2016 Guestbook
Comments and Responses

name:	Leesa Soulodre	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Reputation risk
date:	July 25, 2016
email:	ls@rlexpert.com
location:	Singapore

comment:

I recently had the opportunity to dine with Andrew Fastow, former Group CFO of Enron. It was an enlightening conversation.

I was astounded, having recently completed a desktop audit of listed Asian companies, to note that despite today’s more regulated and enlightened business environment, we continue to witness Enron-esque failures of corporate governance such as aggressive accounting practices.

Perhaps the one thing that surprised me most about Andrew’s case which was dated more than ten years ago, was that he was not jailed for breaking the law, but rather for abusing the principle of law. The Board or CEO had indeed signed off on every action.

Fastow observed that it is often the ambiguity and complexity of laws and regulations that breed opportunities for loopholes and problematic decisions. In his time as Chief Loophole Officer, these were Enron bonusable events, not corporate ethics or conduct violations.

While I appreciate that corporate directors, management, attorneys, and auditors should all ask the hard questions in order to ensure that companies not only follow the rules, but also uphold the principles behind them, my question to you is how you believe it’s best for Chief Reputation Risk Officers to proactively steer their companies through the global outrage battlefield when their operations are largely “distributed operations” – e.g. joint ventures, licensees, agents etc. operating in largely unregulated markets or in markets where Group Ethics and Conduct Standards cannot be easily enforced.

Given that these emerging markets are often the ones fueling growth for our global enterprises, the answer clearly isn’t just don’t operate there. I know our peers would be grateful to hear your expert opinion.

peter responds:

Readers unfamiliar with the Enron scandal of 2001 might want to read the Wikipedia articles on:

• Enron,
• the Enron scandal,
• Arthur Andersen, and
• Andrew Fastow.

In a nutshell, Enron looked like a hugely successful corporate giant making gargantuan profits out of innovative strategies of energy trading. But the company’s profits turned out to be illusory, a product of “innovative” and thoroughly dishonest financial recordkeeping that hid the company’s losses from shareholders, regulators, and everyone else – while top company officials including Fastow siphoned off millions of dollars for themselves. When the house of cards started to unravel, Enron’s share price plummeted to near-zero, leading to what was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in history. Tens of thousands of employees lost their jobs and pensions. Enron’s auditor, the Arthur Andersen company, had okayed the creative bookkeeping; it also went out of business after losing its public accountancy license for shredding Enron documents. Fastow was a cooperative witness in civil and criminal cases against his former colleagues, so he received a comparatively light sentence of six years in prison.

Your question to me isn’t really about Fastow or Enron. You want my take on how to manage reputation and avoid outrage in a decentralized organization that does business in many different cultures with different legal systems, different ethical norms, and different outrage hot buttons.

I’ll get to that, but first I want to address what you say about Enron and Fastow, particularly that Fastow “was not jailed for breaking the law, but rather for abusing the principle of law.” You add:

Fastow observed that it is often the ambiguity and complexity of laws and regulations that breed opportunities for loopholes and problematic decisions. In his time as Chief Loophole Officer, these were Enron bonusable events, not corporate ethics or conduct violations.

Even leaving aside the added complications that result from decentralized operations in a single global economy that is far from a single global culture, you’re raising a very tough issue: the porous boundaries separating – but not really separating – law, ethics, and outrage.

Illegal versus unethical versus unacceptable

I read your June 3, 2016 LinkedIn article on Fastow, “Financials hidden in plain sight – Ask ‘Why?’” At the end of that piece, you briefly mention the LEADS mnemonic developed by Mike Love:

1. Is it Legal? (Both locally and internationally)
2. Is it Ethical? (Is it regarded as unethical behavior by stakeholders even if legal?)
3. Is it Acceptable? (Is it criticized by some, but regarded as acceptable by most who matter most?)
4. Is it Defensible? (Could we defend our action if this became front page news?)
5. Is it Sensible? (Even if it failed all or some of the EAD criteria, does it still make good business sense?)

Love’s complaint is that too many decision-makers ask only the first question and the last, neglecting to consider whether their intentions are ethical, acceptable, or defensible. No quarrel there. But I want to tinker a bit with Love’s definitions. Here is my version of LEADS:

1. Is it Legal? (Both locally and internationally)
2. Is it Ethical? (Even if it’s legal, does it pass muster according to your own ethical standards?)
3. Is it Acceptable? (Even if it’s legal and you consider it ethical, will stakeholders, especially those you do or should care most about, be outraged that you did it?)
4. Is it Defensible? (If it provokes outrage in some stakeholders, could you defend it against their public opposition to the satisfaction of most stakeholders, especially those you do or should care most about?)
5. Is it Sensible? (Even if it passes all of the LEAD criteria, it might still be dumb. And even if it fails some of them, it might still be smart. Does it make good business sense?)

As your comments about Fastow suggest, it is hard to be sure that he and Enron’s other top managers broke clear laws they knew they were breaking, and thus deserved to be imprisoned. The principal alternative possibility is that they exploited loopholes, misbehaving in ways that were clearly unethical but weren’t clearly illegal (though probably they should have been) – in which case they merited shaming rather than imprisoning. Some of what they did might even have been considered ethical if it hadn’t turned out so badly, though some of it, at least, was clearly unethical.

But was it actually illegal? Answering that question would take a thorough knowledge of the details of Enron’s byzantine financial manipulations and an equally thorough knowledge of the relevant laws at the time. Even then, I suspect a fair analyst would end up concluding that there was a case to be made that Fastow and his colleagues broke the law and a contrary case that they cleverly, if unethically, evaded the law. It’s relevant to note that a major change in U.S. law, the multi-pronged Sarbanes-Oxley Act, resulted directly from the Enron scandal. The fact that Congress responded to Enron with a slew of new prohibitions at least suggests that maybe much of what Enron did wasn’t so clearly illegal at the time Enron was doing it.

Here’s what we know for sure. Enron’s collapse aroused widespread public outrage. When public outrage is high, officials look for people to blame – especially if the officials fear being blamed themselves (for legislating unwisely, failing to regulate properly, under-reacting to warning signs, etc.). The most effective way for officials to outsource blame is to find a law that somebody can be prosecuted and convicted for violating. And laws are vague enough that it is usually possible to accomplish this task, all the more so when juries and even judges are experiencing the same outrage as the general public.

Prudent corporate managers know that the boundaries are porous between “legal” and “ethical” and between “ethical” and “acceptable” in the LEADS mnemonic. Unacceptable outcomes arouse outrage, which causes the public to judge that somebody must have behaved unethically, which causes officials to look for a legal basis for punishing the miscreant or miscreants.

I suspect that society is more and more inclined to ignore the distinctions among unacceptable, unethical, and illegal. In the U.S., at least, we used to complain wryly that “there oughta be a law” to right every possible wrong, but we didn’t actually think there was one. Now we insist on it. In a society that distinguishes less and less between outrage-inducing and illegal (think “hate speech,” for example), arousing public outrage is more legally dangerous than it used to be.

Criminal prosecution isn’t the only legal risk increased by stakeholder outrage. Like prosecutors, regulators, too, are greatly influenced by community outrage. An infraction that arouses widespread controversy is far likelier to get regulatory attention than one that nobody notices or nobody minds. It’s also far likelier to get a tough penalty. It leads to more aggressive future oversight. Absent the controversy, in fact, the regulator might not have considered it an infraction at all.

Outrage has non-legal costs as well, of course. Corporate reputation is an asset; it is both a significant component of a company’s valuation and a significant contributor to the company’s profitability. That too is truer than it used to be. For a variety of reasons, customers, neighbors, shareholders, prospective investors, and other stakeholders are all increasingly responsive to a company’s reputation.

To a company’s reputations, rather. It has at least two: its good reputation (how loved it is) and its bad reputation (how hated it is). Seeing these two as opposite extremes on a single spectrum is a conceptual error. It is possible to be both much-loved and much-hated. Moreover, the public steps companies can take to burnish their positive reputation (philanthropy, for example) are entirely different than the steps they can take to ameliorate their negative reputation (apologizing, for example). Often the two are in direct competition: The things you do to calm your critics may irritate your supporters, while what you do to rally your supporters may enrage your critics.

There are other things companies can do that should please allies and opponents alike, such as improving working conditions or reducing dangerous emissions. But much of the time they have to choose whom to please. For a detailed argument that ameliorating negatives matters more than burnishing positives, see my 2010 column on “Two Kinds of Reputation Management.”

Enron neglected to look after its negative reputation. This is one way to view the company’s demise and the conviction of some of its senior managers: as outcomes of its failure to anticipate and manage stakeholder outrage.

Legal punishment for outrage offenses

I feel very queasy about your assertion that Enron executives were punished for violating principles, as opposed to actual laws. Legal systems do punish people for that. But I think they shouldn’t.

Sometimes it’s not even principles, it’s outrage masquerading as principles. When the whole society feels outraged at an outcome, it tries to figure out whom to blame. It wants to blame somebody! So outrage sometimes leads to the enunciation of “ethical principles” that not only were never codified into laws; they weren’t even seen as ethical principles until something bad happened that got people outraged. Sometimes, in fact, these new, ad-hoc ethical principles would look pretty questionable if expressed as abstractions; they’re made-to-order to punish the perpetrators of a particular bad outcome. And then prosecutors and regulators are motivated, or even pressured, to find a legal way to punish the person or company everybody’s trying to blame.

