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Whenever you listen to the radio, watch TV, or browse the internet, you are bombarded with crises of all types.
While these crises, political, health, social, play out on a global stage, many of us struggle with crisis situations of our own.
Today I look forward to our discussion of crisis communication.
I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
I am so excited to be joined by David Demarest, who is a lecturer of management at the GSB.
Prior to the GSB, David served as White House Communications Director for President George H .W.
Bush and was a member of the White House senior staff.
Next, David served as Executive Vice President and Director of Corporate Communications at Bank of America, and then as Executive Vice President for Corporate Relations and Brand Management at Visa International.
Later, he became Stanford's Vice President for Public Affairs and oversaw communications and government relations and events.
Beyond teaching at the GSB, David is finishing his book about what life is like working in the White House.
Welcome, David. Hey, thanks, Matt.
It's great to be with you.
This is going to be fun.
There's so much for us to discuss.
Shall we get started?
You bet. So question one, when it comes to crises, you've had to deal with a few for sure.
Can you highlight one or two that you've dealt with in any learnings that have come from those experiences?
Well, sure. One day I came into the office and one of my staff told me that we had, due to a Data Processing Center foul up, that we had lost 1 .2 million automatic credits and automatic deposits.
That's a lot of transactions to lose, and they were all in California.
And it meant that people's mortgage payments weren't going to happen.
It meant that their payroll, their paycheck didn't get deposited, things like that.
It meant that a lot of insufficient funds, checks might be going out.
And it was an incredible mess.
This was a formula for a whole lot of very angry customers.
Well, what we were able to do was to disaggregate what were the accounts that might have been more easily remediated by virtue of if somebody had a Bank of America account for their payroll deposit and a Bank of America account for their mortgage payment, we could intercept that transaction in between and fix
it. What it meant was that we could get those transactions down to a manageable level of the ones that we really couldn't address in the short term.
So by the end of the day, we had narrowed it down to about sixty nine thousand insufficient funds notices that were going to go out.
So that meant that our focus could be, OK, what are we going to do about those people and come up with a remedy for them that made sense?
And get our apology notes out to them and so forth.
It told me that you need to be able to disaggregate the problem into its component parts and deal with the parts that are most critical.
The second crisis I would put out there was that at Stanford, we had a laptop that was stolen and it contained a lot of employee personal data, like thousands of employees, personal data.
We didn't know if it was stolen the data or if it was just stolen because it was a laptop.
That didn't really matter.
By the time we figured out what was on the computer, we knew that we had to do a public announcement to as a notification.
But it was already late in the day on Friday, not the time when you want to do a public announcement.
People think you're trying to hide the information.
So our choice really was to do it then or do it Monday.
Also, on Monday, we'd have all the systems in place, the toll free number, what we're going to do about identity theft and things like that.
We made the choice to go on Friday at 6 p .m.
And we did that because we felt that people's trust in us trumped the efficiency of waiting until Monday, that if anyone had their identity stolen over the weekend and they found out that we knew about it, about this breach, but we didn't talk to them about it when we knew about it, that would be a violation of the trust.
And we came down to trust beats efficiency.
And in our communication, we told people that we won't have the toll free number set up until Monday.
We won't have the identity theft remediation set up until Monday.
But we felt it was important to get this information out as soon as we knew what the circumstance was because we didn't want to risk someone not being able to take an action on their own to try to protect themselves.
Thank you for sharing those two.
I hear two lessons that you learned.
One is in a big complicated crisis, it's to your advantage to break it down into its constituents parts.
And it sounds like having a platform and technology that can help you doesn't hurt in that situation.
And then the other piece is to know your values that you as an organization have and really challenge yourself to live by those values.
And that must help be a guiding light.
Yeah, you know, I think too many organizations haven't spent enough time really thinking about what would they do in a circumstance that called upon them to act without knowing all of the details of the situation.
The pressure to act can be intense.
