Masterclass: How to Handle a Crisis

[Music] thank you very much for that warm introduction it's absolutely fabulous to be here at risk 4.0 and at abuu Finance week um I use this clicker thank you um so I'm Simon hailes and I'm head of Edelman Smithfield Middle East we're part of the largest Communications firm in the world Edelman and I specialize in helping Financial firms with their PR their Communications their investor relations and often in crisis Communications too uh I'm based in Abu dbby I've lived here for four years Abid is our regional HQ and we work here for many government departments we actually work for adgm and do the communications for Abad Finance week we work for Sovereign wealth funds large listed entities on the adx uh and lots of growing firms too we also help multinational companies come into the region and to establish their reputation here so we're very much part of telling the story of abu's financial strength to the world um and I've worked in PR for 23 years now and I've often been at the Forefront of some quite negative uh front page news so I was previously head of media at Barkley's group uh in London and I was also Chief press officer at the BBC uh prior to that I was a government spin doctor as well so you could say that my career has either been one long crisis or one long succession of crisis um but I'm actually very lucky to have done a lot of Crisis Communications because it's what I do for a living and it's good for our business advising firms on how to keep their reputation safe or you could say I'm actually very unlucky because perhaps I'm a bit of a magnet for bad news so maybe you can make up your own minds um by the end of this talk now they say that for any CEO there are three kinds of stakeholders that can make you lose your job if a crisis occurs it could be your investors if you're not performing it could be The Regulators if you do something wrong and it could be the media who are going to try and get you out of your job no matter what you do and lots of examples uh that I've worked on over my career um relate to those stakeholders and how they interact so on the left examples of business crisis dealing with an activist investor situation someone who wants to come and disrupt or break up the business sometimes dealing with allegations of CEO impropriety both in their private life and their professional life or even worse both at the same time uh sometimes handling a big boardroom bust up and change in CEO leadership which can disrupt a business crisis can occur from external events as well um I've worked on handling a Cyber attack in a very large bank or a banking outed when the app goes down and your social media networks are going crazy or major events like covid which really really disrupt business they can be based on social factors so people saying things that cause great harm and and offense and in the GE geopolitical world that we're in and the pace in which social media moves um that can turn in an instant or sometimes having environmental protesters literally AB sailing down your your building uh and press releasing photos of themselves doing it and finally um also relevant for Risk Managers here leg legal risks as well so dealing with regulatory fines uh conduct issues sometimes criminal trials arrest even conviction I previously handled a very high-profile Case by the serious Fraud Office in the high court and the mother of all crises that we had at at Barkley's which was the lior rig rigging scandal in 2012 uh and that was so large it cost the CEO and the chairman their jobs was front page of the news for 17 days running and it actually took the bank 10 years uh to rebuild its reputation and to rebuild trust again it was a huge effort and of today is talking about how to avoid those issues so that they don't affect uh your business so at edman we provide crisis handling support uh we can stand up teams immediately if there is an issue to come in and help give you a strategy for how to handle a crisis Communications issue put in place the content and the execution to brief the media your social media channels messages to colleagues messages to Regulators government stakeholders and also use the live tracking and dashboards so that you're in control of the situation and you can see how you're turning returning back to normal but really the main part about today is about before a crisis occurs because actually as Risk Managers it's all about preparation preparation is the key and for people in the room people who are managing risk Chief risk officers people who are often pricing risk um I feel in organizations it's actually quite rare the chief comms officer talk to the chief risk officer but the more those two people in those roles understand each other and put themselves in each other's shoes the more prepared a business can get so here's an example of a firm and the types of risks reputation risks that may occur that may come up and you'll be familiar with matrices like this where you're looking at both the severity of an incident and the like likelihood that it's going to occur and then you can prioritize how to manage manage each one accordingly um but what's interestes interesting from a reputation perspective is the way in which the news agenda changes so if you're a risk manager and you're plotting the risks of the organization it's actually very very difficult to know what's going to be in the news tomorrow or next week and how that's going to affect your business so it's really really important to have the chief