Enron aside, there are far too many instances of that process at work in the U.S. – so there are undoubtedly even more instances in societies with weaker traditions of the rule of law.

See for example the 2010 dialogue on this website entitled “What Did Goldman Sachs Do Wrong?”, in which I argue that widespread outrage at an awful outcome – the Global Financial Crisis – triggered a search for scapegoats that ended in prosecutions for finance industry behavior which, absent the outcome, would have been considered neither illegal nor unethical. My point in a nutshell: It made far more sense to be angry at government for deregulating the finance industry than at the industry for maximizing profit in ways permitted by the (deregulated) laws. Just as the Enron scandal led to the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, the Global Financial Crisis led to a multitude of new laws and regulations. That’s at least a strong hint that the crisis was a product more of under-regulation than of corporate malfeasance.

Of course it’s not that simple. Companies lobby. They persuade or push or sometimes even pay government officials to make something legal or keep something legal that ought to be illegal (ought to be illegal because there’s a consensus that it’s unethical, perhaps; or for some other reason, such as because it’s too dangerous to allow whether it’s ethical or not – because it’s dangerously likely to trigger a global economic disaster, for example). Having successfully opposed laws and regulations that would have stopped them from doing what they want to do, companies do it; it leads to bad outcomes; people get outraged; everyone looks for ways to punish the companies – and then someone like me comes come along and say that’s not fair; they just followed the incentive system; we should blame the government, not them. I don’t for a moment dispute that companies have too damn much control over the incentive system.

Once we accept that the distinction between companies and governments isn’t so rigid, that they’re in it together, then outrage is one of the public’s key lobbying tools – a way for the public to counterbalance corporate power. Companies too often lobby governments to make undesirable behavior legal. Public outrage too often motivates governments to treat that behavior as if it were illegal anyway. There’s a kind of balance there.

Still, consider the current effort to prosecute ExxonMobil for “hiding” global warming research. Decades before climate change became a hot public issue, in-house researchers at the company found preliminary evidence that global warming might get bad. They published their studies freely. Their findings also helped convince management to make some internal policy changes in case they were right. But they didn’t convince management to abandon the company’s core business, fossil fuels. In many of its internal decisions and nearly all of its public positions, the company continued to see the threat of climate change as comparatively minor. The company also supported organizations dedicated to pooh-poohing climate change concerns; sometimes the support was public and sometimes it wasn’t. Only much later did ExxonMobil start taking global warming more seriously in its strategic decisions and public statements, for example by supporting a carbon tax.

I find it hard to see misbehavior here – even ethical misbehavior, much less legal misbehavior. ExxonMobil funded research, published the research, considered the research, rejected most of its implications, and tried to convince everybody else to do likewise. I find it especially hard to see this as a violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, designed to facilitate the prosecution of mobsters. For sure ExxonMobil is accountable in the court of public opinion for its long history of doubting the seriousness of climate change and promoting the interests of fossil fuels. But if it were a crime for a company to pay for research, publish the research, and then promote policy positions to the contrary, what company would dare ask its scientists to investigate difficult questions?

I can’t judge if the ExxonMobil prosecutions are showboating or if they actually stand a reasonable chance of succeeding. But public outrage at the company never entirely subsided after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. There are plenty of climate change reasons and other reasons for millions of people to see ExxonMobil as a bad guy. And outrage leads publics, politicians, and juries to want to get the bad guy. At a minimum, legal proceedings are being used to make ExxonMobil pay a reputational price for its policy positions – and to serve notice on other companies that they may pay a similar price if they espouse viewpoints that a later consensus judges to be wrong.

Readers who have trouble sympathizing with ExxonMobil or entertaining the possibility that ExxonMobil is be being unjustly prosecuted can consider instead the various legal actions against Planned Parenthood for (supposedly) selling fetal body parts. Like ExxonMobil, Planned Parenthood behaved in ways that aroused some people’s outrage, and found itself in outrage-motivated legal hot water, despite the scarcity of evidence that it violated any actual laws

Or think about the crusade the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is conducting against electronic cigarettes (e-cigs). The weight of the evidence, I believe, supports the view that vaping e-cigs is much, much safer than smoking real cigarettes. CDC periodically publishes research on smoking and vaping. Some of that research arguably contradicts CDC’s anti-vaping policy stance.

As far as I know the research is honest, but there are times when CDC is less than honest in how it interprets the research for the general public. One of those times is detailed in my 2015 column, “A Promising Candidate for Most Dangerously Dishonest Public Health News Release of the Year.”

Sounds like ExxonMobil, doesn’t it? CDC publishes unbiased e-cig research, then spins the results to support its anti-vaping bias. I believe CDC’s opposition to electronic cigarettes is killing people. But CDC presumably believes it is saving lives. And even I wouldn’t support a criminal prosecution under RICO against the agency or its leaders.

As a citizen, I am outraged that outrage motivates criminal prosecutions. But as a consultant, I take that as a given – as one of the many costs of outrage. As I tell my clients, you might just as well be outraged that acid has such a low pH.

I see five bottom-line lessons so far:

What about ethics?

So far I have focused mostly on the relationship between law and outrage. Where does ethics fit?

Other people’s ethical standards are vital contributors to both law and outrage. When some people’s ethical standards are violated, they often get outraged. And when enough people’s ethical standards are violated, their outrage can drive the effort to make new laws.

Your own ethical standards are moot if they cover things already covered by law and/or outrage. If something is illegal, that’s reason enough not to do it – and it’s weird to hear you attribute your legally obligatory behavior to your own high ethical standards, as if you were obeying the law only because you happen to agree with it. And if something outrages your stakeholders, that’s reason enough not to do it – and it’s insulting to hear you take ethical credit for giving in to stakeholders’ outraged demands, as if you were giving in only because you happen to think they’re right.

The latter point is worth emphasizing. “We’re being responsive, doing what you think is right” is a much better message in mid-controversy than “We’re being responsible, doing what we think is right.” When a company caves in to stakeholder demands, it is in fact being responsive, not responsible (except to its shareholders). Because it’s the truth, the responsiveness claim is far likelier to be credible, and a whole lot less likely to be offensive. It is a huge and all-too-common mistake to respond appropriately to stakeholders’ outrage and then claim you’re adhering to your own values rather than deferring to theirs, thereby undermining your credibility and stealing their credit. For more on this, see my 2006 column on “Giving Away the Credit: Managing Risk Controversies by Claiming You’re Responsive (though maybe not responsible)” or my video or audio on the same topic.

But sometimes your ethics are the only standard in play. There’s no relevant law and no likely outrage, and you are genuinely guided exclusively by your own sense of right and wrong. That’s why ethics belongs in the LEADS mnemonic, to remind us all that we should be guided by our sense of right and wrong even when there’s no relevant law and no likely outrage. I doubt it’s useful to do a lot of messaging about it, though; just do the right thing.

There’s one final possibility: when your ethical standards tell you to do one thing but the prevailing law or your stakeholders’ outrage tells you to do something else entirely. Obeying the law or deferring to outrage will force you to violate your own ethics. Adhering to your ethical standards will force you to break the law or outrage your stakeholders. This dilemma doesn’t come up all the time. But it does come up, particularly in cross-cultural and cross-national settings.

And it can be excruciating. Consider these two examples (or, more likely, consider just one of them, the one that honors your own ethical principles):

I don’t have an easy answer to this dilemma. A piece of the answer depends on how fundamental you think the ethical issue is. Another piece of the answer depends on whether it’s feasible to stay out of the conflict or you have to take a stand one way or the other. We all hope that if we had been 17th century ship captains we would have refused to traffic in slaves, and that if we had been 20th century German chemical company executives we would have refused to manufacture gas for the concentration camps. But we see lesser injustices and feel entitled to “mind our own business” rather than undermining our businesses by speaking out.

If you want to read more along these lines, see my 1999 correspondence with John Elkington and Chris Marsden, “Responsible or Responsive?”

As a sort of summary, let me return to where we started: Enron and Andrew Fastow.

Fastow now gives ethics lectures to business executives and business schools. One of the key points he makes over and over is the same one you made in your comment, that he was imprisoned not for breaking the law but for abusing the principle of law. In other words, he was imprisoned for being unethical.

As CFO of Enron, Fastow found profitable legal loopholes. For a while, he was lionized in business circles for finding profitable legal loopholes. But when everything went sour and some $40 billion in market value disappeared overnight, the whole society became outraged, and Fastow transitioned instantly from famous to infamous. So everyone looked again, more critically, at Fastow’s loopholes. The universal outrage motivated prosecutors, judges, and juries to decide that at least some of the loopholes weren’t loopholes after all; they were actually illegal all the time. So Fastow and his colleagues went to prison.

The moral of Fastow’s story: Loopholes aren’t reliable. If things go sour, stakeholder outrage will cause “just barely legal” to morph into “illegal” before your eyes, and you’ll go to prison. Your only protection, Fastow says, is ethics. You need to create a corporate culture that doesn’t seek out just-barely-legal loopholes in the first place.

