The Early Primaries Are A Reminder Of The Value Of Product Trial

January 20, 2012

Candidates scrunch into booths at small town coffee shops or hop onto the beds of pickups to talk to small groups of voters, then quickly move on to the next group with hands outstretched.

This hardly seems the way campaigns are supposed to be run in the digital age, yet once again candidates have hit the road to campaign much as Lincoln did, only with TV cameras in their wake.

Despite the emphasis on media, retail politics remains very much alive and kicking in the presidential primaries.

The early  primaries provide a delightfully old fashioned look at democracy, coaxing candidates out from behind the media apparatus to actually sit down with people and create a personal impression.

They also offer some perspective on the value of thingness.

Thingness understands that even in a wired world we still want to want to see and touch the product. We want a tangible connection with the substance of a thing. Or a person, as in the case of the early primaries.

If we can’t have that personal connection, we depend on proxies.

The good citizens of several small states are currently screening candidates for the rest of us. Like the people who review toasters they purchased on Amazon, we’re getting their feedback, only in the form of votes.

Thingness is a vital quality that is becoming more elusive and marketers are partly to blame. Many companies think they can do without it entirely in their marketing and sales, relying on technology touchpoints instead. And sometimes they can.

But  they don’t realize they could better engage consumers at times if they stepped out from behind the screens long enough to carefully consider the emotional needs of their customers.

Consumer engagement is not simply a result of rich interactive technology. While we may live in a digital culture, our emotional lives remain rooted in retail sensibilities.

Thingness often helps us make purchase decisions, especially when faced with new choices such as an unfamiliar company or brand, or a big ticket item we purchase only infrequently.

Big screen TV retailers realize many of the customers in the store are trying to decide on a brand before they go home to check prices online. The same is true for automobile showrooms.

Thingness requires personal experience. Our own, ideally. But if not, then someone’s.

That is why sampling and trial still trump everything else. Figuring a meaningful way to share the actual brand experience before purchase remains the gold standard when it comes to creating thingness.

Next is proxy trial. That is, old fashioned word-of-mouth. The endorsement of family and friends carries considerable weight, but even the opinions of strangers can be valuable, especially when there are a lot of them.

What is important is that someone, somewhere in the levels of influence around us actually touched the product and had a good experience to share.

Even if it was only a quick handshake in New Hampshire.

Which Brand Would You Marry? Netflix Is A Lesson In Taking Engaged Customers For Granted

December 9, 2011

Several years ago I was involved in an extensive research project exploring the emotional connection consumers have with brands. Not surprisingly, the findings revealed that consumers seek qualities in brands that they also look for in human relationships. Frequently cited were trust, respect, consistency, accessibility and being easy to get along with, among others.

Intrigued by this line of thinking, in one phase of the research we came right out and asked consumers, “which brand would you marry?” Consumers understood and even seemed to enjoy the intent of the question. They were quickly able to name a brand that deeply engaged them and could explain why.

On its face, this seems to confirm the magical properties of certain brands.

But it’s only part of the story.

While consumers told us that they are quicker to forgive “marriage” brands when they stumble, most also point out they are not reluctant to dump a brand when the relationship stops working for them. Even more admitted that they are always on the lookout for something new even when they’re happy with their existing brand relationships.

Netflix recently learned this lesson in a very public fashion. It discovered that customer loyalty is not an inexhaustible resource, but rather something you need to tend to in your day-to-day thinking about the business. The company made a series of decisions which changed the services it offered and had the effect of upseting many customers. Customer concern was amplified by the ways in which the company responded to the criticism.

Such was the affection customers had for the brand that many said they wanted to forgive the company but could not because in the end there was just too much to forgive. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the consumer increasingly saw good alternatives to Netflix services.

The voice of marketing, if not PR, as an advocate for the customer’s “marriage” with the brand seems to have been missing at Netflix, both initially in terms of assessing customer reactions to the planned changes, and later in responding to escalating customer concerns.

It’s a timely reminder that effective marketing is built not just on creating relationships with consumers, but also in carefully tending to those relationships over time. This is such an obvious premise that it seems foolish even to mention it, yet apparently it cannot be stated often enough.

All brands, even the most popular, are always vulnerable, especially today when they face a confident consumer and a continuously changing competive landscape. Clearly, it’s foolish to work hard to engage consumers only to later take those customers for granted. Under the circumstances, divorce should not be a surprise.

It also raises the question, if marketing and PR do not advocate for business decisions within a company that protect and nurture the customer’s “marriage” with the brand, who will?