And that's why value knowing your values is so important because it gives you a beacon that can inform how you're going to prioritize your actions.
So let me ask you the second question.
When communicating about a crisis, what are some best practices to keep in mind?
So when you're actually sending the message out?
Yeah, I think the key here is that, A, you've got to know what you don't know.
So you have to have kind of a catalog of information that you would like to know, but maybe you don't know.
And how important is that information, which leads to don't speculate.
People speculate as to what might be the case, not necessarily what is the case.
And then you mentioned it earlier, know your organization's values and be guided by them.
You know, companies and organizations that have a solid sense of who they are and what they stand for, they will be able to navigate a crisis much more effectively than those companies or organizations that don't.
And I even tell my students this, Matt, that if you know as a person what your values are in this crazy turbulent world that we live in, you'll be able to navigate it a lot better than to always be situational.
Finally, if there's a necessity for apology and often there is, that apology has to be timely.
It's got to show true regret.
The organization has to take real responsibility and in other words, ownership.
And if possible, provide a remedy.
And that's what we did in the case of the stolen laptop.
We did provide a remedy to people, which was identity protection.
And we did that quickly.
Thank you. So I know you have some very specific ways of thinking about audience engagement.
Can you share what this looks like from your perspective?
Yeah, I think that if we take Stanford as an example, but it applies to pretty much any organization, all organizations have multiple constituencies.
So in Stanford's case, as you well know, we have students, we have faculty, we have donors, we have alumni, we have the federal government who supplies us with a billion dollars of research every year, research funding.
We have the local community and so forth.
And so every organization has multiple constituencies that care about how the organization interacts with them, some more than others.
So part of effective crisis management is to have your finger on the pulse of each one of those constituencies and what elements of the crisis are going to be germane to which constituency to a greater or lesser degree.
So you start to have kind of a stakeholder map in a sense, and then that allows you to know what their concerns, what their fears are, what their anger quotient might be if something has affected them very directly.
And then the next step is to go where they are.
You've got to you can't kind of sit back and wait that wait for them to come to you.
You have to go to them and basically listen to them ask for their guidance as to what it is that is of concern to them.
And how should you how can they help you meet their concerns?
So it's a much more proactive engagement with stakeholders than to simply tell people what you're doing and then hope that hope for the best.
Right. So your audience engagement approach is similar to what we've talked about prior on this podcast, which is really know your audiences and understand what it is that's important to them.
You're doing this very proactively in case something bad happens, you know, and you're engaged with them prior.
And I also heard you say, be very mindful of the different methodologies, tools and modalities with which you can connect to them and leverage those so you can get your messages out quickly and proactively.
I need to figure out how I can affect the anger quotient of some of the people that I live with in my house.
I'd like to reduce it a little bit.
So you got me thinking about that for sure.
We've talked about we've talked about knowing your values, knowing your corporate values.
We've talked about knowing your audience and engaging them.
What are other things people can do proactively to prepare for a crisis that might arise?
Well, I'd say two things.
One, there are certain crises that happen that are impossible to foresee in very concrete terms.
And people will, you know, people aren't going to blame Stanford if there's an earthquake.
What they will blame Stanford for is if we were not prepared knowing that we're in an earthquake zone.
When I think about how people think about crises, I would I would suggest that they do an inventory of what are the worst things that can happen and are we prepared for those things?
That's kind of part one.
Part two is don't drink the Kool -Aid.
A lot of people in organizations, particularly leadership in organizations, fall into the trap of having an organizational bias in favor of their organization.
Oh, we would never do that.
That is a dangerous trap.
We have to really get to the facts of this case, not just what our preconceived notions are about how good our organization is.
So you have to put your shoes and put yourself in the shoes of someone who might have an alternative view of your organization.
And that takes a little bit of hard thinking because, you know, I look I love working for Stanford.
And, you know, I've been there 16 years and it would be easy to think, oh, well, Stanford would never do this or never do that.
