>> Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and others.
TRANSCRIPT:
DOUG: Bradley, congratulations on your book: Faster. Messier. Tougher.: Crisis Communication Strategies in an Era of Populism, AI, and Distrust. I’m so glad I made it through that properly. What was it that made you realize, hey, I’ve got to put this book together?
BRADLEY: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me here, Doug. I’m excited to have this conversation with you. You know, it’s interesting because I actually think that the moment dictated the topic, the title in some ways and the subject itself. You know, I think the triggering moment for me was when I was teaching classes. I’m a professor, as you know, over at Northwestern on the adjunct faculty, and I was teaching students who were in this experienced master’s program, so generally 7 to 10 years out of school. And, you know, it was really interesting because a few years ago, the questions that they were asking me around, what do you do if you have a deepfake where, you know, your CEO is captured saying maybe something that the company kind of supports but doesn’t entirely, you know, stand behind? You’ve got to try to parse through what is real, what’s not. It gets confusing and difficult. How do you do it? What does it look like to actually navigate that situation appropriately? And you learn things like maybe earnings the next day, whatever it may be. And all of this stuff felt so outlandish a few years ago, but honestly, this is stuff that we’re seeing almost every day now. And so, you know, what’s crazy is I was having these conversations in classrooms, but then I would go to Fortune 500 leaders, C-suite leaders, sometimes even board members who are increasingly starting to ask the exact same questions. And Doug, you know how it is if you’re getting questions from the most senior people in the field and then also from those who are finding their way and kind of moving up in the field, you start to realize there’s a real gap here that we need to address. And so, you know, it caused me to say, I have thoughts on these things, but I want to dig more deeply into it. So, some of this was codifying what I believed some of this was looking for the examples that were happening in the wild, right? So, how are we kind of determining what best looks like? And then some of this was really trying to say, let’s do a little bit of research and figure out, you know, where are things going and how should that determine how we approach this. And there were a number of different findings that came throughout it that made me really glad.
DOUG: One thing I say that always impressed me about you is you’re always open to being aware of what’s going on. You don’t just lock into one thing and you approach the book that way. One of the things that I thought was interesting is when you talk about the age of impact, and now it’s the age of issues and that transition that happened so quickly.
BRADLEY: I thought that I was writing this catalog of, you know, all of the amazing changes that were happening in the business landscape. You think 2020, 2021, 2022, this is Covid era, this is post-George Floyd. You have seen an influx in a few things. One, the flexibility of work, right? So, when we saw this great migration that everyone talked about, employers were saying, how do we keep our employees? How do we keep them happy? How do we make sure that they feel like they uniquely belong here? Because that’s going to create a premium for us and allow us to actually keep the best talent, which was extraordinarily important and extraordinarily hard to do and very expensive if you were just competing with money. So, you saw that really interesting transition, but you also saw, you know, folks who were really taking a look at, you know, what does it look like to improve the communities in which we operate in meaningful ways? And so, you actually saw a massive influx in philanthropic and corporate dollars going towards community college causes. And so, it was a really fascinating time where business took up almost an outsized place in society. And so, what came with that though, was many of the stands that leaders were expected to take on societal issues, and some of those felt very in tune with the way the company operated and thought about the world, but some of those felt like stretches. People doing things that weren’t necessarily sincere or things that actually didn’t align to where they operated in this space at all. And so, what happened from there? And we all kind of watched the slow motion, you know, car crash in real time was politicians started to call out companies, many, you know, consumers started to say, well, actually the commitment that you made is one that you haven’t followed through on. People started to wonder, one, what does what you say and public actually mean about who you really are? And two, should you have a point of view on everything? And that ended up resulting in a lot of backlash that started slow over time and picked up gradually, and then became a bit of a fever pitch by late 2023, when you saw kind of, you know, Ron DeSantis in Florida going after Disney and so many of the other things that we saw. And then, you know, we don’t have to go into all the politics of 2025, but, you know, we saw a pretty significant policy and regulatory shift that accompanied much of this, including at the Supreme Court level with affirmative action. And so, all of this stuff comes together to create an environment that is a bit of a pressure cooker. And, you know, when we talked about crisis in the past, it was about company has an issue probably with a product. That product issue creates a lack of trust with consumers and regulators and others, and the company now needs to work on rebuilding trust because of the mistake that they made. And that’s the typical kind of orientation around this. So, what you say and what you do matters, but in the world in which we operate right now, you are seeing so much chaos. And that chaos is largely caused by a few things, which is the increased speed and access to disinformation that goes along with that. So, we’re living in a bit of a half-truth society that’s moving really fast, but also polarization. And people are really, really, really incentivized to see world events through the lens that reinforces their world beliefs.
DOUG: Sure. If I can get to that point on polarization, because one of the challenges when you’re speaking out as an organization is there’s going to be differences among your employees that are challenging. You talked about the challenge of keeping employees. Probably the thing I’m most proud of in my 40 years of having D S Simon Media is that currently we average 12 years of employment per person. The idea that we’ve created something that people want to stick around there or who knows, maybe we’re just outperforming our little niche in the industry and that’s keeping people around, but that’s so important because you have to mollify, it seems, so many different audiences. So, what are some of the approaches to do that?
