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blatherskiteStill slogging through the Heath/O'Hair book on risk communication—I'm now about one-third of the way through it, and have accumulated 13K words of notes and musings that will eventually have to be boiled down into a long summary article. Slogging is only part of the story, of course, since the book contains much of interest, but like hiking up a mountain (something I've done many times in recent months), you have to tolerate a high degree of sloggery to reach the stunning views.
The editing of this book remains lame, occasionally beyond belief—leading me to suspect they simply eliminated that stage or the proofreading stage. Today's best error: using Hamlet's famous "to be, or not to be" speech as the epigraph for a chapter, but attributing it to As You Like It; Routledge, you should be ashamed to publish such tripe. I suspect that what happened is that the author started out wanting to make the point that "all the world's a stage", which is indeed from As You Like It (Act II, Scene 7, as in the attribution to the epigraph), switched to Hamlet in the first paragraphs of the chapter to make the important point that all risk and crisis managers confront the problem and consequences of indecision, changed the quotation in the epigraph to support this introduction, and then failed to change the attribution.
The topic of this chapter is "social dramaturgy", and the author (Palmlund) makes a very interesting point: that the stages of risk and crisis management have a neat one-to-one correspondence with the stages of a play. For example, the pre-crisis phase corresponds to the dramatic gathering of actors and build up of tension, and a time when getting the characters together to discuss things and reach consensus might prevent a crisis. The crisis itself represents the climax of the play, and often results when the characters failed to come together earlier to reach consensus on how to avoid a crisis. Last but not least, the processes of crisis response and recovery from crisis correspond to the dramatic dénouement of the play, when the surviving characters try to put everything back together again.
It's an interesting model because, among other things, it reminds us of how everyone involved in a crisis plays one or more roles, just as the actors in a small theater company may have to play different roles during different parts of a play. There are many other parallels, such as the fact that what goes on behind the scenes of a play is largely unseen by the audience and by most of the characters in a well-written play. If you enjoy theater, you owe it to yourself to see the play Noises Off, which reveals this cleverly and entertainingly.
Although there's not much in this chapter about practical things you can do with the model, thinking it through provides some important and sometimes subtle implications. For example, many previous chapters portray risk and crisis as primarily a dualism, composed only of risk creators (e.g., the company that operates a chemical plant) and risk bearers (e.g., the people who live near the plant). But in reality, the situation is more complex. A useful counter-example is that of farmers, who are both the beneficiaries and primary victims of agricultural chemicals such as pesticides.
A broadly relevant example for risk communicators is how the theatrical model, in which audiences are passive recipients of the messages conveyed by the actors on the stage, can shape our risk communication strategies. As communicators, we can adopt the goal of keeping the audience passive; keeping them in their seats instead of storming the stage is metaphorically equivalent to helping people keep their cool in a crisis. We can instead adopt the role of persuading the audience to become active, whether to cheer the hero and boo the villain or to mobilize support for a cause such as encouraging recycling in our community.
There are many interesting things to ponder here, even if you don't do risk communication, since there are clear lessons here for other forms of communication.
The editing of this book remains lame, occasionally beyond belief—leading me to suspect they simply eliminated that stage or the proofreading stage. Today's best error: using Hamlet's famous "to be, or not to be" speech as the epigraph for a chapter, but attributing it to As You Like It; Routledge, you should be ashamed to publish such tripe. I suspect that what happened is that the author started out wanting to make the point that "all the world's a stage", which is indeed from As You Like It (Act II, Scene 7, as in the attribution to the epigraph), switched to Hamlet in the first paragraphs of the chapter to make the important point that all risk and crisis managers confront the problem and consequences of indecision, changed the quotation in the epigraph to support this introduction, and then failed to change the attribution.
The topic of this chapter is "social dramaturgy", and the author (Palmlund) makes a very interesting point: that the stages of risk and crisis management have a neat one-to-one correspondence with the stages of a play. For example, the pre-crisis phase corresponds to the dramatic gathering of actors and build up of tension, and a time when getting the characters together to discuss things and reach consensus might prevent a crisis. The crisis itself represents the climax of the play, and often results when the characters failed to come together earlier to reach consensus on how to avoid a crisis. Last but not least, the processes of crisis response and recovery from crisis correspond to the dramatic dénouement of the play, when the surviving characters try to put everything back together again.
It's an interesting model because, among other things, it reminds us of how everyone involved in a crisis plays one or more roles, just as the actors in a small theater company may have to play different roles during different parts of a play. There are many other parallels, such as the fact that what goes on behind the scenes of a play is largely unseen by the audience and by most of the characters in a well-written play. If you enjoy theater, you owe it to yourself to see the play Noises Off, which reveals this cleverly and entertainingly.
Although there's not much in this chapter about practical things you can do with the model, thinking it through provides some important and sometimes subtle implications. For example, many previous chapters portray risk and crisis as primarily a dualism, composed only of risk creators (e.g., the company that operates a chemical plant) and risk bearers (e.g., the people who live near the plant). But in reality, the situation is more complex. A useful counter-example is that of farmers, who are both the beneficiaries and primary victims of agricultural chemicals such as pesticides.
A broadly relevant example for risk communicators is how the theatrical model, in which audiences are passive recipients of the messages conveyed by the actors on the stage, can shape our risk communication strategies. As communicators, we can adopt the goal of keeping the audience passive; keeping them in their seats instead of storming the stage is metaphorically equivalent to helping people keep their cool in a crisis. We can instead adopt the role of persuading the audience to become active, whether to cheer the hero and boo the villain or to mobilize support for a cause such as encouraging recycling in our community.
There are many interesting things to ponder here, even if you don't do risk communication, since there are clear lessons here for other forms of communication.