What Have We Learned From COVID-19? (Part 2)

What Have We Learned From COVID-19? (Part 2)

July/August 2020

Peter M. Sandman, one of the world’s preeminent risk communications consultants, is the creator of the “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula and a frequent speaker and author on managing risk controversies. A Rutgers University professor from 1977 to 1995, Sandman, who received his Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University, became a full-time consultant in 1995. In late May and early June, Impact interviewed him by email about the way the public and private sectors have responded to the pandemic — and what we have learned from the experience that should guide us in the future. This is the second of two parts to this wide-ranging and insightful interview.

When we first spoke to you in May, protests by anti-lockdown activists intensified concerns about the spread of COVID-19. Since then there has been a new wave of demonstrations in the wake of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis. What is the risk management strategy to starting a dialogue with protesters?

I think you are better off to let them exercise their First Amendment rights without you. But sometimes protesters are open to dialogue — sometimes even when they didn’t plan to be. I watched in awe as Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields made unexpected dialogue happen with demonstrators enraged at the George Floyd killing.

What do you advise when you think dialogue is possible?

When that is the case, here is the fundamental initial strategy for mitigating a crowd’s outrage. It has three steps:

• First, let them vent — as long as they want. Listen. Resist the temptation to respond. In fact, the first few times they ask for a response, demur: “I’m here to listen and learn. I have plenty of other opportunities to say what I think. There are people here who haven’t spoken yet.”
• Second, eventually the crowd will start shushing each other and demanding to hear from you. Start by echoing what you heard. Try to echo faithfully, especially the parts you consider wrongheaded (even the insults against you personally). Don’t assume you understand. Don’t claim you understand. Ask if you understand: “Let me see if I’m hearing you right. Here are the three main grievances I think I heard. …”
• Third, find aspects of what they’re telling you that you can honestly agree with. Don’t pretend to agree with points you think are wrong, but don’t debate those points either. Focus on opinions and feelings you share.

This “Outrage Management 101” protocol can’t resolve a controversy, of course. At best it opens up a calmer dialogue and thus a chance to resolve the controversy. Its main disadvantage is that equally impassioned people on the other side won’t like watching you engage with people they passionately disagree with. I think this is a price worth paying. Little by little, all sides will figure out that you’re a leader who listens and learns from everybody.

Risk Management Expert Peter Sandman

Donald Trump’s critics say he wasn’t aggressive enough in response to the pandemic. But if he had been more aggressive, don’t you think the same critics would be claiming he was using scare tactics to gain power?

Trump did make one aggressive move early on: He stopped nonresidents from entering the U.S. from China. This violated the public health shibboleth that travel and trade should not be impeded to prevent or slow the introduction of infectious diseases. And so Trump was excoriated at the time. The left called the measure racist and xenophobic, and most public health officials called it ineffective. There is now something approaching an unspoken consensus that it was probably wise, albeit insufficient.

Political leaders often see crises as a reason (or excuse) for seizing or consolidating power. For better or for worse, that’s what many national leaders around the world did vis-à-vis COVID-19. It’s also what some U.S. governors did. But not Trump. Many had feared and some had welcomed what they saw as Trump’s megalomania; the left called it fascism, and the right called it draining the swamp. But despite frequent empty threats to force X or require Y or overrule Z, in practice, Trump ran away from power over COVID-19. He coveted the attention but not the accountability. He performed control but declined to actually take control over anything except the performance itself — the communication activities of federal officials. Nearly all the key decisions — testing, personal protective equipment, lockdown, coming out of lockdown — were left to the states.

So we watched critics who had spent three years complaining about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies demanding that he be more of a dictator: No more patchwork of inconsistent state standards! Invoke the Defense Production Act! Centralize! Tell us what to do!

As your question suggests, I do think a more aggressive early response to COVID-19 from the Trump administration would have been attacked by critics. In fairness, this is only partly because Trump’s critics are predisposed to attack anything he does. It’s also because Trump seems likelier than many other chief executives to have chosen his aggressive responses unwisely, implemented them inconsistently and explained them incoherently. And it’s because even the best leaders get pushback when they try to respond aggressively to a threat before it is visible (much less vivid and scary) to the rest of us.

President Trump has certainly said a lot of false or misleading things about COVID-19; Drs. Fauci, Birx and Redfield have said some, too. At least some of the time, they have to have known what they were saying was less than candid. But I’m sadly used to politicians and public health officials being less than candid about infectious disease outbreaks. The Trump administration is worse than most, but far from alone.

