NPSC Blog

On Thursday 1 and Friday 2 of March, the Network hosted the first full-day workshops for members, on Strategic Crisis Communications. To facilitate these workshops, we asked Kym and Dick Lynch from Lynch Communications to come over from Melbourne and share their knowledge and considerable expertise with us.

Before I get into my impressions of the workshop, I thought I should share the feedback that the other attendees submitted via the web form over the last couple of weeks.

Attendees were asked to rate five categories from 1 – 5, with 1 being poor and 5 an excellent. Those categories, and ratings recorded were:

1. Venue – 92% of respondents gave it a 4 or a 5
2. Presenters – 64% rated them a 4 or 5
3. Content – 64% 4 or a 5
4. Food – 70% rated it 4 or 5
5. Organization – 85% rated it 4 or 5

Those who submitted comments were similarly positive about the event. Most acknowledged that there was a tremendous amount of material and that they had come away with a better understanding of planning needs, structure of the response and tools and techniques to help manage communications during a crisis.

A common theme to emerge in the comments, however, was that the content was not particularly relevant to the public sector practitioner and was too focussed around crises, rather that more issued based case studies:

Presenters were well experienced and case studies best practice, however, the examples they gave were almost all of oil companies where resources were unlimited. It would have been good to have done a public service case study were resources (money and people) were limited and we had to prioritise a response – a workshop of a case study like this would have been good.

I did agree that the focus was all on situations that most of us would never have to deal with (oil tanker running aground in Wellington harbour and spilling several thousand tonnes of crude — nah, never happen here), but the more I have thought about it over the last couple of weeks, the more I have come around to the view that the event itself is pretty much irrelevant: it is the way you deal with it that matters.

As Kym and Dick demonstrated, the formula for the response is predictable. If you plan for an event like an oil spill, or an earthquake, or a pandemic, then you can roll out your plan for just about anything; crisis, emerging issue, it doesn’t really matter – you will have the tools and the training in place to effectively manage it.

And if you look at the issues that we have had to deal with in the public sector over the last several years, I think that you will agree that most — if not all — either were well managed using these principles, or were poorly managed and could have benefited from this approach. I am, however, keen to open this up for discussion.