A dose of 1 rad means the absorption of 100 ergs of radiation energy per gram of absorbing material. These days in Japan, there are a lot of rads and a good bit of absorbing material. For those of us who represent both private and public organizations armed with laptops, Twitter accounts, blogs, pens, quips, spin, the AP Stylebook, and no small amount of solemnity at appropriate times, this giant mess in Japan is a full throttle case study in what is antiseptically known as Crisis Communications.
Those of us in communications who bear our own crisis communications scars generally watch these things carefully, with enormous empathy for our far flung colleagues in the line of fire. Cynthia Starks, an elegant speechwriter, comments on the magnitude of Japan’s communications challenges in her blog at http://tinyurl.com/6hep9qb.
The thing that usually bites is less the words and what you say than when/how quickly you acknowledge the situation. Of course the situation isn't entirely clear when you have to say something, but just say something.
Most of the obvious -- oil and energy, NASA, chemicals, transportation, shipping, etc. -- have crisis communication and disaster recovery plans. But how well they are executed and how well messages are articulated when the big day comes is another story. The savvier of the CEO's around have had some communications experience in the past and know what to do, but that is far from the norm. And it's just the sheer frenzy of situations that can flatten the otherwise stalwart and steady. If the communications person has to hide under the desk to duck bullets from inside and outside the building, this is not good.
I've looked at and advised companies on their crisis planning, and sadly the ones that think they are the best prepared are often among the worst. Their crisis plans are in giant binders, their pool of critical emergency decision-makers is too big, they don't refresh the thing if someone gets a new phone number, they haven't even pre-arranged emergency bridge lines or facilities. In one case a company took about two years to assemble a plan, and when it was "over", "communications" was totally lost in a 6 inch binder that was called "Disaster Recovery". Hats off to all the people who contributed, but they're probably all gone by now. The plan itself probably qualified as a disaster.
Now, in the case of Japan, expect to see Rudy Giuliani shortly in full radiation garb marching purposefully through rubble, advising the Emperor on how a real leader handles a crisis. It's more or less axiomatic that Japanese presidents aren't really leaders, they just disappear and various government officials and private sector business cabals tell him how it is and just keep his mouth shut.
But that's the thing about crises. People need a leader for reassurance. One who is consistently on the air and rolls up his or her sleeves. It's the "Daddy, please make it go away!" factor.
Of course, few crises will (hopefully) ever rival the enormity of Japan's. The insurers can write it off to acts of God, but not so the vox populi, where blame will probably last as long as the half-life of plutonium.
And so this too will enter the canon of crisis communications case studies. It's hard to believe that anyone can prepare a crisis communications plan for something like this. I do think that given the scope and nature (literally) of this, the press and legislators will be a bit more understanding. As they have already, questions will arise in any country predictably susceptible to infrastructure failure when forces of nature strike. France, for example, has been doing the nuclear energy thing for a long time but already the question is how well prepared are they.
It's just weird that Japan, brought to its knees by nuclear energy once before, is again ordering Geiger counters by the boatload. I'm sure there are those that hope Godzilla will show up, eat half a dozen defective nuclear reactors, and head back to the sea where he was born -- in a manger of spent uranium.
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