Voiceover: 00.00 This is The Beat, a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Maura Fiedler: 00.08 Hello and welcome. My name is Maura Fiedler, and on behalf of the COPS Office, I’d like to introduce to you Ian Mitroff. Ian is an author, professor, and crisis management expert, and he’s here to talk with us today about crisis management. Professor, or Ian, if I may call you that— Ian Mitroff: 00.29 Ian is fine. Fiedler: 00.30 Ian. You are an esteemed systems theorist well known as the father of crisis management. For our viewers today, can you please define crisis management? Mitroff: 00.39 Well, crisis management, I mean briefly, is thinking both systematically and systemically about a broad range of crises, and not preparing for each of them individually or in isolation, because no crisis ever occurs solely. It’s looking for early warning signals. It’s being proactive in designing damage containment mechanisms, which was not the case in the Gulf oil spill, so that you can contain the crisis, ideally. It’s considering and factoring in a wide number of stakeholders into crisis plans. I mean, anyway, depending how you count, there are 11 to 12 different kinds of crises, your economic, ethical, informational, environmental, public relations,so far and so on. No crisis ever occurs in isolation. So if you just plan for one or two crises in isolation, you’re almost worse off than—I wouldn’t say that you didn’t do anything at all—but you will, the crisis will quickly get out of hand. Because again, they just don’t occur—one crisis can set off a chain reaction. Every crisis is either the cause or effect of any other crisis. So you have to think and plan systemically and systematically, or you haven’t prepared at all. Fielder: 02.00 What does it mean to manage in the age of supercrisis? Mitroff: 02.03 Well, I mean, the age of supercrisis is that these crises are bigger, costlier, deadlier, and the time between them shrinks. So we go from one crisis into the next, whether it’s Japan or, say, a personal media empire crisis like Rupert Murdoch, or, you know, whatever it is. The time between them just gets vanishingly small. So the point is that in the age of supercrises, one has to constantly do worst-case scenarios and again connect the dots and think about how one crisis can set off—I mean, probably the most important thing: No organization is exempt from any single type of crisis, whether it’s BP or the Catholic church or the government of Japan, it doesn’t matter. I mean it does matter, obviously, but no one is exempt. So either you’re prepared, or you’re crisis-prone. Unfortunately, most organizations are crisis-prone. Why? Because denial is hard. Cops are exposed to a variety of events that most normal people are not. So therefore they’re, whether they like it or not, are used to—or maybe not used to—but they have to deal with things that are unpalatable. In the corporate word, you know, there’s a tremendous amount of denial because just thinking about crises raises enormous anxiety. One of the best ways to cut through the denial is, fortunately or unfortunately, the CEO of one company that has experienced the major crisis has to talk to his compatriots, whether competitors or other members of the industry, and say, “Don’t kid yourself. You will go through, at some point, what I’ve gone through. And either we learn from one another’s mistakes and successes, or we don’t learn at all.” I’ve studied a wide variety of crises that happened; almost any kind of industry, any kind of company, any kind of institution. And what one finds is that the lessons are pretty much the same. And what’s really distressing is the inability, again, because of denial and the scary nature of crises, for us as a society and worldwide to really learn these critical lessons. I mean, one lesson, for example, is that there are no secrets in today’s world. I mean, you can find out anything. The height of irony is that Rupert Murdoch, who lived by a tabloid, is now being tabloid himself. And most people can’t get outside and say, “How could our own technology or business be applied to us against our best interest?” So the inability to do crisis scenarios, to think the worst and prepare. And the sad thing is those organizations that do this are actually more profitable. So it’s not just doing crisis management for its own sake, which is the right thing to do, but it’s also shown to be good business. But it’s very hard to break through denial, because crises are so scary. Nonetheless, over time, humankind manages to learn. The great British poet T.S. Eliot said it best of all: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” It’s too painful. So we shut it and try to blot it out. Fortunately, you can deny it, but reality intrudes. It always has a way of coming back in. So in today’s world, you’re either prepared or you’re not. Fiedler: 06.08 In closing, if you could give one recommendation to law enforcement—or several recommendations— that is, at the beginning of a potentially high-profile incident, what would that be? Mitroff: 06.20 Well, the one thing I’ve always said over the years to any institution, any organization: If you want to be prepared, one of the best ways: Hire an ex-investigative reporter; even better, somebody in police work that has been an investigative reporter. Have them go around and dig up all the dirt, which will be not hard to do, and publish in mock-newspaper or mock-“60 Minutes,” or the daily news, whatever it is, that shows your organization in the worst light. I mean, to couple it to police: Police are relatively prepared for civil disturbance. I mean, what else is new? That comes with the territory. What they’re not prepared for: internal, ethical, moral crises—you know, cops doing bad things and the like. Again, when I lived in LA, whenever there was a crisis, the LA Times dragged out the 40-year history of the LAPD showing all the crises they had had and mishandled, the point being the current crisis was not an aberration; it followed a pattern. So again, you’re either working on yourself, you don’t necessarily need to apologize, keep reliving history, but saying, “We’re committed to change. What was acceptable,what happened in the past, is no longer acceptable.” I mean, Rodney King is really a watershed, not for LAPD, because it says, “There are no secrets anymore.” Anybody with a cell phone, a little video camera, can get behind the scenes and now photograph, which was formerly hidden or only a few people could see it. Now that’s— with social media, a lot of it is anti-social media with bullying—nonetheless, there are no secrets. So either you operate in really a public light because it all comes out in the wash. I mean, if it can come out with Rupert Murdoch, who is about as secretive and controlling as any human being on the face of the planet, and in the business, who is exempt? It comes out in the Catholic Church. Name me a single institution that you can’t get into the secret, locked-up files or get a disgruntled employee, whatever, to come clean with all the dirty linen. There are no institutions. Fiedler: 08.42 Thank you very much for your time. Mitroff: 08.44 My pleasure. Voiceover: 08.47 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems.