Tom Mueller: 0:07

Hi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and we deliver that through interviews, storytelling and lessons learned as shared by experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. With me again today is my co-host, Marc Mullen. Marc, good morning.

Marc Mullen: 0:28

Good morning, Tom. Happy to be here.

Tom Mueller: 0:31

And great to be with you again, Marc, as always, hey, at our podcast today we're going to talk about training in a way where we focus on crisis simulations. For those of you who've been through a major crisis exercise, you're familiar with how injects get put into the exercise to kind of introduce new developments, new external things that might be happening. Today, the trend is all about using digital tools to simulate that external climate, to simulate social media and media stories. Our guest today is an expert in this area and he has spent a lot of time developing his own proprietary simulation tool and has been using that and working in the simulation realm around exercises for the past 15 years or so. So our guest today, to cut right to it, is Jeff Paddock.

Tom Mueller: 1:32

Geoff is joining us from the UK. Quick bio on Geoff - he worked as a print reporter in the UK for about 10 years before moving into the corporate communications roles, where he spent about 16 years working in the nuclear and then chemical industries there in the UK. So he brings a solid journalistic background in as well as the corporate communications side, which would make him a buyer of services for crisis exercises, and that as well today being a seller of those services, so he's got a great perspective on that. As I mentioned, Geoff , from industry a few years ago and now consults on crisis issues. He's notably running those simulations for large exercises. Jeff, Geoff welcome to the podcast.

Geoff Paddock: 2:28

Hello Tom. Hello Marc, good to be with you. Thanks very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tom Mueller: 2:34

I'm just fascinated by this subject matter that we're going to talk about today, because, like you, I spent 30 years of a career working in corporate communications and media relations roles for a large international energy company, and so I spent a lot of time working with simulation tools like we're talking about today, and it's just fascinating how much of an impact these tools can make when somebody is working on an exercise around a very real simulation. Jeff, I wonder if you could start us off and just tell us, from your perspective, the value that tools like this bring for a company or an agency that's doing an exercise.

Geoff Paddock: 3:20

Yeah, delighted. It's interesting. This particular area we're talking about is cutting edge. Now. I've been working with digital for more than 10 years and the feedback we get from companies that we work with is consistently good that digital is the best way. And I've been around crisis training, as you say, from both sides of the picture for a long time. A lot of that time we were restricted. So when I was working in the chemical industry, nuclear industry, we were restricted to passing pieces of paper around, or the alternative was drafting large groups of people behind the scenes to make simulated calls to the crisis team. The first of those examples was pretty boring passing pieces of paper around. I remember sitting on a training exercise for a very big fast food manufacturer and talking about a crisis in burger land. At 10 o'clock we passed another piece of paper and said it's now changed. There's now this happening. Pretty boring, and if you did it often enough with a client, the teams were used to it. They weren't engaged and they didn't think it was much like real life.

Tom Mueller: 4:30

Geoff, what do you find are the most impactful aspects of the simulation you know as you're doing it for companies and agencies.

Geoff Paddock: 4:39

I think it's like being in the audience for a TV show or the theater. It allows people to suspend disbelief because the crisis rolls out in front of them on a screen, and it also imparts a sense of tension and the kind of pressure that they'd have in real life. And that was something that we just couldn't do when we were passing pieces of paper around or even getting people to call into a room. So how it happens digitally, the scenario for a crisis exercise is agreed in advance and a detailed brief written that's down to us, write down to the media. Stories and the social media posters are injected into the day.

Geoff Paddock: 5:17

For the client, it's a totally bespoke experience. So we don't just give people the same old generic problem. We want to know what their worst nightmare is. We want to know what's the big problem for them at the time, and then we will deal with that. It's as realistic as we can make it. We don't invent places where we actually will have it set in the setting where the people are, whether they're actually live or virtual. Participants on our courses can either see a projected version of the simulator or they can call it up on their own laptops and their own PDAs.

Tom Mueller: 5:53

One of the most fascinating aspects of this digital simulation is how real it feels in the exercise setting. You can see people who are processing. A new media story has now popped up on the screen here. There's social media posts now coming in from elected officials or from NGOs and all of a sudden you start to feel the adrenaline in the room starting to ramp up a little bit. Can you speak to that a little bit in terms of the realism and the emotion that it brings into the exercise? Absolutely.

Geoff Paddock: 6:29

The internet is now part of any crisis, whether it's an oil well blowing up or it might be the financial or sexual mismanagement by company insiders but everybody gets the news from the screen now, and that's a huge change from the past. The thing about the golden hour that's not really the case anymore, because you never know when something is going to jump up and bite you. So everyone gets the news from the screen. But to practice how you're going to respond to that when it happens for real, whatever your crisis is, I think you need to use the same media. Digital crisis sims, basically use the same media that you would be using if you were doing it for real, and you can do it online via Zoom Teams. You can do it in a room with remote access the cost effective and so much more impactful. And also, if you've actually got a team in there, you're training your management. Whoever they are and wherever they are, can keep an eye on what's going on. They can dial in, they can look in and they can see it.