Well, you've got to be able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who might not think the way I do about the university or about my organization.
Sometimes you've got to think like an adversary or you have to think like a reporter and get yourself out of your comfort zone and think in ways that a critic would think.
Very useful ideas. And in fact, the last idea about seeing the situation from somebody else's perspective echoes something Bob Sutton shared on our podcast in terms of team meetings and group decision making.
It can always benefit to have that other perspective.
And as you said, to make sure that we're not drinking the Kool -Aid.
And I think reflecting on what could go wrong while maybe depressing and concerning is a great thing to do again in the name of being proactive in preparation.
I'd like to change the topic a little bit.
You've spent a lot of your life in the political world and you even teach a course on political communication.
Looking at our current political landscape, what advice do you have for people who are trying to push a political agenda that is important to them, such as equity, energy, employment?
What advice might you have?
You know, we we live in a very in a remarkably polarized environment politically and it is very difficult to, you know, have conversations metaphorically across the aisle.
I think it's a tough arena to navigate within.
But I think if you're going to be successful in trying to expand support for your cause or your agenda, you have to refrain from the temptation of being too judgmental about those who might not buy into what you're trying to sell and try to understand why at a deeper level, what's their concern about it
and then make your case on their terms, not yours.
You know, you've got to be thoughtful about what avenue you can take to try to break through some of perhaps a rigidity of view on the other side.
But coming at it from a different angle might be a little bit more persuasive than simply jumping up and down and saying, you're the devil incarnate.
The second half of that is, you know, for your supporters, it's really about moving them from just being supportive to action.
And that means communicating urgency.
And how you communicate urgency is to make sure that they see the present day merits of dealing with a particular problem.
I really like how you separate those two points.
The thing that really resonated with me was the notion initially of framing your point in the language and the approach that the people you're trying to convince are taking, rather than it's my idea and you should see the world the way I do, try to appreciate the way the other people see the world and put
your communication in that perspective.
And then the second part there, this notion of urgency and driving action.
A lot of us feel that, hey, if I just share the information that it's inherent and intuitive that action should follow.
But building that sense of urgency, providing a pathway to action becomes very important.
Yeah. You know, I remember back at my Bank of America days, the CFO was the person that I ultimately reported to.
And when I would talk to him about reputation management, he'd kind of glaze over.
And because I wasn't talking in a language that he could really relate to.
So I changed my language to be one about risk management.
That was a concept that he was very familiar with.
And that enabled me to have more fruitful conversations with him about the steps that we needed to take when we had to deal with reputational risk, business risk, financial risk and so forth.
That last point you made about the linguistics of it leads me to my next question, which I know you and I share is something that we are passionate about and concerned with and teach about.
And that is the language you use and the rhetoric involved in communication.
What thoughts do you have of the importance of our words and does anything change as a result of our communicating virtually rather than in person?
Yeah, those are those are really two great questions.
I I love language. One of the modules in my class is about language and rhetoric.
You know, when when you think about language and you look at some, you know, I don't mean to get too esoteric here, but the word strategy, for example, comes from the Greek word strategos, which means a general.
And the word tactics comes from the Greek taktos, which means arranged in order.
The difference between strategy and tactics, then you know, you kind of can bring to life by talking about their derivation.
So, you know, language is really what we use to provide information, to make an argument, to motivate behavior, paint a picture, tell a story.
You know, all of those things are essential to bringing your issue to life.
And in other words, first, building an understanding of one's agenda.
You know, I think generally speaking, those principles are applicable to the virtual world.
Crisis management is is indeed much more complicated with the advent of social media.
We all know that speed is essential because social media, you know, creates a narrative so quickly that people can mobilize faster.
Bad news travels faster than it used to.
Misinformation can spread like wildfire.
You have to understand, you know, the platforms that we are all living with, and you've got to communicate to people in those spheres.
You know, it used to be a rule that kind of a communications rule that never repeat the accusation that's made against you.