Shopping For Ethics In The Grocery Aisle

September 9, 2011

The philosopher Peter Singer tells a story in which he asks you to imagine walking by a shallow pond where you notice that a small child has fallen in. You are the only person around and unless you quickly wade into the water and get the child, he may drown. Doing so will, however, ruin the expensive pair of shoes you are wearing.

Singer notes that people readily say they will sacrifice the shoes to save the child. So he then asks, instead of buying expensive shoes, why not donate the cost of the shoes to an international aid agency that could use the money to save the lives of children in poor countries?

I recalled Singer’s question after a recent visit to Whole Foods.

If you look closely at the Whole Foods meat counter you will notice a color code on the signs that tell you the type of meat and price. A brochure explains it this way:

“Throughout our meat department you will find chicken, beef and pork labeled with the Global Animal Partnership 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating. It’s your way of knowing exactly how the animals were raised for the meat you are buying. We have made it easier for you to identify the steps with simple color coding…”

On the face of it, it seems that Whole Foods is responding to a demand  by customers for greater transparency regarding the food they purchase. If your ethical concerns lead you to purchase a chicken that was raised on pasture instead of one that lived mostly indoors, Whole Foods is there for you.

But what struck me were the similarities between Whole Foods’ ethical choices and those which Singer raise, and how they shed light on the role of ethical concerns when it comes to many brand decisions today.

Having worked in the food industry for many years, and conducted  considerable research among shoppers during that time, I’ve heard many consumers say that ethical concerns are important to them when making purchase decisions. They often cite the humane treatment of animals as an important issue when it comes to food.

Dig a little deeper, however, and it becomes more complex than that.

It’s no secret that the quality and safety of the food supply continues to be an issue for many consumers. This is understandable given the continuous stream of news reporting recalls of contaminated produce, eggs, beef and other foods.

Surveys also reveal that consumers perceive a connection between “humane” and “safe.” They believe that a producer attentive to ethical concerns in the raising and processing of animals for meat is also more likely to maintain higher standards in other ways that promise greater safety, such as raising the animals in sanitary conditions and without the use of artificial hormones, and providing only vegetarian feed.

Ethical claims, it seems, have also become proxies for many of the health and safety assurances that consumers want regarding their food today.

Where Whole Foods’ poultry and Singer’s child intersect is in the utility of the ethical decision.

A child in peril before us commands our attention in ways a thousand children in peril on another continent cannot. For one thing, the moral implications become so clear that we cannot imagine living with ourselves if we do not rush to his aid.

In a similar vein, the food we place on the table for our families also demands our attention for reasons of safety and health, and with an immediacy that the plight of pigs in a crowded barn in Iowa does not command for most people.

This is not to downplay consumer concerns about the ethical issues related to the purchases they make. Most of us report we want our purchases to help make the world a better place and we are even willing to pay a little more to do so. This sentiment surfaces frequently enough in surveys to be credible.

The practical takeaway here seems to be that we find it easier to make ethical choices when they have immediate and clear benefit. Conversely, the farther ethical questions move from our everyday concerns, the more abstract they become and thereby less urgent.

In short, it seems ethical concerns become most actionable when we can bolster our good intentions with a strong dose of pragmatism.

Mistakes Were Made: How Cognitive Dissonance Shapes Public Opinion

August 24, 2011

Contradictory thinking is difficult to explain. Even harder to explain is why there is so much of it today.

Because of proliferating media and communications, private thought quickly becomes public. We now have unprecedented access to the thinking that drives the behavior of our fellow citizens and much of it seems contradictory. For example, we have recently seen people arguing against government spending on entitlements and simultaneously defending Social Security.

This seeming discontinuity in logic has an explanation. It’s called cognitive dissonance and is discussed in a book recently recommended to me, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). It offers insights into how we justify the choices we make even when it later becomes apparent a particular decision may not have been our finest moment.

The authors define cognitive dissonance as “a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent such as ‘Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me’ and ‘I smoke two packs a day’.”

When we fail to address this conflict, we experience tension that can provoke anxiety, anguish and even anger until we find a way to resolve it. To continue the example, the authors point out the most direct way for the smoker to reduce the dissonance is to quit smoking. But if she finds she can’t do so, she may convince herself that the dangers of smoking are overblown or offset by the fact that they help her lose weight.

The concept becomes even more interesting when you move into more nuanced decisions. For example, if someone we dislike surprises us by doing us a favor, we’re suddenly challenged to reassess our opinion of the person. We may do so, or we may convince ourselves that this person is actually out to get us in some devious way we don’t yet understand, so our feelings about him or her are confirmed.