Consider this excerpt from a 2015 article – one of dozens of articles on Fastow’s many speeches – entitled “Here’s a Simple Lesson on Business Ethics From the Former CFO of Enron”:

The point he makes, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that business ethics can be a tricky thing. Practices that are perfectly legal and widespread can be unethical. While the off-balance sheet transactions that triggered Enron’s collapse were approved by the company’s lawyers, accountants and management, Fastow said, he nevertheless deserved to go to jail for misleading investors.

As Fastow said at the event on Wednesday: “I wasn’t the chief finance officer at Enron, I was the chief loophole officer.”

To illustrate his point, the former CFO now-turned business consultant outlined a few accounting scenarios that one may or may not think are misleading. He points out that many of them are in wide use and are perfectly legal under current regulations.

I’m not sure I agree with Fastow that ethics is the only protection. Understanding how outrage affects the way law gets interpreted might help too. Both together would be best.

Outrage management for a decentralized global enterprise

As if all the above weren’t complicated enough, it gets a whole lot more complicated when a business operates across a wide range of countries, each with its own legal standards (or absence of legal standards) and each with its own cultural values and outrage hot buttons.

How can a decentralized multinational corporation with global reach into wildly different countries and cultures police the outrage management practices of its many arms?

This wasn’t a major issue for Enron. Although Enron did have operations in other countries, it was an American-run corporation whose sudden collapse outraged the American public, provoking American criminal prosecutions.

But it is a major issue for many of your clients, as it has been for many of mine. I don’t have a comprehensive answer, a blueprint for global outrage management. But the following four points might be a step toward such an answer.

One final point: It’s not always easy to tell when a company policy is motivated by ethics, law, or outrage – or a fourth possibility, public relations (“good reputation,” basically). And maybe it’s not important to figure out which it is.

For example, companies sometimes decide to impose worldwide standards on themselves, even though no law requires them to do so. A company might adopt the toughest legal standard of any country in which it operates as its voluntary standard wherever it operates. Or a company might adopt a code promulgated by an international NGO, committing itself to obey the code as if it were international law. Some companies have adopted these kinds of worldwide standards governing pollution, safety, corruption, transparency, etc.

Why do many multinational companies impose worldwide standards on themselves when they don’t have to?

• In part, they’re seeking the simplicity and efficiency that comes with a one-size-fits-all set of rules.
• In part, they’re motivated by considerations of traditional public relations. Companies with tough voluntary standards typically showcase those standards and hope to reap “good reputation” benefits.
• In part, they’re in pursuit of a legal safe harbor. Regulators often see a company’s voluntarily adopted standards as a sensible reason to focus their regulatory efforts elsewhere. If a company is holding itself to a set of standards tougher than your country’s laws, why spend a lot of time looking for violations of your laws?
• In part they’re truly enforcing their own ethical values – especially about safety. When I talk to certain clients about their tough worldwide safety standards, I really get the feeling their commitment to those standards is heartfelt.
• And in part – often the largest part – they’re trying to manage outrage. I have helped clients negotiate agreements to adhere to some code promulgated by an NGO. Usually the companies that were interested in signing up were already under attack or trying to avoid coming under attack.

It’s only in theory that law, ethics, and outrage are separate sieves. In practice they’re often entangled.

name:	Diane MacEachern	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Still an environmental activist after all these years – and still using the communications skills I honed in Ann Arbor!
date:	July 5, 2016
location:	Maryland, U.S.

comment:

What strategies and tactics could the Clinton campaign and others use to communicate the risks posed by a Trump presidency?

To date, Donald Trump is the ultimate Teflon candidate. Despite his racism, sexism, misogyny and crudeness, and the violence and physical brutality he condones, his support is growing among voters. Point-by-point rebuttals don’t seem to diminish his standing. Even comparisons to Hitler don’t stick.

Where is the chink in his armor? Or, where is the opening in voters’ minds that will allow them to grasp the threats they face if Trump is elected?

name:	Ben Duncan	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Freelance expert, former EU civil servant
date:	July 5, 2016
email:	ben@warningproject.org
location:	Scotland, and sometimes Belgium and France

comment:

Over the last few weeks and months a variety of experts, international organizations and even the President of the United States have lined up to warn the British public of the economic and political risks involved in leaving the European Union (EU).

Polling evidence and the media echo during the campaign showed that these warnings were failing to resonate with voters. On 24 June, 52% of voters opted to leave the EU.

Of course this all happened during a highly charged political campaign, and to a large extent the result can be put down to the success of the “Leave” campaign. Nonetheless, are there some risk communication lessons to be drawn from the failure of the “Remain” campaign? Could the very real risks of leaving the EU have been better communicated?

peter responds:

Diane MacEachern was my graduate student in environmental communication at the University of Michigan 40 years ago, before she went on to found Vanguard Communications and then Big Green Purse. Her Guestbook comment on how to defeat Donald Trump arrived in early May. I postponed responding, thinking maybe I’d get one on how to defeat Hillary Clinton and could tackle them together. Instead, I received a Guestbook comment about the defeat of Brexit from Ben Duncan, a more recent friend and colleague from when he managed risk communication at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Tackling Trump and Brexit together works too.

The U.S. phenomenon of Donald Trump’s success (so far) and the U.K. phenomenon of Brexit’s success (probably irreversible) have both been analyzed ad nauseam.

Even the relationship between the two has received more-than-ample attention, as a Google search for “Trump Brexit” reveals. Many articles are about Trump’s June 24 Brexit news conference. But more are about the various commonalities between the Trump phenomenon and the Brexit phenomenon, and the question of what if anything Brexit’s surprise victory might foretell about the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Brexit polls showed “Remain” ahead of “Leave”; election polls show Clinton ahead of Trump. “Leave” won. Will Trump?

More fundamentally, both Trump and Brexit are (partly, not entirely) manifestations of the same forces, especially anti-immigration, anti-free trade, and anti-Muslim fervor. Even more fundamentally than that, both are (again partly) manifestations of an anti-elite revolution. As income inequality has worsened in both countries, working class people in the U.S. and the U.K. have become increasingly convinced that public policy is formulated by and for elites; that people like them neither participate in key decisions nor benefit from the outcomes of those decisions. There may be debate over whether they’re right in thinking that (I believe they are), but it’s pretty clear that that’s what they believe. For many in the pro-Trump and pro-Brexit ranks, “taking back their country” – from liberals, from secularists, from bureaucrats in Washington or in Brussels, and especially from elites – is more than a metaphor; it is a passionately felt mission.

And it’s pretty clear that in 2016 they are prepared to act in accord with their beliefs. Again, there is room for disagreement over the extent to which Trump and Brexit supporters are acting out of their ideological convictions and policy preferences or out of their anger and frustration – and how happy or unhappy they’re likely to be with the outcomes they’re seeking. Either way, they’re no longer acceding to elite judgments about what’s good for them. Trump’s imminent nomination is the result in the U.S. Brexit is the result in the U.K.

All that has been said and said and said. So what can I add?

The two risk communication questions being posed to me are these: What can Clinton supporters do to convince people about the risks posed by Trump, and what could “Remain” supporters have done to convince people about the risks posed by Brexit? I think these are largely the same question.

Warning people about the risks of Trump or Brexit is of course a precaution advocacy task. All risk warnings are precaution advocacy: “This is dangerous, and here’s what you should do to prevent or ameliorate or respond to the risk.”

But Trump and Brexit warnings are different in an important way from most of the precaution advocacy I have written about. The paradigmatic barrier to most precaution advocacy efforts is apathy: People aren’t upset enough about the risk. I’ve also written a good deal about the opposite barrier, denial: People are so upset about the risk they can’t bear to deal with it.

But the core problem when you’re trying to warn people about Trump or Brexit is neither apathy nor denial. It is the attractiveness of Trump and Brexit despite (or even because of) their riskiness.

Warning people about Trump or Brexit, in other words, isn’t like warning people about the problem of antibiotic resistance or the danger of dehydration if you don’t drink enough fluids during a heat wave, unequivocally bad things you want them to pay more attention to. It’s more like warning people about seductive but unwise life choices – for example, warning your best friend about his drug habit or her loser boyfriend. Or it’s like warning your pregnant colleague to skip her cousin’s wedding in Rio that she’s been looking forward to for months because Zika poses too high a risk to her baby. The problem isn’t that people don’t know Trump/Brexit is dangerous. The problem is that they have strong reasons to want to take the risk.

Not only that. Much of the appeal of Trump/Brexit is grounded in outrage – outrage at decades of being ignored or disdained by elites of all political stripes. Trump and “Leave” campaigners validate, respect, and empathize with this outrage. And then they stoke it, harness it, and steer it. This makes Trump and Brexit hugely attractive to their supporters, regardless of the risks. Doing precaution advocacy with a target audience of outraged stakeholders is especially difficult.

The solution, I think, is grounded in the risk communication seesaw, including some aspects of the seesaw that I haven’t sufficiently addressed previously.

Identifying the target audience

In the case of both Trump and Brexit, we can simplify and clarify the question by figuring out who the target audience ought to be.

I’m not talking here about the target audience for the entire Clinton or “Remain” campaign – just that portion of the campaign focused on the precaution advocacy message that Trump/Brexit is unacceptably risky.

