Corporate comms exercise |
Brief
Run a half-day exercise for press officers and other corporate communications staff
- To offer advice on communicating with all stakeholders during a major incident;
- To discuss best practice;
- To highlight potential pitfalls and common mistakes;
- To use a format that fits the overall theme: ‘an entertaining but educational forum’.
The challenge
Press officers and communications staff with several years’ experience were thought to be sceptical as to what they could learn from such an exercise. Furthermore, they came from different nuclear sites and inevitably would wish to apply knowledge of their own site’s response arrangements to the fictitious accident scenario, causing unhelpful divisiveness.
How these challenges were addressed
Instead of having the half-day exercise based on a nuclear accident scenario at some fictitious plant, Escott Hunt based it around a transport accident (a crash involving a vehicle carrying nuclear materials), which had similar consequences as an on-site incident but not the same constraints in planning terms. This worked well.
Participants were divided into five teams of three and asked to put themselves in the position of various stakeholders. Later, as each stakeholder group presented its demands, the other participants reverted to their corporate communications roles to identify ways of meeting those demands. This served to highlight the difference between stakeholders, the issues to be addressed; the demands of various media outlets; the need for effective internal and external liaison; the division of responsibilities between responding agencies; the importance of the political perspective… and, not least, the pressure on corporate communications staff.
Escott Hunt facilitated the process by directing discussion to produce a series of flow charts demonstrating the importance of having an effective information management system in place in order to ensure a consistent message to all stakeholders. As each issue/stakeholder group was addressed, Escott Hunt staff gave a short presentation highlighting best practice. Facilitators managed discussion so that lessons were learned from this matching process. These were documented and issued as a post-exercise report.
Analysis
Important lessons were learned in a relaxing, non-pressured environment. There was healthy competition between the groups as they put themselves in the shoes of their various stakeholders and heaped demands on their corporate communications colleagues. For many, it led them to realise that (1) demands placed on them in exercises and during real-life incidents were not unreasonable and that (2) with an effective system in place they could not only handle those demands but, more significantly, anticipate them. As a result, all our client sites have now moved away from a reactive approach and adopted a more proactive stance in emergencies - a significant achievement.