In this week’s episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO discusses a number of reputation management and crisis communications topics that arose during a recent day he spent at the Carlson School of Management, part of the University of Minnesota.

Topics discussed during this episode include the Boeing 737-MAX crisis, the Starbucks crisis in Philadelphia some time ago, and personalities and leadership skills for reputation management, crisis management & communication leaders.

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. I’m Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. And what I would like to talk about in this week’s episode is a series of questions that I was asked this past weekend. Some of you might know from looking at my bio I’m an alumni of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota where I earned my MBA in 2014. and this past weekend I was invited to come back to the university and serve as a judge along with a faculty member for students’ final projects in the executive MBA program. Ironically, it was five years to the day since I had done the exact same thing there at the Carlson School presenting on my final project along with a five of my fellow classmates from Minnesota, Vienna, and China. But I had a chance to talk with several students over lunch, and of course when we talk about what I do for a living, people are always totally fascinated by this idea of crisis management and business continuity, crisis communications.

And so, I got three interesting questions and I thought that it would be fun to kind of riff on these a little bit for a podcast episode. So here it goes. The first question that I got was about the Boeing 737 Max issues that the Boeing organization has been faced with following their recent crash, two crashes, of that aircraft. And a lot of commentary in the public sphere in the media about how Boeing got the aircraft approved, about the level of government oversight of that development and flight certification, about potential software issues with the aircraft, and how Boeing has been managing all of this reputationally. And the question that it was asked kind of along the lines of what did I think about the timing of this situation in terms of just how quickly or not quickly that the story got out and how Boeing responded to those questions.

And really the question was about how quickly do you have to respond in a reputational crisis, and then kind of apply that to Boeing? And my answer was a little complicated. First I think that there’s a, you have a very brief period of grace following something happening that impacts your organization reputationally that before you need to get out and address it head on in a very clear statement or a narrative about what your organization’s response is to these allegations, or this potential issue, or the reputational crisis that’s your faced with. If you don’t react during that time, if you don’t act in time so to speak, then your opportunity to influence the story, your opportunity to get your own spin on the story out in public is gone, and it will be taken over very quickly by the news cycle, by social media, by all of the different forces that come into play in a reputational challenge that an organization might face.

So from a timing standpoint, I argued in this kind of lunch discussion that timing is very important and that we should be reacting quickly as facts are known and you can start to tell the story about what happened. I also mentioned that I think that there’s a level of forgiveness I think to an organization that comes out and addresses the issue head on. That you can come out and say, look, we were wrong, or hey, we screwed up and here’s what we’re going to do to fix it. Or you can also say that in like the 737 Max situatio...