These three points are fundamental, I think:

I haven’t studied the mammoth accumulation of Trump and Brexit poll data – and poll data rarely dig deeply enough to document ambivalence anyway.

But I have seen polls that showed a significant cohort of people who consider Trump unqualified to be president but who nonetheless plan to vote for him. No doubt this is partly because they dislike Clinton so much, but I think it’s mostly because they find Trump’s positions, style, and capacity to disrupt the status quo sufficiently attractive that these virtues outweigh that potent negative.

A June 25 Washington Post – ABC News Poll, for example, found that 64 percent of Americans consider Trump unqualified, including nearly a third of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. But 11 percent of those who said Trump is unqualified also said they intend to vote for him anyway. If the election is at all close, they’re potentially a decisive bloc.

“Unqualified” is a very strong condemnation for a presidential candidate. You’d think if any negative would be dispositive, that one would!

So weaker criticisms of Trump – including risk-related words like “bullheaded” or “intemperate” – are presumably even more compatible with deciding, on balance, to vote for him anyway. (This isn’t unique to Trump, of course. Plenty of people who plan to vote for Clinton consider her untrustworthy.)

There are millions of Americans who really think a President Trump might do the country and the world enormous good – break the logjam in Washington, force the elites to pay attention to ordinary people, knock some heads nationally and internationally, make America great again. But they also think he’s a huge risk. Clinton seems to them the wrong sort of leader, but wrong in a very familiar way, following in the footsteps of her husband and her predecessor. They don’t like the directions they think a Clinton presidency would take us, but she’s not likely to be catastrophic as President. Trump might be. Or he might be exactly the shock therapy the country needs. They long for that, but worry, really worry, about the possible catastrophe.

That’s who you need to be talking to.

An October 22, 2015 Peggy Noonan Wall Street Journal column captured this ambivalent audience perfectly:

A relative and early Trump enthusiast said Wednesday on the phone, “He’s – he’s not going to go in there and say, ‘I’ll bomb someone,’ right? I mean he’ll have the regular professional generals and all the military people surrounding him, giving him advice – right?” I could hear a certain wavering. But then he stopped talking because he didn’t want to wind up in a column.

I think (as Noonan obviously does) that her relative represents a sizable and important slice of the American electorate: people who like many things about Trump, perhaps including his capacity and inclination to disrupt the status quo, but nonetheless worry about the risks a Trump presidency might pose. For an audience of people who consider Trump both attractive and risky, the task of Clinton supporters isn’t to convince them that Trump is risky. It certainly isn’t to berate them for finding Trump attractive. The task is to bring to the fore the side of their ambivalence that is already worried about the risk.

Noonan’s relative is a Trump supporter, albeit an anxious one who might be persuaded to switch sides if his anxiety about Trump came to overshadow his enthusiasm. That’s the core ambivalent audience I’m talking about.

It’s worth mentioning that there are ambivalent Trump opponents as well – people who plan to vote for Clinton even though there are some things about Trump that they like. This may be a reasoned, conscious decision: “Trump says things I wish I felt free to say. I like his spontaneity, emotional intelligence, authenticity, and candor – and even some of his positions. But he’s too unreliable, too uninformed to be president. And too intemperate – what if he launched a nuclear war! I might be tempted to vote for him if only I could reassure myself that he’s not an unacceptably risky choice.” The ambivalence of other Trump opponents may be unconscious and disavowed. I’m sure there are people who genuinely disapprove of Trump and fully intend to vote for Clinton, no question – but there’s still something about Trump they find riveting, and they keep checking him out, almost against their will, out of the corner of their eye.

Ambivalent Trump opponents also deserve some attention from Clinton campaigners. But I think ambivalent Trump supporters are paramount.

Were ambivalent “Leave” supporters similarly important in the Brexit referendum? I think they were, but I’m not sure.

One sign of Brexit ambivalence was the closeness of the polls, with lots of people saying they were undecided – 18% two months before the referendum and 9% just a few days before.

And U.K. media kept quoting voters who explicitly said they were torn – in their hearts they wanted out, but in their heads they worried about what might come next. An apparently big bloc of voters accepted the arguments of the “Remain” campaign that leaving the E.U. would pose serious risks to the economy, jobs, trade, security, etc. But they disliked the loss of sovereignty that E.U. membership represented to them; they disliked many of the laws, regulations, and policies that E.U. membership had forced on them; and they absolutely hated what felt like the disdain of those bureaucrats in Brussels. The choice they faced – to reluctantly vote “Remain” or anxiously vote “Leave” – was a tough call.

Perhaps another sign of ambivalence is the extraordinary number of “Leave” voters who indicated in the days after the referendum that they had changed their minds and wanted a do-over.

I can’t quantify how many ambivalent Brexit supporters there were, nor how many ambivalent Trump supporters there are. But I suspect ambivalent “Leave” voters were pivotal in the passage of Brexit – which might not have passed if “Remain” campaigners had understood better how to address their ambivalence. And I suspect ambivalent voters will again be pivotal in the outcome of the U.S. presidential race.

So let me turn, then, to the question of how to talk to ambivalent people.

Targeting an ambivalent audience: riding the seesaw

I’m postulating a cohort of ambivalent voters: people who are seriously concerned about the riskiness of Trump or Brexit, but still find other things about Trump/Brexit exceedingly attractive (though they may hesitate to say so … to pollsters among others). Some days they’re anxiously planning to vote for Trump or for “Leave”; other days they’re reluctantly planning to vote for Clinton or for “Remain.”

The key risk communication tool for targeting an ambivalent audience is the seesaw. This is how I put it in a 2005 column (with most of the juicy examples removed for the sake of brevity):

Seesaw … is the game to play when people are ambivalent – when they believe X and Y simultaneously, even though X and Y are not entirely compatible..

Here’s the paradox of the seesaw: When people are ambivalent, they will tend to resolve their ambivalence by emphasizing the half of it that everyone else seems to be neglecting. If you say X, in other words, I’ll say Y. If you say Y, I’ll say X. (Those who have raised teenagers understand this phenomenon. Teenagers are ambivalent about almost everything.)…

So how do you get an ambivalent audience to end up on the X seat? You take the Y seat, all the while providing lots of evidence to support X. “Even though we have pretty good understanding of this and this and this, there is still so much we don’t know!” Or as the World Health Organization’s David Heymann said during the SARS crisis: “We are building our boat and sailing it at the same time.” People tended to have a lot of confidence in Heymann. It wasn’t despite his acknowledgments of uncertainty; it was because of them. …

[S]eesaws are intrinsically unstable. When you take the Y seat on the seesaw, that temporarily inclines me to the X seat, where you wanted me. But I’m still ambivalent; I’m just expressing the half of my ambivalence you didn’t emphasize much. For a longer-term resolution, consider inching your way from your seat toward the fulcrum. In keeping with the exquisite geometry of the seesaw, my response will be move toward the fulcrum too. We can meet in the middle, where grownups live, able to keep in mind simultaneously the truth of X and the truth of Y.

What does the seesaw teach us about what sort of messaging stands (or in the case of Brexit, stood) the best chance of helping ambivalent voters resolve their ambivalence about Trump or Brexit in the direction of a Clinton or “Remain” vote?

Based on these rules-of-thumb, we can rank-order the messaging strategies for ambivalent audiences from best to worst:

1	Best     ⇓	Subordinate the side of your audience’s ambivalence you favor to the side you oppose: “Even though voting for Trump/Brexit is risky, I get why it’s attractive.”
2		Subordinate the side you oppose to the side you favor, but give them equal attention: “Even though I get why it’s attractive, voting for Trump/Brexit is risky.”
3		Focus on the side you favor, with a perfunctory bow to the side you oppose: “Here’s my long disquisition on why voting for Trump/Brexit is risky, and by the way I get why some people think it’s attractive.”
4		Focus exclusively on the side you favor: “Voting for Trump/Brexit is risky.”
5	⇑	Focus on the side you favor and attack the side you oppose: “Voting for Trump/Brexit is risky, and only a fool or worse would find it an attractive option.”
6	Worst	Just attack the side you oppose: “Only a fool or worse would find it attractive to vote for Trump/Brexit.”

In the Brexit referendum, “Remain” campaigners made by far the greatest use of #4, or at best #3. They endlessly insisted on the dangers of Brexit, with only an occasional pro forma acknowledgment of its appeals.

In an analysis written two weeks before the vote, one pro-“Leave” pollster and commentator wrote:

It was probably a mistake for the “Remain” campaign to go nuclear so early. Their claims that leaving the E.U. would be a catastrophe for Britain’s economy and security, and the lurid terms in which they were made, probably weakened their case rather than strengthened it. The approach undermined the campaign’s believability; as wavering voters in my final round of focus groups said last week, the warnings became “white noise.” A less frantic tone, arguing that the E.U. had plenty of faults but on balance we were better off in – rather than that calamity would ensue were we to leave – might have sounded more credible and, particularly from David Cameron, more convincing.

Worse yet, I am stunned by how often Clinton campaigners have opted for #5 on my list – and then wonder why it doesn’t work well.

If I think Trump is risky even though he’s appealing, and you say he’s both risky and unappealing, the first thing I hear is that you don’t get Trump’s appeal. Instead of feeling reinforced in my view that he’s risky, which we share, I end up disputing in my mind your claim that he’s unappealing.