It’s difficult to give up beliefs in which we have invested a good deal of energy even in the face of new information. That’s why changing public attitudes on social issues usually takes time.

It seems that often when we make a choice we not only close the door to other choices, we have a tendency to slam it and then nail it shut. This can become a slippery slope when it comes to behavior.

Studies show that when we make a choice, even one where the differences are small and only a slight preference tips us in one direction over another, we may later ardently defend our decision and denigrate the option we did not choose.

This may go a long way toward explaining why facts and data seem to have so little power to influence public debate today. It’s not that we don’t value facts, but more a case of valuing only our own facts.

We tend to select facts to fit our viewpoints rather than to inform them. Because there are so many viewpoints on almost any topic today, all citing apparently credible sources, it’s fairly easy to find what we need to confirm our biases.

Ultimately, self-justification allows us to turn our blind spots into virtues.

Edward Bernays: The Don Draper of PR

July 28, 2011

Those of us in PR may wish we had our own Don Draper.

Actually, we do. His name is Edward Bernays.

Although he didn’t look anything like Mad Men’s iconic advertising executive – Bernays was a small man with the appearance of a slightly rumpled professor – he had the virtue of being real.

What was most notable about Edward Bernays was not that he was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and drew on his uncle’s thinking for his work, or that Life magazine once listed him among the “100 Most Influential Americans.”

Rather, Bernays’ claim to fame is that he is considered by many to be the “Father of Public Relations.” A title that The New York Times used in his obituary, albeit in quotes, no doubt to appease those who believed that the other well-known PR man of the era, Ivy Lee, had the better right to it.

Bernays claimed the title in part because he was an excellent self-promoter, and also because he lived much longer than his peers – to 103 – so he had the advantage of having the last word. But there is a case to be made that he richly deserves it.

Even Don Draper in all his creative glory can’t hold a candle to Bernays when it comes to influencing the society in which he lived. In many ways, Bernays was an early architect of modern consumer culture.

What got me thinking about Bernays was learning that his seminal book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, written in 1923 and out of print for decades, is being reissued. This slender book is a fascinating read with remarkable relevance today in the concise way it lays a foundation for modern public relations, even if his condescending comments about the public’s intelligence may sometimes jar modern sensibilities.

The book found a wide audience because Bernays astutely sized up the changing current in business at the time – the shift from a “public be damned” attitude to one more open to public dialogue. He brought to the discussion fresh thinking about how business could engage and direct public attention.

Unlike Lee, who came to public relations from journalism and was more news-oriented in his practice, Bernays had a keen appreciation for the psychology of perception and desire and it resonates throughout his work.

Among the subjects discussed in Crystallizing are many still topical today: creating strong word-of-mouth; the need for consumer research; effective use of credible expert spokespersons for companies and brands; understanding that news media are in the business of entertainment as well as information; the role PR must play as an advocate for ideas in society and not just a facilitator of company communications.

Many have found it easy to be critical of Bernays. In addition to being overtly self-promoting, he was not an especially deep theoretical thinker. He seemed more like an expert tailor, stitching together the ideas of many social critics with whom he agreed, especially those who warned about the public’s propensity to adopt a “herd mentality” when it came to important ideas. For this reason, he believed that public opinion needed to be led by experts.

This was a recurring theme in his thinking and came in part from his attentiveness early on to Freud’s discussion of the irrational forces that often drive modern man. Bernays saw it as his job to shape and direct these forces for his clients.

It was only a short step for Bernays to go from Freud’s ideas to developing PR campaigns that promoted the consumption of goods and services based largely on desire over need.

In doing so, Bernays created some campaigns that are easy to question today, such as promoting cigarette smoking to women by linking smoking with female equality. To his credit, he later became an outspoken opponent of smoking.

Despite his sometimes questionable contributions as a theorist, Bernays still deserves our attention for his pioneering work in PR.

He raised many issues regarding the ethical responsibilities of public relations that are still relevant. He also was one of the first to understand cultural and social context as a driver of PR. He had a unique creative capacity for developing bold ideas that would engage consumers in ways that benefitted his clients’ products.

He also was an early practitioner of the “big idea” when it came to creating events and promotions supporting consumer brands, such as his work for Procter & Gamble, which not only got bars of Ivory soap into homes across America, but also into the hands of children – tomorrow’s consumers.

All this made him wealthy and, ultimately famous as PR counsel to many leading companies and public figures.