Yeah, because that just reinforces the accusation.
Well, in the virtual world, if you have an answer to an accusation and you don't put the accusation in your talking points or your FAQs or whatever, somebody searching for that issue will never find your answer.
So, you know, just using the right words so that they are optimized for search.
You know, we have to be sophisticated and know that people are going to go to the web to find out information about a particular issue or crisis.
And you've got to use the language that they would likely use in their search.
And so it's little things like that that I think can help us deal with crisis management in the virtual world.
Absolutely. And the notion of really thinking about wording and the exact language you use is so powerful.
Most people focus on, here's what I want to get across.
But if you spend just a little extra time of thinking about how do you use certain words to help you get that information across, it can be incredibly powerful.
I joke with people.
I have a 17 year old son.
He's just gotten his driver's license.
He wants a car. You cannot today, David, buy a used car.
You can buy a certified previously owned vehicle, but you can't buy a used car.
It's the same car, but calling it a certified previously owned makes it sound different and better and they can charge more for it.
So this notion of choosing language wisely to help you further your goal, I think is really important.
And I know you and I both share that.
And I hadn't thought about how detailed you have to get in your thinking when it comes to the virtual world and how people actually search for the things that you're putting out there.
Makes a lot of sense to me.
Before we end, I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask everyone who joins me.
Are you up for that?
I'm ready. All right.
Question number one.
If you were to capture the best communication advice you ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be?
I'm not sure I can keep it to five words, but I think can get close.
Okay. Worry about being right at the end of the meeting, not at the beginning of the meeting.
Tell me more, but I like that a lot.
I'll let you have the extra words.
Well, I think when it comes to leadership, listening is more important than talking.
When you're leading a group of people or when you're meeting with a group of stakeholders before you articulate your view, probably better to listen to other people's views.
If you're leading a team of people and you're in an authority role, if you lead with what you think, you can bet your bottom dollar that people will echo that.
I used to watch President Bush, first President Bush in cabinet meetings.
He never showed his cards when he was talking about a policy issue.
He would always make the cabinet talk about what their views were.
And then he would go back to the Oval Office and he'd make a decision.
If he had said, well, I don't think this policy should be this or that.
Every one of those people would be saying, Oh, Mr.
President, you're so smart.
You're so brilliant.
That's just the nature of things.
But I think the point of it is listen first, talk next.
Yes. Words to live by for sure.
Let me ask you question two.
Who is a communicator that you admire and why?
Uh, I'll give you, I'll give you two.
Gandhi and Lincoln.
Because he was able to, uh, inspire a movement of hundreds of millions of people against colonialism in India.
And he did it large in, in, in large ways through communicating through his book about, uh, seeking independence and then speaking and writing, uh, essays.
And Lincoln, you know, who, I think had he been able to serve out his second term, I think we would live in a different country today.
All you have to do is read his second inaugural address about with malice towards known and charity for all.
It's a beautiful address.
And he did it in so few words, just like the Gettysburg address that it was so powerful that he was able to capture what I think, uh, was a, a hopeful vision of what this country could be.
Absolutely. Two, two wonderful communicators who did amazing things for this, this world.
Last question. What are the three ingredients, the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
Okay. I'll be, uh, too cute by half here.
Context, context, context.
Hmm. Knowing the contextual environment of, uh, your circumstance, whether it's a crisis, whether it's your reputation, uh, whether it's your brand, knowing, having a really rigorous understanding of the contextual environment is the foundation of coming up with effective strategies and, uh, achieving
your organization's, organization's goals.
Context is absolutely critical.
As were the topics that we discussed today, David, uh, I can think of no one better to help us understand how to communicate in the times we live in than someone like yourself who has experience in both crisis management and crisis communication, as well as political communication.
Thank you so much for your time, for your insight and for your advice.
Thanks, Matt. Thank you for listening to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
To learn more, go to gsb .stanford .edu.
Please download other episodes wherever you find your podcasts.