Both ambivalent Trump supporters (he’s risky but so damn appealing) and ambivalent Trump opponents (he’s appealing but so damn risky) are unlikely to be responsive to any argument about Trump’s riskiness that keeps company with insistence that he’s not in the least appealing – or, worse yet, insistence that anyone who finds him appealing in any way is … whatever: racist, rightwing, wacko, misogynist, anti-Semitic, ignorant.

The best messenger for the message that Trump is unacceptably risky is someone who wishes he weren’t, who has cherished the hope that the campaign would mature him, who has reluctantly and gradually decided it’s impossible to vote for the man despite his appeal.

That’s how the seesaw works.

Playing seesaw is a lot to expect of a committed campaigner

Maybe I shouldn’t be so stunned that Clinton campaigners have trouble acknowledging any way in which Trump is appealing. Most Clinton campaigners don’t see any way in which Trump is appealing.

If you genuinely think support for Trump is incomprehensible-bordering-on-evil, it’s hard to see the ways in which a reasonable person might find him an appealing candidate. It’s even harder to make yourself try to “acknowledge” those ways. And it may be impossible to sound sincere, respectful, and empathic when doing so.

This is a symmetrical problem. Here is a key finding from a May 2016 poll that asked people whether they understood why somebody might choose to vote for Trump or Clinton. Sixty-five percent of Democrats said they couldn’t understand why anyone would vote for Trump. Seventy-two percent of Republicans said they couldn’t understand why anyone would vote for Clinton.

Presumably an even lower percentage of campaigners for Clinton, tasked with selling the message that Trump is risky, would have a decent understanding of Trump’s appeal to the key ambivalent audience.

It is tempting to comment at length about aspects of Trump’s appeal that I think Clinton campaigners have difficulty seeing, much less acknowledging. I am going to resist this temptation for several reasons. One, I can’t really expect Clinton campaigners (for example my old friend Diane MacEachern, who launched this Guestbook response in the first place) to find any disquisition on Donald Trump’s virtues enlightening or even acceptable. Two, since I am by no means a Trump supporter, I don’t want to attract anti-Trump vitriol by saying nice things about him. And three, I want to keep my focus on risk communication and especially the seesaw, not on the merits of the presidential candidates.

But I can’t resist mentioning two key elements of Trump’s appeal that Clinton campaigners seem unable to detect:

• Political incorrectness. Beyond doubt, he says a lot of untruths (some of them offensive). But he also says, often in an exaggerated way, a lot of true or somewhat true things that aren’t conventionally “allowed” to be said (some of them offensive as well). Yet I suspect many Clinton campaigners can’t think of a single thing Trump has ever said that had a grain of inconvenient truth in it.
• Charm. There are millions of people who can’t see past his boastfulness, his insults, and his all-too-frequent sneer. But millions of others find him likeable – a rich, irrepressible Everyman. Both Trump and Clinton are apparently warm on a one-on-one basis. Clinton seems unable to project that warmth to crowds or TV audiences. Trump does so with ease. Whether you respond to Trump’s charm or are immune to it is a kind of litmus test.

In the Brexit campaign, I suspect, “Remain” proponents also had blind spots for some of the appeals of leaving the European Union. Certainly they had trouble acknowledging those appeals respectfully and empathically. It’s easy to find arrogant, disdainful quotes from the “Remain” side of Brexit about the “Leave” side. And there’s no question in my mind that many “Leave” supporters felt their patriotic impulses were being stereotyped as intolerant and nativist. The progressive establishments in Europe and the U.K. are typically more respectful of non-European movements for national self-determination than they were of the Brexit movement.

But I have spent a lot more time reading and thinking about these issues with regard to Trump. So I need to leave open the question of how able and willing at least some “Remain” proponents were to acknowledge the appeal of “Leave.”

I am not recommending that opponents try to fake a respect and empathy they don’t actually feel for the reasons and feelings underlying support for Trump or Brexit. People can tell when they’re being insincerely patronized. Try to develop that respect and empathy. Or find spokespeople who have it.

In a nutshell

In the U.S. presidential race, there are millions of people who are torn between two almost identical ambivalent positions:

• I like a great deal about Trump that I don’t like about Clinton. But the bottom line is that he’d be a dangerously unpredictable president, and that’s too big a risk to take. I think I will probably vote for Clinton, but reluctantly.
• Trump would be a dangerously unpredictable president. But I like a great deal about Trump that I don’t like about Clinton, and that’s too big a factor to ignore. I think I will probably vote for Trump, but nervously.

(Remember: None of this applies to unambivalent, all-in supporters of Trump or Clinton.)

If you want to talk this ambivalent audience into voting for Clinton – the first instead of the second of these two positions – you need to acknowledge what they like about Trump that they don’t like about Clinton. You don’t have to agree with their reasons for preferring Trump; you can still be an enthusiastic, unambivalent Clinton supporter. But you have to show that you get why they are so attracted to Trump – sincerely, respectfully, and empathically.

The Clinton campaign and too many Clinton supporters come across as contemptuous of just about everything that others find appealing about Trump. That makes it difficult or maybe even impossible for them to be credible or persuasive when warning about the riskiness of a Trump presidency.

Similarly, Brexit was (and is) simultaneously scary and appealing to many Brits. The result was ambivalence. “Remain” campaigners may have failed to see the appeal of the “Leave” position. They mostly failed to acknowledge it with anything like sincerity, respect, and empathy. Those failures undermined their efforts to assert the dangers of Brexit, and contributed importantly to the success of Brexit at the polls.

Ben responds:

You make a compelling case for the use of the seesaw as a way to reach out to ambivalent voters. My two takeaways from your article are:

1. David Cameron and his Conservative colleagues campaigning for “Remain” should have made more use of the seesaw when reaching out to ambivalent voters.
2. The chances of the Democrats making use of the seesaw in reaching out to ambivalent Trump supporters are slim.

Point 2 is rather depressing as there are Democrats, particularly from the “Rust Belt” states, who could credibly reach out to some of the ambivalent Trump supporters. However, as you rightly say, they won’t do this because they fear being demonized by others within their party. Maybe, in any case, it simply is not possible to attempt this type of segmentation in the full glare of media scrutiny during an election campaign.

The irony is that David Cameron and most of the other “Remainers” were in the perfect position to say they saw the attraction of leaving the E.U. Cameron has never been an E.U. enthusiast and up to February this year he was still saying he was prepared to back leaving the E.U. if he didn’t get enough concessions in his “re-negotiation” of Britain’s relationship with the E.U. Indeed, these statements came back to haunt Cameron during the referendum campaign and served to undermine his credibility in warning of the dangers of leaving the E.U.

Another important factor in the campaign was that the “Leave” campaigners warned of the risks of Britain staying in the E.U. They linked this to the issue of migration in a very low, untruthful but effective way. They said that Turkey was about to join the E.U., opening up the U.K. to millions of more migrants. They said that the U.K. might be forced to contribute to future E.U. bailouts of countries such as Greece. And they portrayed the U.K.’s public services (schools, hospitals) as being at the breaking point because of the current “burden” of immigration.

The winning side in the Brexit referendum brought down the U.K. Prime Minister but they themselves did not then become the Government. They do not now have to try and deliver on the wild promises they made. During the campaign and immediately after the vote, the Brexiteers gave out lots of false reassurance about the impact of leaving the E.U. on Britain’s economy and its place in the world. For example, on the day after the vote the most prominent Brexiteer, former London Mayor Boris Johnson, said “Let me be clear. The United Kingdom today is no less united and no less European.” I had thought about writing an article on how such reassurance breaks the most basic laws of risk communication and could come back to haunt Mr Johnson. But when he then pulled out of the contest to become U.K. Prime Minister I realized they would not!

Diane responds:

I’ve just returned from a couple of weeks in “Trump Country,” along Virginia’s Atlantic coast. Many ambivalent voters seemed motivated to vote for Trump by their desire for change. “Spanky,” a retired school teacher who also owns and manages an ice cream parlor, was representative of several likely Trump voters I met. While not particularly attracted by Trump’s boorishness, he wants things to be different.

When I pointed out that life in a variety of important ways is not only different but better now than it was eight years ago – more health care, less crime, more jobs – he dismissed those advances in favor of some vague notion of “change” he couldn’t quite articulate. He also noted that while life in the U.S. might be better for “other people,” it wasn’t necessarily better for him. What he wants is “change” – whatever that means – that will improve his own existence.

I find this a particularly vexing issue to address because Hillary Clinton is primarily offering continuity, not change (which also, by the way, is what drove so many folks to support Bernie in the primary).

On the seesaw, I might be able to get Spanky to inch towards the fulcrum if, in addition to acknowledging his desire for change, I could point to some tangible changes Clinton is proposing. But the changes she does support – on trade and immigration, for example – just aren’t speaking to an ice cream parlor owner’s need for changes he thinks will actually make a difference to him.

