I share a stack of case studies from around the world, along with information on things like how to manage the media in a crisis, how to prepare leaders for crisis comms, checklists for what you should do in the first hour after a crisis occurs, and so much more.

[00:13:42] The training has had really great feedback, so I'm sure you will also get heaps out of it. Okay, that's all for today, folks. As always, if there's a topic you'd love me to cover on this podcast, please get in touch. And you can also check out the weekly blog on the website and sign up to my fortnightly update where we share comms related [00:14:00] news and learning opportunities from all across the globe.

[00:14:03] In the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.