Marc Mullen: 7:35

So, Geoff, I have a question about that because, again, I spent a lot of time at drills and preparing for drills, preparing my clients for them, and most of the times the objectives for the Joint Information Center is to put it together, press release and do a news conference. So I see a shortcoming on exercise designed to fully use this tool. How do you deal with that? Do you actually inject yourselves well before the planning of the exercise, or do you come in to exercises that are ready to be run and you're just bringing the tool in at the last minute?

Geoff Paddock: 8:10

Well, we bring it in with an exercise that's ready to be run, but we do actually spend some time putting the thing together. So Our storm site is run with a single operator. So this is just me, basically, and that will be a support to the trainers in the room. The candidates who come in and it might be a team of anything up to 20-20 old people. They're called to it.

Geoff Paddock: 8:35

They don't know what they're in for, and they will be given a written scenario at the outset and then, if it's a virtual call or if it's in the room, they'll be split into groups and those groups will, for real, tackle the crisis. So, just as they would in real life, they're put together and told okay, it's down to you now to organise yourselves. You have got one hour, one hour, 15 minutes, whatever it is to get to a stage where you can put a holding statement together and that actually imparts a real pressure on them, a sense of pressure. We cut through some of the detail they'd have to face in real life, so they don't need legal approvals or management approvals.

Marc Mullen: 9:17

But that's the way it works. Sure, so you're exposing them to the pace and the dynamics of a national response, but you're peeling out the elements that get in the way of them get into performing the level they need to.

Geoff Paddock: 9:32

Yeah. The real aim here is to get them to work as a team. This is where you know this training is very useful for people who are not communications professionals but who might, in the event of a real crisis, be drawn into a crisis team, and you know, our clients know that that's a possibility and it's very useful to be able to practice this in a safe setting.

Tom Mueller: 9:56

That's one of the things I really like about these tools, jeff, is just the realism that it puts in the room.

Tom Mueller: 10:03

You and I have worked many, many crisis exercises together, both as from the client side and as a buyer of these services, and I just love the way people's perspective changes on this, because a lot of times in an exercise you'll see people kind of coasting through.

Tom Mueller: 10:22

You know, as Marc said, hey, our objectives to get a press release done and, you know, hold a press conference. Well, that's not particularly realistic for a major crisis, right, and we all know today, social media is going to lead communications and certainly the feedback coming into the company with the that's having the problem is going to be coming through social media just fast and furious. So it's quite important that their teams are prepared to monitor that social media and actually prepared for some of the vitriol that's going to be coming their way as well. Jeff, having watched you work the back office of the tool you call Storm, I've just been fascinated at some of the injects you come up with around these things. You're pulling stuff from today's headlines, putting it into the simulation almost in real time. How does that work for you, and do you find that to be very effective as a training tool.

Geoff Paddock: 11:25

Yes, I do. I'm going to be a bit modest here because you've you've pulled me up a bit. I think this is the secret source that can make the difference between a testing session and one that really takes the participants further. How we do this? A lot of it is done by me, but there's others who are involved. We do our homework, giving those who take part as realistic an experience as they possibly can get.

Geoff Paddock: 11:49

So these crisis teams can face hostile television clips, angry stakeholder tweets, and they can have their statements torn apart, sometimes by our trainers in the room, sometimes by me afterwards. Social media participants can face serious criticism as they would in real life personal insults, mocking memes and even fake news from parody accounts. Now, it's not too difficult for us to take a crisis. Once you know the scenario, you can then start to flesh it out with the detail. The important thing is for these people. They come into the room and their business is under attack. Their organization is in the target and it's not just something that they have to sort of play along because you're in the so and so industry. We deal with oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, we deal with all sorts. We've got experience of that. But it's their organization and they feel as though, oh, this could be a real workday for me.

Marc Mullen: 12:50

So can you turn the knob up and down to match the group? Or I should say do you turn the knob up and down or is your intent to overwhelm, or is your intent to fraud into action? And how do you measure that when you're in the middle of providing your injects?

Geoff Paddock: 13:06

Never to overwhelm, I think. I think my early experience of the old style media training was that we really did go into overwhelm the senior manager who was in the chair, and that's no longer a thing. We want people to perform brilliantly, we want them to do their jobs and we don't want them to be nervous about having to go into an arena that they don't know about. We've been surprised how real life's mirrored our sessions for some clients.