Of course, Clinton will never advocate changes as drastic as Trump’s. But I do think her campaign would be wisely served – and would attract more ambivalent voters – if she could counter the risks these voters associate with Trump by offering them some specific and meaningful ideas for change that would give them a reason to vote for her.

peter responds:

I like your notion that Spanky might move some on the Trump riskiness seesaw if Clinton could acknowledge that she represents less change than Trump (the downside from Spanky’s perspective) but also point out that she’s a safer agent of change (the upside).

name:	Peter Eisner	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Journalist and author
date:	June 23, 2016
location:	Washington, D.C.

comment:

I’ve just been shanghaied by Northwestern University Medill Journalism School to lead a seminar on the security of U.S. infrastructure. It seems to be moving toward dealing with the safety and protection of the U.S. electrical grid.

In his book Lights Out Ted Koppel makes a Chicken Little argument that a cyber attack on the grid is likely to happen, even inevitable, and could bring down the grid to millions of people for months, or longer.

Others say that is overstated and the greater threat – eventually – is an electrical magnetic pulse from the sun.

We’re going to look at the various aspects of this: threat, types of threat, preparedness, etc.

An important element of this is right up your alley. Have you ever worked on this in particular and/or do you have any suggestions?

peter responds:

Coincidentally, I was in Tallinn, Estonia a couple of weeks ago and got interested in the (almost certainly Russian) distributed-denial-of-service cyber attack on Estonia’s access to the Internet in 2007. This was an especially big deal in Estonia because that country has made Web connectivity the core of pretty much all commercial, industrial, and governmental activity. Russia brought life in Estonia to a halt for weeks.

So I’m in a frame of mind to buy Koppel’s argument that a cyber attack on the U.S. electrical grid is a high-magnitude high-probability risk. And given how little impact this and other warnings have had on public opinion (and public policy) in the U.S., I’m also in a frame of mind to believe that it won’t be easy to arouse concern about this risk. Odds are it will take a high-profile scary domestic news peg.

Your effort at Medill to get journalists more aware of the issue may help. It can’t hurt, certainly. On the one hand, the agenda-setting function of the media is thoroughly documented. The news media are far better at determining what people think about than at determining what people think. On the other hand, most of the agenda-setting documentation preceded the advent of social media and the downsizing of journalism. More than ever before, reporters now try to cater to the interests of the audience rather than hoping to influence those interests.

I have never worked specifically on this issue. But I suspect one important barrier to convincing people that it’s a big problem is convincing them that it would be useful for them to worry about the problem – that is, that there’s something to be done about it and some role for them to play in getting it done.

In the literature, this issue usually goes under the labels “efficacy” (can the problem be solved or at least ameliorated) and “self-efficacy” (can I do anything meaningful to protect myself or help solve the problem). When efficacy and self-efficacy are low with regard to a specific risk, people are motivated to shrug off that risk in any of several ways. Some resolve their cognitive dissonance by convincing themselves it’s not really serious; others accept that the risk is high but don’t do anything about it (not even try to learn more) because they feel paralyzed or hopeless about it. Perhaps the most damaging defense is reactance: When we feel powerless to mitigate a risk, we may get angry at the source of warning messages about it, and our attitudes and behaviors tend to move in the opposite direction.

These sorts of reactions are understandable and sometimes even sensible when there really is nothing to be done or nothing I can do. They’re unwise but nonetheless powerful if I mistakenly feel/believe that there’s no point in becoming more involved or even more interested.

Efficacy messaging can have a significant impact. This is particularly relevant to fear appeals – messaging that tries to frighten people into precautionary action. Early in my career, the conventional wisdom among psychology and communication experts was that fear appeals tend to backfire. But evidence has accumulated in the past couple of decades that fear appeals work fairly well – if and only if they don’t run up against an efficacy or self-efficacy barrier.

See for example this article by Kim Witte and Mike Allen, tracing the evidence that fear appeals motivate precautionary action when people are encouraged to feel efficacious, whereas trying to frighten people about a risk they feel incapable of protecting themselves against is likely to arouse their defenses.

In a nutshell, we are all constantly doing triage on a universe of things we might worry about. Efficacy and self-efficacy are key sorting variables that help us allocate our time and emotional energy.

I’m pretty sure efficacy and self-efficacy are relevant to getting people to focus on cyber attack risk.

But for many people, I suspect, that’s not the main barrier yet. The decision to take precautions about a risk (or to urge policymakers to take precautions) occurs in stages. Different stage models define them differently. The Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM), which I helped develop back when I was an academic, defines seven stages between ignorance and completed preventive action (or an established habit):

1. Unaware of the issue
2. Aware of the issue but not personally engaged
3. Engaged and deciding what to do
4. Planning to act but not yet having acted
5. Having decided not to act (a dead end, obviously, an alternative to the progression from 4 to 6)
6. Acting
7. Maintenance (continuing to act as needed)

Efficacy and self-efficacy are particularly relevant to the transitions from Stages 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. For people still at Stage 1, though, they’re not yet a significant part of the problem. And most people may be still at Stage 1 vis-à-vis cyber attack.

But as soon as people are aware of an issue, getting them engaged requires convincing them that getting engaged won’t be futile.

If you’re interested in the PAPM, you’ll find plenty of information about it, on my website and elsewhere. You might also look at something I posted on the website a month or so ago, “Car Crashes and Mass Extinction Events.” The part on how to arouse concern about mass extinction events (from climate change to asteroid crashes) has some relevance for cyber attacks.

Let me know what you end up saying in your seminar about risk communication aspects of the cyber attack problem.

name:	Etienne and Myriam	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Mining industry public affairs
date:	May 19, 2016
location:	Canada

comment:

We both attended the workshop you gave for our company last December and remember you saying we could follow up with you should we have questions. So here we are!

First, let us tell you – and this is not an overstatement – that your training has transformed the way we've been approaching community outrage in our residue site project. The results have so far been pretty outstanding and fascinating in many ways.

This has also been VERY useful in helping us explain to senior management what needed to be done – the desired attitude and behavior – and that our most vocal opponents should be treated with utmost respect. Your work has also helped us explain that being “trashed” in the mainstream newspapers is not a problem as long as we are progressing toward our goal.

We are currently seeking to address the issue of potential property value impacts. There is concern about future claims for expensive compensation resulting from the expansion of our residue site in the local town, near where our neighbors live.

We remember you mentioning that fears and outrage related to property value loss were a common problem that many companies had. In response to such fears and as a way to mitigate the outrage, you suggested making a commitment to compensate impacted home owners, should it be proven that property value losses were caused by the company. In the end, you noted, the compensation requirements were typically nil or close to nil.

Our questions:

1. Is this a fair representation of what you said?
2. Is there any documentation available to support this view?
3. Any suggestions you could make? Opportunities to deepen our understanding of the problem and possible options?

We are currently framing our proposal to senior management and constructing our business case. So all comments/questions/suggestions are welcome!

peter responds:

Thank you for your kind words about my seminar and its impact on your company and your work.

Some brief answers to your three questions.

I hope this helps. Please let me know what else you learn as you look into the concept further, and how senior management reacts to your proposal.

name:	Nicole Hunter	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Engagement consultant
date:	May 6, 2016
email:	nicole@firelightconsulting.com.au
location:	Australia

comment:

In brief here is the situation:

• A local community committee of management has recently had to publicly tender for the ongoing management of a site they have managed for over 15 years. (A significant increase in the funding provided by local government to the site required a change in contractual arrangements.)
• They didn’t win the tender. Instead, their “nemesis” in the space won it – an organization that has never “played well with others” in this space.
• They didn’t win it because they couldn’t show they had the governance skills that the Council required. (Council have been working with the local community committee for close on four years trying to get them to be better at governance.)
• The local group was apparently quite happy for an open tender when that was announced at the end of last year. But now they have been told they haven’t won and are outraged at the process.
• The local group has good connections. They can mobilize and galvanize a community. And they have threatened legal action.
• Both the Council and the local group have issues in the way they have handled this. They both have faults.
• The process appears to have been run with fairness and equity.
• There is a possibility that the Councilors may decide to rescind or recall the vote to award the tender. So that needs to be factored into the possible processes going forward.

My client is the Council.

I see many outrage factors in play here. We obviously have a situation of the local group feeling forced into a situation that they don’t want to be in, so it is “controlled by others”; it’s an unknowable situation (what will happen next?); it’s morally relevant; the Council may be seen as unresponsive. But it’s the unfairness that seems to reign.

How can the Council best communicate their decision to the local group and to the broader community who use this site?

I think acknowledging the mistakes of Council is key to future conversations. But there are also mistakes on the part of the local group. They contributed to this situation. How do we best balance this when talking with the group and the locals?

I also think the local group has potentially been asked to do too much, be too professional. And the Council underestimated the response to the announcement from the local group.

peter responds:

I know next to nothing about Australian legalities regarding tender offers, government contracts, and the like. So I’m putting aside the distinct possibility that your client cannot legally say some of what it would ideally say from an outrage management perspective. Insofar as Australian law permits, what do I think Council should say to address the outrage inherent in this situation?

The core problem here is a common one: how to deliver outrage-arousing news without exacerbating the outrage.

One important piece of the answer is negative, what not to do. When you’re telling people something you know is going to make them angry, don’t try not to make them angry. My wife and colleague Jody Lanard used to be a university student health psychiatrist. Pretty often an undergrad would tell Jody that she wanted to break up with her boyfriend “but I don’t want to hurt his feelings.” Jody’s advice to these students was identical to my advice to your Council: You can’t skip that part.