BRADLEY: You talked about kind of, you know, outperforming your niche in the marketplace or creating something special. And I think both of those things are true of you. I do think that every organization has to understand two things. One, what are the reasons that people who actually care about this organization, your employees, your consumers, etc.? What is it that they actually value about who we are? What is the special kind of magic that we have, and what are we trying to solve for in the world that is unique? And number two, what are the things that make up our vulnerabilities? We all have them. Organizations have them, people have them. And so, the better job you do it really understanding what those things are. And frankly, I mean, I’ll put a finer tooth on it. What are the things that if a person were to hear this issue about you, right, would create a fracture in the trust and the belief they had in your organization, you have to prepare for things that may actually create that. And so, you know, I say this in political terms all the time because people understand it. What really wouldn’t hurt a Donald Trump or even a Bill Clinton in terms of scandal would really hurt a Barack Obama or a George H.W. Bush, because they have different sets of vulnerabilities, and people expect different things from those folks. And we all have to think, as, you know, entities, what is it that is going to create affinity, create trust, and what is it that’s going to break trust? And we really need to operate against those vectors at all times.
DOUG: Yeah. Now that’s fascinating. And obviously you talk about crisis quite a bit in the book. And one of the big issues that should we respond, shouldn’t we respond? When do we know it’s a crisis? Can you share some of your takes on those questions?
BRADLEY: You can’t play whack a mole, right? You know, when you think about all of the things that come at you, some of them are true, but some of them are completely false. And, you know, regardless of whether something is true or it is false, there is way too much volume of those things for you to say. I’m going to respond to every single one of these issues. And so, the key isn’t necessarily figuring out is it true or false? The key is figuring out does it actually have the ability to do damage to people’s trust and affinity for me or my brand? And if the answer is yes, because it hits you in that spot of vulnerability we were just talking about, then you have to respond, put on our priority list of figuring out how we run the scenarios and figure out what it would look like and get the lawyers in the room with the comms folks and the business folks to figure out, like, what are we comfortable saying and doing in these moments. Because if you don’t do that exercise, then when you’re caught flat footed, there is no possible way you’re going to get people, um, you know, aligned with the level of speed you need to, to react in the moment we’re in.
DOUG: Yeah. It’s also interesting that a lot of times crisis has been thought of, okay, how do we defend ourselves? How do we protect ourselves instead of what opportunity does this present to us? And you know, if you’re playing defense, you’re talking to whack a mole. There’s going to be a lot of trouble if that’s sort of the scenario you’re stuck in. But if you can somehow turn it around to become an opportunity, that seems like much safer territory.
BRADLEY: Yeah, it really is. And I don’t think people typically think of it that way, but it’s such an important reframe for it. You know, in a broad sense, I actually feel pretty strongly that crisis moments are actually when organizations are their most malleable, right? You have the ability to make great change because when things are working well, people say, well, we don’t need a bunch of suggestions. We got this covered, but when the sky is falling, people say, if there is one thing we know for sure, it’s what we’re doing is not working, right? So, you can actually try new things and you can become a new organization through this process. And I think people ought to see it through that lens, because the opportunity to your point really is great.
DOUG: Yeah, and it’s so interesting because in our own business, I see, you know, when Covid hit as a threat, we had a focus on survivability, but it’s like, geez, if we’ve been doing some of the things we did after Covid forced us before, we could have been way more profitable ten years ago kind of stuff, but now it’s sort of forced into the new reality that you adjust to it. I’m hopeful that you may consider that people who watch this podcast episode will be getting an honorary degree from Northwestern, given the importance of the information you’re providing, I don’t know if you can pull that off as an adjunct, but we’ll see. We’ll fight for it for you that.
BRADLEY: We’ll talk to the Dean about it.
DOUG: Any final thoughts that you want to share with the audience?
BRADLEY: One of the core arguments of the book is to really understand who your stakeholders are and to be really almost ruthless about narrowing down your field of who those folks are. I talk about it in terms of people who have the ability to impact your license to operate. And so, you know, when you think about marketers, they do this really well. They segment their population down, they’ve got their demographics. They understand, you know, what influences their buying decision. They know the age ranges. They know all of this information. You can go all day on this, but as communicators, we have a tendency to say, here are all of the stakeholder groups and here’s how we’re thinking about them. And really, we have to actually be really just almost maniacally focused on who are the 15, 20 people who have the ability to truly impact our business, not just all investors, but who are the couple of investors who, you know, carry a lot of weight and sit on the fence? Who are the employees who actually carry the greatest influence within their employee sets within our workforce? Who are the, you know, customers who are kind of lukewarm on us, but actually, if we were able to truly, you know, corner that part of the market, we can unlock our growth objectives? And then let’s start to really map how we communicate and frame out our communications strategies against moving those particular stakeholders. Because if we do that, we get a lot better at tuning out the noise, Doug. And there is so much of it that I think in this moment, we’ve got to be able to cull down the inputs and get really, really, really, really sharp on what’s going to move the needle.
DOUG: That’s beautiful. I’m sure you moved the needle for our audience. So, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
BRADLEY: Thanks, Doug. Appreciate it.