After Crystallizing, Bernays continued to advocate his ideas through interviews, speeches, articles and books including Propaganda, an effort in part to revitalize a concept even then in disrepute. The latter inflamed many because of its contention that intelligent manipulation of public opinion is a necessary part of democracy, proving once again he knew how to get people’s attention, especially when it came to himself.

If you want or learn more about Bernays, a good read is the biography, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays And The Birth Of Public Relations by Larry Tye.

Why Public Apologies Sometimes Fall On Deaf Ears

July 12, 2011

Many crisis management experts contend that public apologies need to be specific to be effective. It seems they also need to be broad in order to meet the expectations of different types of victims.

According to a recent journal article by Ryan Fehr and Michele J. Gelfand, professors at the University of Maryland, there’s no one-size-fits all apology for companies experiencing a crisis. Here’s how they describe their research:

“Central to the question of why some apologies succeed where others fail is a recognition that all apologies are not created equal. Rather, apologies can contain different sets of elements – referred to here as ‘components’ – that may affect how victims react to them. For instance, some apologies might focus on the compensation of a victim while others might focus on showing empathy.”

The authors note that the main relational components of an apology are offers of compensation, expressions of empathy, and acknowledgement that social or cultural norms have been violated by the transgressor.

Which of these components a victim expects to see in an apology depends on his or her self-construal. Self-construal is a term used in social psychology to describe how we see ourselves in our relationships with others. Their point is that our inherent relationship needs, or lack of them, shape how we listen to apologies.

The authors identify three types of self-construals – independent, relational and collective – and discuss how the various components of apology influence each type of victim. Here’s a quick overview of their observations:

Victims with strong independent self-construals see themselves as autonomous individuals. They have a strong independent self-identity and will focus on issues related to their personal rights and entitlements following an offense. These individuals do not value empathy but seek an apology that restores balance to the relationship, such as legitimizing the victim’s claims and offering compensation. For example, these individuals will want an organization to admit wrongdoing and then explain how it is going to make things right through compensation.

Those with relational self-construals see themselves as strongly connected to others and are defined by their relationships. Because of this, they work to develop and maintain relationships and are attentive to cues concerning the status of their relationships. Victims in this category tend to care little about compensation and are especially responsive to apologies communicating empathy, concern and compassion which they see as important in restoring emotional balance to a damaged relationship. For example, they expect an apology to acknowledge the suffering experienced by the victims and express concern for their well-being.

Victims with collective self-construals identify strongly with groups and social categories and are particularly attentive to offenses committed against the group. They expect apologies to recognize that behavior is driven by accepted rules and norms. As a result, effective apologies for this type of individual affirm the importance of group norms by acknowledging the seriousness of violating them. An example of an effective apology is acknowledging that one let the group down in failing to meet the high standards set by the group.

When it comes to applying these insights, the authors recommend throwing a broad net: “These findings suggest that detailed apologies with multiple components are in general more likely to touch upon what is important to a victim than brief, perfunctory apologies. Offenders should therefore offer apologies with multiple components whenever possible.”

The authors also point out that attention to the collective self-construal is especially important in offering cross-cultural apologies when social and cultural norms can vary greatly.

The article, “When apologies work: How matching apology components to victims’ self-construals facilities forgiveness,” was published in Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, May 2010. A copy can be found here.

Why We Apologize So Badly

June 8, 2011

Never have we seen so many public apologies as recently and so few that engage us by their sincerity, much less their humanity.

One is tempted to dismiss the idea of the public apology but that would be a mistake. Why we apologize, and how, is instructive even when we do it badly. Our inability to apologize well reveals more about us as a society than we care to admit.

What does it mean to “apologize well?”

Let’s look at what makes an apology credible. Effective apologies usually have several dimensions.

On the first level, the transgressor identifies the offense and takes responsibility for it. This involves expressing regret that it occurred and concern for those affected. On the second level, he explains what happened and why, and commits to making reparations. On the third level, he identifies the lessons he learned from his mistake and what steps he is taking to prevent a reoccurrence.

Now compare that with the more typical and quickly mumbled “I’m sorry” that passes for an apology today, or its even more evasive cousin, “I’m sorry if you’re offended.”

Contrary to popular opinion, saying “I’m sorry” is not an apology. At best, it’s barely a down payment on a real apology.

The phrase “I’m sorry,” when used without qualifiers, stacks the deck with ambiguity that works in favor of the offender. It can mean either I’m sorry I did something or I’m sorry something unfortunate happened.

