Summarizing the Value of Predicting Stakeholder Reactions to Crises

So let’s do a quick review of the concepts that we’ve covered in this module. As we begin, I ask you a few questions about how you previously thought about engaging stakeholders during a crisis. What is the best way to engage them? What information do we think they want to hear? How should we package the information that we want to share? What goal should we have is we plan and evaluate the effectiveness of our engagement efforts? I think that we’ve made a pretty compelling case for the importance of considering how stakeholders are likely to react when facing a crisis and for the development of some tools as a product of our consideration.

During this module, we’ve examined a very simple but powerful model that can be used by leaders at your organization to help you better understand how stakeholders are likely to behave in a crisis. This model, I suggested would not only be useful for understanding stakeholder reactions during a crisis, but perhaps more importantly it can help us predict how stakeholders are likely to react in a given scenario. If we could predict how our stakeholders are likely to react to a particular situation I offered, then spending time working through a few of these scenarios would help us in a number of ways.

I said that first, we could use the model to help us begin to prioritize the types of crises that would be most important to prepare for. We considered this notion during the module and determined that by considering those crises that some stakeholders might react to in the most extreme or severe ways. We would benefit from first preventing, then preparing to manage these specific crisis. Our stakeholder response model can help us sort through potential risk scenarios to identify our priority types. Second, I suggested that our model could be used to help us identify gaps in our current crisis response capabilities.

As we saw what we work through some practical application exercises with our model, if we can identify the sorts of things that we need to be able to do well to mitigate the severity of stakeholder evaluation outcomes, then we should be able to determine how well we actually do those things. In other words, if we need to do a better job of defining expectations with stakeholders or educating them on the factors beyond our control that impact our ability to consistently meet those expectations, then we should evaluate our current capabilities in these areas and make improvements where necessary. And finally I suggested that our model could help us begin to craft generic response plans for certain types of situations.

I hope that you took advantage of the activity that provided some guidance on how to accomplish this and that you’ll share that guidance with your organizational colleagues. All of the concepts that we explored during this module or critically important for high stakes leaders to understand and practice. They provide key building blocks that can help an organization and increase its capacity for resilience, and they helped us create mechanisms to anticipate crises and cope more effectively with them when they appear.