Effective Crisis Communication

Benji Crooks, Marketing Director at Public Sector Network, sat down with Phillip Wagner ahead of his upcoming course, Effective Crisis Communications. Wagner shared why most training is generic, and how CIRs, single-source messaging, and realistic, time-pressured simulations help public sector teams communicate clearly, counter misinformation, and respond with confidence.

Benji Crooks:
My name’s Benji Crooks, I’m the Marketing Director at Public Sector Network, and I’m here today with Philip Wagner to talk about the course Effective Crisis Communications, which is happening on the 12th and 14th of May.

So first of all, could you let participants know what they are to expect from the course?

Philip Wagner:
This course has been especially designed, and it came from one of the clients last year who wanted to understand: how do we communicate effectively in a crisis situation? What’s the process? What’s the structure we need to go through?

Because the key need in any crisis communication process is:

the information has to be factual,
the information has to be current, and
it has to provide guidance and direction to people on what steps to take to protect and defend themselves, particularly in things like natural disasters or events like that.

Benji Crooks:
There’s lots of crisis comms training out there. What makes this course different for public sector employees in Australia and New Zealand?

Philip Wagner:
I’ve been involved in two of these events. I was involved in the bushfires of 2020, I was a Defence Force reservist, and I was called up for that duty. I was also involved in the COVID lockdown later in 2020, and we managed a lot of the crisis planning and communication.

What this course does differently from every other one is it includes a component around Critical Information Requirements, a CIR. This is not taught in many other courses on this subject. Unless you know what your CIRs are, you cannot start doing any form of crisis communication planning.

We cover a whole section of that.

Benji Crooks:
Keeping on crisis comms, what would you say are some of the early mistakes people make in the early stages of a crisis?

Philip Wagner:
Mistakes we see constantly are:

the haste of getting information out without it being properly screened and sources verified, which means you then have to update it,
if you are going to communicate, it needs to come from one reputable source, or as I called it in the presentation, “the official rumor starter”. There needs to be only one official source that disseminates information. If it’s multiple sources, it causes mass confusion, and
making sure you stop hearsay immediately.

So as soon as someone posts on social media, “I have heard this,” and it’s not verified, you come back onboard and say: “We have not verified this. Thank you for letting us know. We will check it and come back and post.”

They’re the three we see straight away.

The challenge also in modern crisis communication is misinformation and disinformation. There is a lot of it out there. We now have an American president who’s made disinformation an art form in the form of fake news. That really adds an extra layer to the complexity of: how do we clearly communicate out to our client base?

Benji Crooks:
On the back of that then, what’s one change an organization can make that better prepares them for their next crisis?

Philip Wagner:
If they don’t have a crisis communication plan, if they don’t have crisis planning set up, they’re in trouble.

We are going to get more crises whether we like them or not. They’re part and parcel. It’ll be in the form of natural disasters in Australia, it’ll be civilian events, power disruptions, cyberattacks. These will happen.

If you haven’t done your pre-planning prior to the event, on the day it happens you’re in trouble. Because what the plan does, and the rehearsal on top of that, is you then go into what is essentially a drill moment: if this happens, do this.

You’ve got established playbooks that say: “Okay, this area’s been hit. This is the impact consequence. This is the message we need to put out.” And you’ve already got those messages pre-planned. Now they will need to be reviewed and tweaked, but you’ve done the hard work already. You’ve got the language right, you’ve got the subtlety right.

You’ve also done the tuning in to your customer/client population base, which is absolutely critical.

Benji Crooks:
Relating back to the course then, what are the practical skills participants can expect to walk away with?

Philip Wagner:
We teach the theory on day one, and on day two we give you a scenario that we run through. We put you into teams, and we put you under time pressure to come back with messaging.

I act as the CEO, or the organization head, or the department head, and you have to back-brief me. And I say, “Yes,” “No,” or “Wait.”

So it’s really putting you under pressure to come back with a meaningful message, and then what channels you’re going to use to get out there. This is shaped by the audience we get. If it’s local government, it’ll be a local government scenario. If it’s state government, we’ll do it differently, and so on. But it’s shaped in that way.

You come up and you’ve got to deliver, and it’s done on time pressure. So it’ll be: “Where’s your message?” “We haven’t got one.” “Why not?”

We did this with a client last year. They loved it. They were put under pressure. They realized, “Gee, we’ve got a lot to do in a very short time.” And it worked.

They had, for instance, 30 minutes to come up with a message, and they found it very challenging. And these were experienced communications professionals.

Benji Crooks:
Keeping on that, how do you see crisis communications evolving in the public sector over the next few years?

Philip Wagner:
Artificial intelligence undoubtedly will be a key part of that.

We will potentially have state and state-sponsored actors causing deliberate disruptions. There will be deliberate misinformation and disinformation put in.

At the local government level, a natural crisis tends to be controlled. At a state level, controlled, but at a national level it can be different already.

We’re currently experiencing a whole series of natural weather events in southeastern Australia, bushfires and the like. What they’ve done is they’ve gone to the subject matter expert, the chief fire officer, the head of the State Emergency Service, and the like, to come forth and explain what’s going on, because there’s credibility of the source. That will be part of it.

We will also see the issue of timeliness and accuracy. Because as soon as it’s not accurate, people will question the credibility of it. So it really comes down to the preparation and rehearsal they do prior.

Benji Crooks:
Finally, to end on, and I think you’ve mentioned this in a couple of your other answers: who is the target audience that you would like to see on this course?

Philip Wagner:
Not just the communications professionals for each agency, but also chief executive officers, if they get a chance to come onboard and understand the concept of CIRs. I can teach, and we do teach that separately in a four-hour block.

But the concept of a critical information requirement is something that CEOs of organizations, department heads, and in local government, local councillors, need to be very familiar with. Because that will contribute very much to what we will release and what we will not release.

Because part of crisis communication is not just telling people, but also not telling people, because you aren’t 100% sure.

Benji Crooks:
Perfect. Sorry, were you adding anything else at the end of that sentence?

Philip Wagner:
No, that’s it.

So, for the client we did last year, everyone’s aware there were about 20 to 25 people who came from one local government area. And we had a couple of senior people that came on. They said, “We’ve never heard of this CIR concept. We love it.”

We explained it, and I actually show them (and I do this in the course) the actual critical information requirements we’d use during bushfires and COVID. And they go, “Wow, we never thought of it like that.”

And that then gives them a whole different construct, or planning spectrum, to go out and start planning: “How do we respond?”

Join Phillip Wagner on the online training course Effective Crisis Communications. In this practical course, you’ll learn how to define Critical Information Requirements (CIRs), build a clear crisis comms plan, manage misinformation, and deliver accurate messaging under pressure through realistic scenarios.