Communications officer or an advisory team like Edelman at your risk management table and informing you about what's going on in the outside world and that Trend analysis um it's also important that you might not just have one crisis you might have more than one uh going on at the same time and when I was at Barley's and the BBC we'd often have five six seven crisis going on at the same time and you'd be judging which one is causing the most damage the interplay between them interconnected crisis and how they're playing around the world so having a constant map on this is really key a second thing is that if you're not doing it already I think it's important to have reputation risk as a formal risk that's reported in the business and one thing we did at at Bary was make that a formal requirement and it meant there was a reputation risk committee reporting to the board so that reputation risk can be considered at the highest level and that's actually a brilliant mechanism because it really helps a business to make smart decisions well ahead uh of an issue and it helps the communications team to inform them in advance um to looking at the types of things we do to help companies prepare we do a lot of Crisis Communications simulation and that ranges from uh initially scenario planning look at what risks might be out there maybe some risks that you haven't thought of and how they could hurt a business we do uh webcasts online training modules for your team right through to live uh tabletop exercises and live crisis simulations where we get your exec executive team in a room and we play the role of journalists and we put them in situations and it's very useful because it really throws up questions particularly about what they're going to say to the media who does that and how do they manage that accordingly and want and and also it's important that to make sure that your CEO or maybe it's not your CEO another spokesperson in a crisis situation is Media trained and we'll come in for a half day or full day and walk them through uh many different types of techniques firstly messaging techniques drawing on some skills from the emergency services or the world of Politics on how to maintain control in a crisis situation we do a lot of practical interview rehearsal uh playing the role of journalists simulating broadcast interviews print interviews even being ambushed by the press and also importantly looking things like body language what are your eyes your hands and your voice doing uh when you're on camera because often that can tell a lot more about a business's confidence in a crisis situation uh than the words that they say uh we also then have a range of Crisis Communications manuals that help a business to really understand are you dealing with something that's just a small issue that can be handled or a systemic crisis for the business how do you escalate that how do you stand up a crisis leadership team business operational teams and extra communication support to handle it we have mechanisms for how to structure this and I think really crucial having your comm's lead at the table alongside the chief of staff and the crisis leadership team also slightly separate from day-to-day business operations so that they can continue as normal and what your find in all of these crisis situations whether it's a simulation or a real world issue the question very quickly comes the first question is always how do we fix this problem but within about five minutes the questions become what do we say to the Press what are we going to put on social media do we need to tell the regulator do we need to have our messages consistent or do we tailor them for different audiences has anyone thought about talking to colleagues because what of one of them is speaking at an event like this and they get doorstepped and they say something and it's often when a question like this is missed that it starts to go wrong so these guides can give you a really good manual to have the systems in place uh to deal with these issues accordingly um we can get in place operating manuals so that you can stand up a crisis team very quickly assess the severity of the risk and the and clear action plans for how to deal with it and then also um easy to use uh scripting tools so that everybody can stay on message and everybody can be absolutely clear about what the message is um just finally because we're short of time um as a global firm we have people that specialize in crisis Communications around the world and I follow the sun model so we can support you around the clock working continuously and we also have an excellent dashboard the edman command center which gives you live reporting updates on how issues are trending around the world you can track that in English and Arabic uh and we can really use that to use data uh to make really informed decisions so thank you very much for listening um we've covered the fact that a Communications crisis can hit any organization um whether you're a good business or a bad business many of the businesses I've worked for have been doing a great job but they've been under Mass scrutiny we've covered the need for Preparation and why that's key and how to put structures in place um but ultimately we're here to help business to stay on track so you can get back to business to normal we've only covered a brief amount in the 10 minutes that we've got but my details are on the screen so if you'd like to get in touch or have a word after this session um we'd love to talk further thank you very much [Music]