Geoff Paddock: 13:34

We keep our predictions accurate and many people who've attended our training sessions have been called on when real life crises happened. We have one, well, with one client. I can't tell you who it is, it's a fairly large company that operates worldwide, but we have what's called a nuclear option agreement with them. Tom will recognize this one. If during the session that we do and we might do two four hour sessions in a day with two different teams if during those sessions we find the participants are particularly able, so they're good, if they're quick with statements and they perhaps have an appetite to engage with social media as well, then we'll unleash an extra development. We'll ratchet up the pressure towards the end of the session and they may look forward to being grilled by a simulated media interviewer or even face up to a press conference or a town hall. We'll only do this when the client organizer, who's usually on the call, is happy with the process and we're all satisfied that this team are up for a bit of an extra challenge and I think the results can often help turn a good response into a great response. Equally, if teams are struggling with it, we can ease back.

Geoff Paddock: 14:48

We want them to organize. That's the main thing. We want them to feel real. The detail isn't always that important. If they perform brilliantly, great, that's fantastic. If they don't, okay, for a million reasons. You know you're not always on top form. We're proud of the feedback that we get from our courses. Very often people say, as well as the skills of the trainers, like Tom taking part, they also say the realism of the digital simulation made that the best course that they've been on this year.

Tom Mueller: 15:21

Yeah, Geoff, if one of the things that I like a lot about the tool is that you can ramp it up or back it down, because a lot of times when we're doing crisis exercises or crisis training sessions for a client, you know we have a real mix of people in the room. You maybe have some more experienced people and oftentimes today it seems like we have a lot of younger staff who are, you know, newly hired into organizations and so they don't understand all the rules of the road for how to deal with social media. What can we say, what can't we say? But even in this simulation setting, they're at least getting the experience of seeing what the vitriol might be like and how politicians might weigh in on this and how people who are completely disconnected from the incident you're dealing with find an excuse to weigh in and become part of it. All of that is just terrific context for any corporate communications people or even business leaders, to understand what that external environment is like.

Tom Mueller: 16:32

Most of us who've worked in corporate communications, we can be a little insular. We're focused on our internal politics and satisfying our internal clients. This is a great way to expose people to the really intense external spotlight that's going to be shown on us when we have a major incident. So, jeff, what social media channels do you most often simulate? And you know, given the global nature of social media and even just business today, how do you choose which channels that you're going to use for an exercise?

Geoff Paddock: 17:10

The short answer is we use all of them. We've run courses all over the world. Now, sometimes we've done it entirely in the local language. German is challenging. Chinese is worse, so there's no point talking about Facebook or Twitter in China. They just don't use it. There's a very small number of people who can actually use it there. So for the purposes of this, we'd simulate Weibo or WeChat For our social courses. We use the channels the client usually engages in, whatever they prefer, whether that be LinkedIn or Instagram, rather than Facebook and Twitter, and our injects are always appropriate to the medium. So we're not asking them to go on unfamiliar ground. They'd be, you know, they would normally be using those channels. Some clients also encourage to think about internal communications, which can be a very important part of a crisis response, especially when an organization's reputation may be on the line.

Tom Mueller: 18:14

Yeah, that's an excellent point too on the internal comms piece, jeff, because the storm platform allows participants in the exercise to actually post up internal communications notes as well. So the team in the room dealing with the issue has to think external as well as internal and then craft their communications to cover both of those audiences. And Jeff, I just want to tap one other issue you raised and that's the issue of language. So if you're dealing with a company that's doing an exercise in Brazil or in the Middle East somewhere, can you adapt the tool to work in local language for those injects?

Geoff Paddock: 18:59

Yes, within reason. Within reason we can. Personally, my linguistic skills are confined to two languages. I speak English and I also speak American English, which is bit like it but not quite the same. But yeah, we have done a German, a couple of German sessions, all in German, and that's testing for us, because we need to be sure that what we're saying is actually right. For that, of course, we'd use a translator who'd be working on the injects as we go along. In Chinese it's more difficult, but we have done it, and sometimes we'll have local language injects that are pre-prepared and tested and those will go in at the appropriate moment.

Marc Mullen: 19:46

I had an English teacher in high school that told us we had to suspend our disbelief, we had to get into what we were reading and out of our daily lives. Do you find that sometimes the room is resistant to moving forward? As you've built the injects to adopt a quicker pace, to have new issues that they have to address, do you ever get pushed back of just we're not going to go there.

Geoff Paddock: 20:12

Very seldom Marc. In my experience they don't. They rise to the challenge. They realize that that's what they're there for and that be petty about it or insular doesn't really work and it's not going to do them any good. I find just to pick up on what Tom said earlier that the younger people, the less experienced people who come in and sometimes who are pushed into the role of the poor sod who has to give the interview or perhaps talk to the camera at the press conference, that's a good testing time for them, but it's really good experience and the others always seem to handle it well. So no, I don't get much pushback and people I think the more realistic it is, the less easy it is to push back.

Tom Mueller: 21:02

Geoff, we've talked about using the simulation tools. In particular, we're talking about Storm now, which is a tool you developed for WPNT communications, who I work for as well, and we do a lot of executive coaching as well as crisis training for companies around the world. So we've talked crisis exercises. Jeff, do you ever use this tool for other type of training outside of the crisis exercise realm?

Geoff Paddock: 21:29

Yes, it's something we're increasingly asked to do. So social media is one area that a lot of clients worry about and they may have social teams whose job it is to sort of get into the fray daily and answer outside inquiries. They may not, and a lot of the big ones don't have those social teams across the board, so they might just be located in the headquarters or a couple of people in a country. So training people on social is slightly different than something that we're doing and we just take the mainstream media bit out of the picture and the crisis is usually something a lot sort of lower than the major crisis we'd be testing in our drills. It can be something as simple as a pop star who basically can't make a concert because they can't get the fuel because there's been some kind of problem and that's you know. It's a different way of using the tool. Also, you can use this tool alongside other things for media training. If you're doing media training remotely, to have this kind of backup is very useful.

Geoff Paddock: 22:44

We used to do a thing where the participants will be interviewed by a down the line journalist and then a piece will be written on the basis of what they had said, just as if a journalist in real life had interviewed them by telephone Using our storm site. We can now put that article in context, with the logo of the media organization next to it that they expect. It looks like a real article. We might just have a stolen picture of them that we can put in. We have that stuff repaired and that is delivered back to them within the session so while they're still in the room, they can actually look at each other's media articles. Also, we can take if we have a tech in the room, we can take clips, interview clips from people and we can run them on our storm site while they're still in the room and they can have a good laugh or they can have a good cry about their performances and everyone can sit around and judge them. So, again, it looks real. It looks like it's been part of an online thing.

Tom Mueller: 23:51

That's a really impactful piece of the puzzle here, Geoff, is when you can record a radio interview, for example in the room, or a television interview in the room, and within a few minutes, turn it around, have it posted on the website. No doubt it brings a bit of pressure on people who are participating in the exercise, but in terms of creating a very realistic sense for what you're going to deal with in a crisis situation, the tools, I think, are just fantastic. Jeff, I have to tell you I enjoyed working with you these past many years Now it's probably 10 years or so We've been doing these things together.

Geoff Paddock: 24:32

Yes.

Tom Mueller: 24:33

And just appreciate the level of creativity that you bring into those simulations. You regularly surprise me with the real-time injects you're coming up with and delivering that so well done. I look forward to working with you a bunch more in the future.

Marc Mullen: 24:54

So, Geoff, one more question real quickly. As you create all these injects and put them into the exercises, have you ever put one in where you're sad to yourself? I'm not going to use that one again. Yes.

Geoff Paddock: 25:08

Yes, no question about it. You're probably familiar with a character called Boris Johnson who used to be a prime minister here, but he's sadly disgraced and he was kicked out. But yeah, boris Johnson used to appear quite regularly because in real life it was quite possible He'd see an incident and someone from the government would actually go for it. Same goes for a certain former president in the USA who regularly used to appear On the basis that in real life he could actually. It's just crazy enough. You might get a comment if it was high profile enough. So yeah, whenever I've done that, I'm always kind of a bit cautious, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I liked the causes to be different. So if you do two teams on one day from the same company, I really don't want them to see exactly the same thing twice. So I will vary injects and I do have stuff in reserve to throw in and if something goes down particularly well, then great, it's back, and if something goes down badly, then you'll never see it again.

Tom Mueller: 26:14

All right, Geoff, thank you very much for joining us. It's been a great pleasure chatting with you and learning more about the simulation aspects of training and exercises, and thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. If you like what you're hearing, please like and subscribe to the podcast and give us a five star rating, and please tell your friends and colleagues about us as well, and we'll see you again soon on another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.

Marc Mullen: 26:48

Hi, this is Marc. We all know that in a crisis, nothing is more important than doing the right thing and making sure people know about it. In recognition of this reality, your organization has both a physical response plan directing response actions and a crisis communication plan guiding communication efforts. These plans should work together to enhance your ability to do the right thing and to make sure people know about it. But do you know these plans work well together? I can help you be sure by reviewing both plans to ensure that they do. A small investment in this review can yield a large return in the effectiveness of your plans. If you're interested or want to learn more, please email me at markmullenccc@gmailcom.