What you as the victim want to hear, at the very least, is “I’m sorry I ran over your rose bush” rather than “I’m sorry your rose bush was ruined.” Yet even that is marginally better than the other popular option, “I’m sorry you’re upset about the rose bush,” which implies that you have a curious and perhaps unnatural attachment to the plant.

One of the main reasons why apologies are in such a sorry state is that the apology has been repurposed to serve the needs of the transgressor over that of the victim. The goal of a sincere apology is reparation and restitution, requiring the offending party to say and do whatever is required to reestablish the trust and goodwill that previously existed between him and the offended. This requires the offender to humble himself, but that idea now seems so Twentieth Century.

The new goal of an apology is protect the brand identity of the offender. This is not unexpected in a society where, as we’re frequently reminded, we are all brands to be cultivated. Brands do not engage consumers by appearing weak. Brands demand our aspiration, not our pity.

It’s easy to place the blame for this on celebrities. In a culture that uses popularity as currency, we’ve allowed celebrities to model for us what an apology looks like. Not surprisingly, celebrities have pioneered increasingly creative ways to Teflon-coat their apologies in order to protect their brand.

We let them get away with this because their role is to entertain us and the public apology has become yet another form of entertainment that is flashed across screens from network television news to Facebook postings. On YouTube, celebrity apologies are tucked in among adorable babies and singing dogs. Context is everything.

Even the failure to apologize can be entertaining. The filmmaker, Michael Moore, has fashioned a career from planting a video camera in front of people who should be apologizing but aren’t.

So where is all this leading?

Well, when was the last time someone offered you a really satisfying apology? One that was direct and sincere, thorough and timely, and wonderfully free of the conditional clauses that are frequently used to deflect blame?

I thought so.

Sorry to hear that.

The Conformity Of The Umpire And Thoughts About Public Opinion and Social Media

April 28, 2011

We’re now well into baseball season, which means it’s time to relearn the lesson that no matter how many rules we enforce on the field, unintended consequences will still break our heart.

One of the more consistently perplexing characteristics of baseball is that teams win more games at home than when playing away. While Home Field Advantage applies to all team sports, it’s often more apparent in baseball because professional teams play so many games.

Fans and sports journalists have long recognized this phenomenon but no one has been able to credibly quantify it. Now a book provides an interesting and potentially definitive analysis of this phenomenon and, by extension, raises some provocative questions about human nature and the subtle pressures that public opinion can bring to bear.

The book is Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won. The authors, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, convincingly demonstrate that in just about every sport the home team wins more often. They also provide an explanation, one which is not what most fans like to believe.

The authors claim the answer to Home Field Advantage lies in the officiating, specifically the psychological pressures on field officials to make calls that favor the home team. They explain it this way in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated:

“They (officials) are not, however, immune to social pressure, and that’s where we think the explanation for home team bias lies. Referees are, ultimately, human. In test after test, psychologists have found that social influence has a powerful effect on people’s behavior and decisions – without their even being aware of it. Psychologists call this influence conformity, because it causes an individual’s opinion to conform to a group’s opinion. In other words, when humans are under enormous stress – say, making a crucial call with a rabid crowd yelling a few feet away – it is natural for them to want to alleviate it. Making snap judgments in favor of the home team is one way to do that. Umpires also may be taking cues from the crowd when they’re uncertain. They don’t know whether that tailing 95-mph fastball crossed the strike zone, but the crowd’s reaction may change their perception.”

So it’s not a question of officials knowingly favoring the home team but rather, as the authors conclude, a case of their simply being human. The desire of the official to remove the intense pressure of uncertainty in moments of high stress is coupled with the influence of a screaming crowd advocating a specific outcome.

Looking beyond sports, the impulse to scale up these findings to find broader insights into public opinion and, in particular, the impact of social media, is irresistible.

Some marketers and reputation experts today discount the impact of public reaction as momentary, diffused and weakly held. This charge has been leveled most recently against social media, and by critics with impressive credentials. They make some compelling points in questioning how closely popularity is related to genuine influence and also how directly cascading social communications lead to societal action.

Yet if you’re of the view that public opinion is a fairly recent social construct and we’re still trying to understand the true influence of word-of-mouth in society, the book’s conclusions about conformity and decision-making raise all sorts of interesting questions about social advocacy. It’s especially useful when scrutinizing how and why grassroots public opinion, especially when focused and amplified through new media, can influence corporate, political, regulatory and legal decisions and behavior.

