Crisis Communication

Get your message out clear and strong

- Ong Xiang Hong

We come across many failures to communicate in our businesses – more often than we might like to admit. We think of communication as a straightforward process: I talk, you listen, you talk, I listen, we understand each other. What’s so hard about that? Sometimes communication actually is that straightforward, but often it’s not.

The failed Bay of Pigs invasion shows a dramatic example of communication gone wrong. When President Kennedy asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their opinion on the invasion of Cuba in 1961, he was told that the proposed operation had “a fair chance of success.” The Joint Chiefs didn’t explain what they meant by “a fair chance”, but Kennedy presumed it meant a “good chance” of victory.

Years later the author of the Joint Chiefs’ report said that, in his mind, a “fair chance” meant 3 to 1 against success. Because of this misunderstanding, the President approved the ill-fated attack that caused unnecessary deaths and led to a historic foreign policy debacle.

Of course, in business, communications blunders are rarely this deadly. But they can cause embarrassment and lost time at best; financial loss and reputational damage at worst. Companies with as little as 100 employees, spend, on average, around 17 hours a week clarifying previous communication. This, when translated into dollar signs, equals approximately US$525,000.

Conversely, in a study conducted by Towers Watson in 2014, companies with high effectiveness in change management and communication are 3.5 times more likely to significantly outperform their peers. Therefore, effective communication is vital to an effective business.