Council is in essence firing the community group from its position managing the site. So not making the group members angry isn’t a feasible or sensible goal. But not making them angrier than necessary is. Some concrete recommendations follow.

Notice that four of my five points below are framed in terms of “show,” not “tell.” Sometimes it helps to say these things outright and sometimes it doesn’t. In general, I prefer explicit acknowledgment to hinting. But just as seeming oblivious to how people feel can exacerbate their outrage, it can also exacerbate their outrage to rub their noses in how they feel. Delivering outrage-arousing news calls for empathy – and empathic communication requires finding a middle ground between obliviousness and intrusiveness.

So some of what follows your client should say. And some of it your client needs to find ways to show without necessarily saying.

name:	Kerry Chamberlain
field:	Public health
date:	April 30, 2016
location:	Michigan, U.S.

comment:

What do you want your legacy to be?

peter responds:

The last time I updated my webpage entitled “Working toward a Legacy” was June 2014. Here are some additional musings.

Students as legacy

Early in my academic career, I saw graduate students as my legacy, especially doctoral students but also master’s students. They spent years under my guidance, aspiring to acquire what I had to offer and then take it further. And many did … in academic careers, activist careers, etc.

But after a difficult divorce I left Michigan for Rutgers, where I had no graduate students. I loved the pleasure of teaching undergrads. And every so often, still, I hear from a long-ago Rutgers student I hardly knew who’s writing to tell me some way I made a difference in his or her life. Still, undergrads weren’t a legacy in the way grad students had been; I was a tiny piece of any undergraduate’s education. So when my consulting work began to flourish and compete with my university responsibilities, it was a fairly easy decision to leave academia for consulting.

Clients as legacy

So then I figured my legacy was my clients – the people and organizations I had helped, and perhaps launched on a new path, maybe even inspired. And that’s true up to a point. There are several thousand people out there in government and industry who have sat in a “Sandman seminar” or a consultation and took something away from it.

But my speaking and consulting style was more Johnny Appleseed than long-term mentor. Clients were more adult and more motivated than undergraduates – but I had only a few days with them, typically – less time than I had spend with my undergrads and far less than I had spent with my grad students.

I do hear from former clients pretty frequently, and I have learned from them that I’m an awful judge of my own impact. Sometimes I have come home discouraged from a piece of client work, having sensed that they didn’t buy my approach – only to hear years later that my day or two with that organization was a watershed, that old-timers still speak of “pre-Sandman” versus “post-Sandman” thinking. Other times I have come home excited about the impact I thought I had – only to hear years later that nothing changed. Still oftener, what I hear years later is that things changed only a little and only for a little while.

I used to have former clients I thought of as “alumni organizations” – organizations I figured had absorbed my approach (or as much of it as felt right to them) deeply enough that they no longer needed even periodic contact with me to stay on course. Then I watched several of those alumni organizations go badly off-course. They neither adhered to my approach without me nor saw fit to bring me back. (Or maybe nobody was left who remembered me.) Sometimes that happened after a change in senior management; but sometimes it just happened.

It’s not hard to find examples of what I would consider risk communication “worst practice” in the records of some organizations included in the partial list of my former clients on this website.

If I had my career to do over again, I think I would divide my work about in half: half by-the-hour work for clients I hadn’t worked with much before, helping them through a current controversy or giving them a basic seminar; and half multi-year retainer contracts with clients committed to investing substantial time and resources working with me, with the goal of integrating my approach to risk communication into the organization’s culture, its DNA. I realized early on that I should do that. I even wrote about “The Four Stages of Risk Communication” (with a 1991 copyright!), and labeled the final stage “the organizational stage” – but I never really embraced the challenge of marrying risk communication and organizational development.

Business as legacy

The normal way for a consultant to leave a more permanent legacy than his or her clients is to build a business. You take on employees and become a manager and a rainmaker. Eventually you develop a succession plan: Who will take over the reins when you retire? Or you sell your thriving business to a larger outfit and become salaried head of a wholly owned subsidiary. Or you sell out altogether and start something new.

I had chances at these legacy options. But I always turned them down.

Partly it was about preferences. I loved consulting and speaking and writing, but was pretty sure I would hate management. I loved being responsible only for myself and only to myself, with nobody I had to boss (and find work for) and nobody who could boss me. I had and have the soul of a sole practitioner. (I do enjoy collaborating sometimes, especially with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. But nobody’s boss there.)

But it was also about capabilities. I’m not a good manager. The few times I’ve been an actual boss in the past (such as running the Environmental Communication Research Program at Rutgers back in the late 1980s and early 1990s), I didn’t do especially well. I don’t have good intuition for when to exert my authority and when to back off and let my employees fend for themselves. I’m quite skillful at exercising influence – for example, advising a CEO with many thousands of employees and an ego to match. But I’m not so skillful at exercising power.

Bottom line: I ran a thriving one-person consulting business. Now I’m letting it slowly fade away. No legacy there.

But prospective clients take note: I still say yes when I want to. Feel free to make me enticing consulting offers.

Apprentices as legacy

The other thing I might do if I had it all to do again is take on apprentices. I have had many inquiries over the years from young people who wanted to work with me and learn from me – be my grad students, in essence, without paying tuition or getting a degree.

I yearned to say yes. But I couldn’t figure out the logistics. At the height of my consulting career I was on the road as much as 200 days a year. I couldn’t pay the airfares and hotel bills of apprentices; they couldn’t either; I couldn’t really expect clients to do so. And I wasn’t sure what I would ask an apprentice to do – what the risk communication equivalent should be of a Renaissance artist’s apprentice work – cleaning brushes and crushing pigments, then filling in the sky, then painting the crowd, then slowly graduating to foreground. Other issues were thorny as well: the confidentiality problems of giving my apprentices access to client secrets; the awkwardness of traveling alone with a younger person (especially if female) with whom I had an authority relationship; etc. So it never happened.

Now, of course, I have exactly the opposite problem: I don’t do enough work to keep an apprentice busy.

Case studies as legacy

Now if anything I would need not an apprentice but an archivist/scholar, someone who would read through my hundreds of client files and turn them into publishable case studies. But think of the confidentiality issues that would raise! Every case study would need to be thoroughly anonymized – which would greatly reduce its interest and value … and at the end of the day I’d still be vulnerable to liability suits if an ex-client recognized itself and worried that others might recognize it too.

Still, I’d love to find a way to get some of the hundreds of memos I have sent to clients – “Here’s why you should do X in this situation instead of Y” – in shape for third parties to read (and want to read).

Website as legacy

Meanwhile, my main legacy is this website. As little as a year ago I was adding to it frequently; now I am adding to it only occasionally. I can’t tell yet if this is a lull or a retirement.

I didn’t decide not to spend a lot of time writing for the website. I thought cutting way back on my consulting work would leave me more time for the website. Instead, I discovered that that’s not how I’m using my time. I have a long list of topics I want to write about. I even have a pile of half-written website columns. But I have added very little so far in 2016.

Maybe I stopped writing so much for the website because I was increasingly making familiar points about new examples rather than doing a lot of new thinking. And a lot of the new examples were ones that would make me sound querulous. I’m finding myself especially critical of how public health does risk communication: about flu, about measles, about the anti-vaccination movement, about Ebola quarantine, about lead in Flint, about Zika. In each case, as I see it, public health is mostly in the right but unduly self-righteous and sometimes even dishonest in attacking its opponents. (Climate change activists are in the same boat, I think.) I could write a series of articles criticizing public health agencies and professionals for pretending 95% right is 100% right and trashing the 5% of the truth that cuts the other way. But I don’t think that’s the legacy I want: “He did a lot of good work when he was younger, but then he became an old, crotchety, hostile purist, and ended up helping the bad guys by endlessly criticizing the good guys.” So I go play with my grandchildren instead.

What’s already on the website gets a lot of use – roughly 1,000 visitors a day. They come in three groupings, I think.

• Some are interested in risk communication. They read articles on riskcomm principles. When they read case studies about particular hazards or controversies, it’s to extract the riskcomm principles.
• Others are interested in a particular hazard or controversy. When they figure out that the article they have stumbled on is focused on how the specific issue is communicated rather than on the issue itself, they often exit quickly. But sometimes they decide the communication aspect of their issue matters to them. Occasionally they even start exploring the rest of the website.
• The third and smallest group is the regulars, who come to my site often and maybe have it on RSS. These are as close as I’m ever going to come now to graduate students. I’m pretty sure you’re one of them.

Anyone who wants to learn my approach can come to the website and read what I’ve written (and watch the videos – but mostly just read what I’ve written). I have tried from time to time to get a 501(c)3 organization – ideally a university – to take ownership of the website. So far several organizations have expressed tentative interest but none has made the firm “in perpetuity” commitment I specify. My fallback is already in place; when Jody and I are both dead some of our assets will roll into a foundation charged with perpetuating the website so everything that’s on it remains readily available to anyone who wants to use it (or rediscover it, if that’s how things go).

And sometime in the next year or two I hope to craft a curriculum that organizes the content already on the website, as an alternative to just diving in and reading whatever catches your eye.

Master class as legacy

My “Working toward a Legacy” page goes into some detail about my master class idea, and I won’t repeat it all here. I think it may be an idea whose time has passed.