Here’s one example among many. After a badly over-reassuring start, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo became something of a role model of how a government official can say alarming things in ways that are candid yet somehow comfortingly empathic. But he has been neither candid nor empathic (nor apologetic) about his biggest mistake: sending elderly COVID-19 patients to nursing homes when they no longer needed hospital care, even though many were still infectious. This undoubtedly contributed to New York’s horrific nursing home death toll. Instead of owning the policy blunder, Cuomo tried to blame the federal government and the nursing homes themselves.

How does your “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula apply to this crisis?

I distinguish a risk’s “hazard” (how much harm it’s likely to do) from its “outrage” (how upset it’s likely to make people). Based on this distinction, I categorize risk communication into three tasks:

• When hazard is high and outrage is low, the task is “precaution advocacy” — alerting insufficiently upset people to serious risks. “Watch out!”
• When hazard is high and outrage is also high, the task is “crisis communication” — helping appropriately upset people cope with serious risks. “We’ll get through this together.”
• When hazard is low and outrage is high, the task is “outrage management” — reassuring excessively upset people about small risks. “Calm down.”

Before a crisis, the main risk-communication challenge is precaution advocacy. COVID-19 precaution advocacy was woefully inadequate. Even experts who saw the pandemic risk clearly were mostly unwilling to shout it from the rooftops. They were afraid of being mocked, ignored or criticized. And they were afraid of turning out wrong if the threat fizzled.

During a crisis, obviously, everything focuses on crisis communication — guiding people through the awful situation they’re in and helping them make wise decisions about how best to protect themselves.

COVID-19 crisis communication has been spotty. A lot of experts tried to compensate for their insufficiently alarmist precaution advocacy with excessively alarmist crisis communication, leading to lockdowns even in places where less extreme social distancing interventions (like canceling mass gatherings) probably would have been sufficient. Other leaders made the opposite mistake, insisting that the risk was low long after it was obviously high.

After a crisis, the main risk communication challenge is outrage management — addressing criticisms and recriminations about how the crisis was anticipated and handled. As a rule, people hesitate to voice those criticisms and recriminations mid-crisis; they don’t want to attack the leaders they’re relying on to protect them. When criticisms and recriminations come to the fore, that’s a signal the crisis is ebbing.

COVID-19 is different in ways that complicate the usual pattern. Pandemics happen in peaks and waves. So in places where the COVID-19 pandemic is ebbing, it may well be ebbing only temporarily. During the lull, outrage management is coming to the fore as if the crisis were over — but there is a need, too, for precaution advocacy to warn people that it’s probably not over. Where infections are still peaking, the paradigm is crisis communication. Also, we are arguably undergoing two simultaneous crises, the pandemic crisis and the lockdown crisis. People who believe their leaders are focusing on the wrong crisis can’t afford to wait till the crisis ebbs to voice their outrage; they have no choice but to mobilize outrage now.

What have you learned from this pandemic? How, if at all, has it changed your thinking?

I have spent decades teaching clients that panic is rare — and in the early weeks of the pandemic, public complacency was (as usual) a hugely bigger problem than public panic.

In crisis situations, people very seldom panic. We may get frightened — sometimes appropriately frightened, sometimes excessively frightened. Or we may fail to get frightened, even when it would be appropriate and useful to do so, since fear motivates precautions and preparedness. But we don’t panic. If we feel panicky and can’t bear the feeling, we trip an emotional circuit breaker and flip into denial instead.

But now I’m wondering if public health officials and experts panicked. In decades of pandemic planning, I never once saw anyone propose nationwide lockdowns as an appropriate response. Social distancing, yes. Even “extreme social distancing,” such as canceling mass events and closing schools. But locking down entire countries’ economies? Never.

Lockdown wasn’t in the playbook. Certainly locking down places where very little virus was circulating and hospitals had plenty of surge capacity wasn’t in the playbook.

So how did we get lockdowns throughout the U.S., most of Europe, India and elsewhere? The public didn’t panic. The public was compliant — surprisingly so, often reluctantly so and now decreasingly so. Politicians made the decisions, of course. But public health experts and public health officials gave the advice. I am not a public health expert or official. But it looked to me at the time like most lockdowns in most places were panic-driven bad advice. It still looks that way to me now.