Only the fool wrote T S Eliot in his 1935 play Murder in the Cathedral, may think he can turn the wheel on which he turns. Thats a truth Nassim Nicholas Taleb rediscovered for us this year in his best-seller The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable where he shows how, in business as well as in life, our predictive powers are delusive and we should expect not just the unexpected , but the unexpected catastrophe.
When the wheel we think were turning flies off its axle and hits us in the face, you can be sure the media will be quick to the scene, pushing cameras and microphones into our dazed faces to get the best shots of our wounds and asking How do you feel? How did this happen? Whos responsible? What are you going to do about it?...
Internet security practitioners are particularly exposed when a media firestorm breaks. Users are aware its imperative to keep communications and transactions secure, but their technical expertise usually ranges from scant to zero. Low levels of understanding promote high levels of blind trust and dependency, which quickly convert to outrage and recrimination when their web-worlds turn upside down. Worse, in a crisis the specialist correspondent is supplanted by the general news reporter, whose knowledge is also limited, and whose priority is to name and shame the guilty parties.
So the lure is to bolt the doors, shutter the windows, and try to get on with the business of recovery in what is an attempt at a media black-out.
Only you cant. Because in todays media , if you leave a vacuum, someone else one of an army of analysts, or a politician, or your competitor, or delegates from all three will be swept onto the empty stage and start talking on your behalf, saying things you might not like to hear.
At this turning point in your corporate lifecycle how you handle the media, and the image you therefore project, will have a profound effect on your reputation. If youre part of a quoted company, according to research from the University of Oxford, England, the way you behave publicly in crisis will directly impact on your stock price do well and your shares can actually end up worth more than they were before disaster struck.
The author and international award-winning documentary film-maker Frank Wintle now advises major corporations on their media strategies and helps them prepare for, rehearse, and execute media crisis management. He is also FIRSTs communications consultant.
In Recapturing the Wheel Media Perspectives on Crisis and Recovery he will be sharing these strategies with the FIRST Kyoto audience.