I was poised to launch the master class some years ago. I had a list of 100-odd people around the world who already knew a lot about risk communication and thought they might want to pay me to spend a week a year for several years with each other and me, learning the finer points of my approach via collaborative strategizing on each other’s actual pending problems. I even had 20 or so signed up, with others pondering whether to sign up or not; I wanted 30-50 total.

And then the Global Financial Crisis hit. I worried less than people would renege than that they wouldn’t when they probably should, given the tenuousness of everybody’s jobs right about then. So I canceled and returned the fees of the early signers.

Now I’m older and tireder. I don’t think my expertise is out of date (though I’d be the last to know), but I’m surely not the hot ticket I was a decade ago. And a big piece of my original concept was to run the master class year after year with a mix of alums and newcomers. Assuming I still have enough energy to run an intensive week-long class in 2016 at age 71, will I in 2021 at age 76?

I haven’t entirely given up on the master class. If someone – some university, maybe – were to say, “We’ll find the students and handle the logistics, you just run the damn thing,” I’d probably say yes. But I doubt I’ll ever send an email to the 100-odd people on my list asking if they’re still interested. And who knows how many are even at the same email address, much less still interested in a Sandman master class?

Partner as legacy

The final legacy option I’ve been considering is to sign a partnership agreement with a public relations agency or a management consulting firm – or ideally one of each. I would teach my bag of tricks to as many people as possible inside the partner organization; I would help them apply my approach to their clients’ problems, working directly with the clients when needed; at the end of 3-5 years the organization would have made my approach an integral part of its approach and a competitive advantage vis-à-vis its competitors.

Negotiations along these lines with two companies fell through when it became clear to me that they wanted me to bring them my clients more than my approach, and it became clear to them that I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that.

Now a third company is mulling whether to make me a partnership proposal. It is supposed to get back to me soon with some kind of draft. I’m somewhere between skeptical and hopeful.

name:	Timothy Sly	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Emeritus Professor, Epidemiology & Risk Studies, Ryerson University
date:	March 20, 2016
location:	Canada

comment:

I thought you might be interested in a March 15, 2016 article by Brent L. Reichert, just released in Food Safety Magazine.

The article purports to advise food company execs the step-by-step approach to managing a food safety crisis involving a recall.

I scanned the essential steps, searching of course for the obvious acknowledgment of culpability, the apologies (profuse and sincere), and the expressly stated admission to the public that it was “our fault,” “my responsibility,” etc.

Sadly, this seemed to be completely omitted from the priority list presented by Brent Reichert.

I am assuming you are well aware of the Listeria outbreak in the Canada Packers (Maple Leaf) plant in Toronto three years ago. I would have thought that the approach employed in that unusually well-managed episode might have been written into such guidelines.

peter responds:

I agree with you about the Reichert food recall guidelines. These guidelines put an awful lot of emphasis on legal and insurance considerations, and except for mentioning that a communications person should be part of the crisis management team, they say nothing about how to talk to the public.

Reichert does point out that “protecting and maintaining” the company’s reputation (“rebuilding” might have been more to the point) is one of three key goals in a recall. But his advice really doesn’t speak to reputational issues. Maybe he figured those issues needed to be addressed in a different article by a different author. But if so, he should have said so, rather than leaving the impression that his guidelines were meant to cover the waterfront.

Surely an article that addressed reputational issues would have discussed the importance of taking responsibility and expressing contrition.

As you note, Maple Leaf Foods is among the best examples (the best Canadian example I know) of a well-handled recall of food that has turned out deadly – in this case because of Listeria contamination. CEO Michael McCain’s televised apology for the company’s 2008 Listeria outbreak is iconic.

Of course there’s more to recall risk communication than a prompt, heartfelt apology. Three other key components (by no means the only three) are these:

• Provide easy-to-use guidance for consumers on what lots are being recalled, how to tell if the food in their kitchen comes from one of the recalled lots, and how to return it or dispose of it safely if it is.
• Describe the contaminant or disease that has necessitated the recall – what it is, what its health effects are, who is most at risk (for Listeria it’s mostly the elderly), what the symptoms and treatments are, etc.
• Explain what went wrong that led to the contamination, and what the company proposes to do to help prevent such problems in the future. (Some of this information isn’t available until later – but companies shouldn’t wait; they should say what they’ve discovered and decided so far.)

I didn’t work on Maple Leaf’s 2008 Listeria recall, but I watched it and admired it. I had done an earlier food risk communication seminar in Guelph, Canada that some of the key Maple Leaf people had attended, and they told me later it was instrumental in how they managed recall communications (and how they tasked the external PR people they brought in to help). In 2009 and 2010 I did work extensively with Maple Leaf on its reputational/recovery efforts after the recall, including its determination to become the poster child in Canada for Listeria risk management.

You mention a Maple Leaf Listeria outbreak three years ago. I was no longer working with Maple Leaf by then, and confess I don’t remember that later outbreak. I’m glad to hear you think the company handled that one well too. Or maybe 2008 feels to you like three years ago? I can relate to that. I worked on the Jack-in-the-Box E. coli O157:H7 recall in 1993. (I worked not for Jack-in-the-Box, but for its meat supplier.) That feels to me more like three years ago than 23 years ago! Fonterra’s botulism recall was three years ago. (I worked on that one too.) Maybe you’re thinking of that.…

Apart from Reichert’s neglect of communication/reputation issues, some of his advice conflicts with what I consider good food recall risk communication. For example, he seems to think that the decision about whether a recall is necessary at all should be made chiefly by the company’s “regulatory counsel,” and that the extent of the recall (“how wide a net to cast”) should also be determined mostly by legal and technical considerations.

But I see huge communication implications in both these decisions. Companies advised by their lawyers that a recall isn’t needed may be advised a day or two later that a recall is required after all; their communicators would have warned that a belated recall can be far more disastrous than one that turns out unnecessary. Similarly, it is devastating to reputation if a recall expands several times as the company discovers more and more lots that might be contaminated; it is far wiser to encircle the problem, so there are no “worse than we thought” revelations in follow-up news stories. (I tell clients to aim for later being accused of having overreacted.)

Just yesterday, coincidentally, I read an article recommending that a company in the middle of an applesauce recall should remind website visitors of all the good things it is doing, and perhaps launch a recipe contest. The author, Karen Masullo, is a crisis communication consultant – but I couldn’t disagree more with this piece of advice. I’d rather see a client explicitly stating that it will sponsor no new recipe contests or other “positive” marketing efforts until its health emergency is over. Seeming to be trying to distract consumers (and yourself?) from your serious current problem is horrible outrage management.

Masullo also criticized the applesauce company for mentioning a prior recall. The company had issued a statement that said in part: “Many of you know that last year we had a recall for a different reason, and as a result, we understand you may be losing patience with us.” Masullo’s point was that it’s foolish to tell “persons who may be unfamiliar with them that they had an issue last year.” I wouldn’t be terribly worried about the downsides of letting newcomers know the history. I’d be much more preoccupied, as the company obviously was, with coming across as honest and determined to longtime customers whose loyalty may be shaken.

But at least Masullo’s article addressed recall communication issues – even if I thought some of her advice about those issues was pretty awful.

Tim responds:

You are correct of course: In my mind 2008 clearly seems only three years ago instead of eight! I should have recalled the year more closely, as I had to amend my teaching examples at that time to include Maple Leaf’s Michael McCain’s most refreshing response, which he did “right off the bat.”

It still stands in stark contrast to BP’s continued response throughout the saga in the Gulf of Mexico, Exxon’s response in Prince William Sound, the Canadian Red Cross in 1986, the Dalkon Shield, Dow-Corning’s silicone breast implants.… the list goes on. You know of course that the Red Cross are now completely out of the blood transfusion business in Canada; despite a full-scale, very public Krever Inquiry in 1993 (delayed by their unsuccessful legal battles to defend their name), not once did anything sounding like an apology escape the agency’s lips.

In contrast, the “star” acts are few and far between when demonstrating responsiveness as the route back to trust: J&J in South Chicago, Maple Leaf, some aspects of Jack-in-the-Box, several others.… But in general, the corporate mindset, sharp and brilliant in short-term matters of protecting the bottom line, remains astonishingly sluggish in recognizing the longer-term leverage to their bottom line that can be achieved by being – and appearing to be – immediately responsive, sincerely repentant, and utterly transparent and accountable in their actions.

I seem to detect your fingerprints all over the good ones!

Some years ago, I was working with the team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, doing field work gathering views and opinions from rural folk surrounding a large, state-of-the-art landfill site (one that you could put on a picture postcard without any signs that a landfill actually existed behind the well-managed berms – no seagulls, smells, blowing paper, dust, etc.). The local population had dug in their heels and delayed the opening by eleven years, despite the fact that the expected life of the site was only ten years! Their main grievance was that nobody consulted them.

But what I found was quite astounding: The most often-repeated complaint from these farmers and their rural neighbors was that the local regional government (which operated the site) still expected them to pay the usual $5 per bag rate for using the site. “They could have allowed us, within a two-kilometer radius of the site, to dump domestic items free if we wanted to!” they said. “They could have issued a decal for the car window allowing dumping without charge!” My sense was that if the local authority had permitted that, the resistance would have melted away a decade earlier! How easy and inexpensive a solution it would have been!