At the very least, this explanation of the Home Field Advantage phenomenon serves as a colorful reminder that human nature is irrepressible no matter how many rules you overlay on a situation.

When Bad News Is Good News For Reputation

 April 5, 2011

Given the choice between having a bad reputation and having no reputation, it’s likely that most of us will choose the latter, as will most companies. This follows traditional thinking about reputation management which believes it’s usually much harder to salvage a damaged reputation than to build a good one.

A paper I recently came across from Marketing Science makes me wonder if this line of thinking is always true. What if bad news sometimes can be good for reputation, at least in a practical sense?

The article, written by three professors at Stanford and Wharton, discusses research that examines the effect of negative book reviews and concludes that, “…although negative publicity is not always a good thing, in some cases, negative can actually be positive.” Granted, they weren’t measuring “reputation” per se, but the exercise seems close enough to raise some interesting questions.

The authors found that while negative reviews in publications such as The New York Times will hurt sales of books by well-known authors, similar reviews can and do increase sales by unknown authors. This occurs, they conclude, because even negative reviews bring attention to new works that otherwise would have passed unnoticed, and also because the sting of negative comments tends to fade over time leaving only increased awareness.

This brings to mind P.T. Barnum’s famous quip, “I don’t care what you say about me, just spell my name right.” And perhaps the point being made here is that Barnum’s comment is as true today as it ever was.

One takeaway from this research is the reminder that the idea of reputation is under construction today – at least the traditional concept that has a desirable reputation being built on good words and deeds. If one extends this line of thinking into the area of reputation management, it’s easy to envision ways in which reputation could be subordinated to a calculated strategy to build awareness, even if one needs to cultivate notoriety to do so.

It then remains to be seen whether choosing this route may later cause one to regret the price paid for devaluing the social currency, especially when we later find we need that reputation to help us get through a crisis in which public integrity is an asset.

Another observation from reading the study is more in the area of social commentary – that we are losing the capacity for nuance as we try to participate in the overlapping discussions of the social narrative occurring around us. When we live in a society characterized more by the emotional need to participate than to listen, and to experience things more than to understand them, reputation understandably becomes a more ephemeral construct.

A copy of the article, “Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales,” can be found here.

A Practical Lesson In Reputation And Crisis Management Complexity

February 22, 2011

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a case study on a woman who had the wrong surgery performed on her left hand. Instead of operating on a finger, the surgeon mistakenly operated on her wrist. While this type of error is rare, it’s even more uncommon to see it discussed so publicly.

In the article, the surgeon took responsibility for the error while candidly indentifying the many reasons why it occurred, most dealing with deviances from standard procedures. While many of these deviations were minor, taken together they aligned to create the surgical error.

What he did not say, or even infer, was also notable. Nowhere was mention made of the fact that modern medicine, in even its most routine practice today, is often a confluence of teams of specialists working with highly complex systems and procedures where much can go wrong and it’s nearly impossible in many cases to separate human error from systems error.

The woman understandably wanted her finger fixed, not a lesson in complexity. In the same vein, when a company experiences a crisis the public is not in the mood to have it explained in ways that question the complex systems we take for granted.

A fundamental assumption we make in our society is that complexity is good for us. We don’t frame it in those words, exactly. Usually, we couch it in unassailable convictions, such as that we have the most modern medical system in the world and it will keep us healthy into a ripe old age. Or that automobiles are built to be very safe today.

Right now, Toyota still has a problem even though government investigators recently announced that malfunctioning electronics were not found to be the cause of the rapid acceleration problems that generated lawsuits and headlines last year. While this vindicates Toyota on one level, it’s not going to provide comfort to the many Toyota customers who want clear answers and solutions to the problem. Replacing one question with another simply prolongs the uncertainty around complex issues and does not allow consumers to forgive and move on.

Complex systems are not simple, which should be obvious, yet we pretend that they are when it comes to risk. What is even more disturbing is that we are genuinely surprised, and often dismayed, to learn this.

The surgeon in this case offers a practical lesson for those involved in the management of both reputations and crises.

There are many things that will arise that will adversely impact your company’s or organization’s reputation over which you may have little or no control. When they occur, you may be tempted to try and explain the complex dynamics behind them. Resist this impulse no matter how important it seems to you at the time. No one wants to hear it. Instead, like the surgeon, take responsibility, provide a straightforward explanation, correct the problem and move on.

Later, perhaps, when the dust settles, larger and more abstract issues can be explored in your communications with stakeholders and publics. But in the heat of the moment, just deal with the finger.