How NOT to handle a communications crisis – Alan Hilburg on MH370
The world's top crisis communications strategist and best-selling author, US-based Alan Hilburg is in the process of setting up a branch of his firm in South Africa. Acknowledged as the man who successfully defused the potential Tylenol disaster for Johnson & Johnson, Hilburg has spent his career working on some of the trickiest challenges ever faced by corporations or Governments. During a recent conversation I asked his opinion of the way the communications crisis around the missing Malaysian Flight MH370 has been handled. He agreed to go on the record. Here's the fascinating interview. – AH
ALAN HILBURG: For the last 30 years, I've been involved in many of the more significant crises in the world. There are certain principles you apply, but what was shameful was how they failed to comprehend the emotional drivers of a crisis and the families. The families, in my opinion, were absolutely marginalised and they allowed the media to drive speculation into issuing false and unverified statements. Now the families are saying 'wait a minute. How do we even know that the plane crashed because there's no confirmation? There's no debris' and so you have to ask yourself was this decision to make this announcement another example of their mismanagement?
ALEC HOGG: The announcements have been coming thick and fast. Have you ever in the past, in your 30 years, had to deal with an airline crash before?
ALAN HILBURG: I have and I've worked on three, actually.
ALEC HOGG: How did you handle those?
ALAN HILBURG: A lot better than this. Again, you always have to focus on the human needs: the apparent and the less apparent human needs of the victims. Unless you know, you're not really sure and in this case from the very get-go, the airlines would normally manage this kind of crisis. The crises I've been involved with in terms of airline disasters…in each case the airline – not the government, not the airport, and not the Minister of Transportation – handles it. Here every day you have a new spokesperson and they seem just as ill-informed as the last one. One of the very basic rules of crisis management is 'one spokesperson, one voice' and if you don't know, you acknowledge uncertainty. However, at the same time, you commit to finding answers no matter how hard they try to hide. In this case, they were just rotating spokespeople and the speculation was rampant. When you look at this, you see that again, they allowed media-driven speculation because today – maybe it's a little different than the crises I handled from the perspective that there are probably hundreds more social media outlets than there were then – and each one of them goes out to seek an expert. You therefore have experts contradicting experts and experts hypothesizing over what happened. It was just…as I said, it was shameful and it makes me wonder whether they tried to close the story for the wrong reason.
ALEC HOGG: Alan, often we learn the most by inverting what's wrong and making sure that we don't do that again. Do you think this could be a case study for future communications students of what not to do?
ALAN HILBURG: I think it is. I think it is a case study and I think it's a case study in what not to do as much as a case study in what to do. In crises, one of the lessons we know for sure is the public responds more to outrage than they do to the event. The outrage created by the Malaysian government…there was nothing rational about that outrage. You manage outrage when the victim and the emotion are removed and that's always the first step. Just to give you an example: there was a Press announcement. How did the families find out that there was a press announcement? They got a text. There was therefore no effort by the Malaysian government to first talk to the families. The families found out the same time the world found out. It was so insensitive and it was just a repeat of the insensitivity.
They moved families out of hotels to make room for the race car drivers and the mechanics who were going to be in this weekend's Formula 1 race in Malaysia.
I have to tell you – and I know you're going to say that this may be a conspiracy theory – but I almost feel Alec, as though they made this announcement so that they world would focus its attention not on Malaysia Air 370, but on Malaysia's F1 formula race in Kuala Lumpur this week.
ALEC HOGG: Yes, it's extraordinary.
ALAN HILBURG: It really is sad.
ALEC HOGG: You've been following it more closely than most. Do you have any views on some of the off-the-wall theories – one being that perhaps a UFO came down and took the plane out of the sky?
ALAN HILBURG: You know there were so many theories out there, and my only comment to the theories about UFO's was that I asked people whether they saw the Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. One of the great airline mysteries in history is the Bermuda Triangle and Spielberg explained the Bermuda Triangle in his movie, because all the pilots that were lost in the Bermuda Triangle reappeared as they exited the spaceship at the end of the movie.
ALEC HOGG: I'm sure the families will be grabbing onto any hope whatsoever, but let's just assume that the Malaysian government comes to its senses, and Malaysian Airlines calls Alan Hilburg and says 'come and help'. What would you do?
ALAN HILBURG: I would start by getting an agreement that there's one spokesperson. I would have gotten there early and just acknowledged the uncertainty, but the commitment to finding answers no matter how hard they try to hide. I would have put out a very public plea to all the countries involved. Frankly, what I heard from my sources at the Department of Defence in the US is that many countries had knowledge of tracking the aircraft, but simply did not want to share it because it would disclose the scope and scale of the radar potential and that was a matter of national security. Two weeks ago a company in Britain who said 'we have the technology and the satellites. We have 22 satellites. We know what happened.' That announcement appeared on Saturday and never appeared again. Two weeks later, it's that company and their satellites that are being credited with coming up with the mathematical formula – and it is only a mathematical formula – that the airplane crashed and this is the approximate area that it crashed. I think that if you look at the tendrils of crisis management, any one of them is viable.
ALEC HOGG: When they do find the plane…when they find the debris, how would you suggest they should handle it?
ALAN HILBURG: If I were Malaysian Airlines, I would come up with a very responsible innovative way of memorialising the deaths of all those unfortunate passengers through the lives of the family members, and scholarships to the kids.
Whatever needs the victims' families have, money should not be an object to Malaysia Airlines if they want to recapture the world's trust. Money should also not be an object for the Malaysian government if they want to recapture the world's trust.
They'll have to begin immediately thinking about 'if we hadn't done a particularly good job of relating the needs and empathising with the needs of the families, what can we do now?' Each of these families is going to go through their individual crises, but each of them has needs that the loss of their loved ones has created. I would be focusing 100 percent of my time trying to understand and mitigate those needs.