The Leading in a Crisis Podcast

EP 27 Forging Unshakeable Trust: The Role of Community Advisory Panels in Crisis Management with Marysue Knowles

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Unlock the secrets to building unshakeable trust between companies and communities with our expert guest, Mary Sue Knowles. With over two decades of expertise, Mary Sue unravels the significance of community advisory panels (CAPs) for effective crisis management and the cultivation of long-term relationships. This episode is a goldmine for anyone looking to understand the sheer power of open dialogue and genuine engagement in forging community partnerships that withstand the test of time and turbulence.

Join us as we navigate the intricate process of forming CAPs, selecting the right members, and establishing a dialogue that outlasts the immediacy of regulatory approvals. Mary Sue walks us through the stark differences between a community with a CAP in place and one caught unprepared in the face of crises, with vivid examples drawn from recent headlines. By the end of our conversation, you'll grasp why CAPs aren't just good practice—they're the proactive bridge that connects industry to community, ensuring that even in the midst of storms, communication remains clear and conflicts are skillfully mitigated.

For more information about CAPs, contact Marysue Knowles at: mknowles@knowlescommstrategies.com

To share feedback or submit a guest recommendation, contact Tom Mueller via email at tom@leadinginacrisis.com.

To reach Marc Mullen for help with your crisis communications plan development or review, email him at mmullenccc@gmail.com.

We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.

Tom Mueller:

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

Marc Mullen:

Happy to be here, tom, looking forward to today's session.

Tom Mueller:

On our podcast today we're going to talk about community advisory panels. These are panels that get set up to help with community engagement around a major incident or a major new project that a company may be launching within a particular community. A community advisory panel can help create engagement between the community and the company to help smooth the path toward regulatory approval. Here, our guest today is an expert in running community advisory panels. She is Mary Sue Knowles. Mary Sue, welcome to the podcast.

Marysue Knowles:

Thank you for the invitation. Glad to be here, tom.

Tom Mueller:

Just as a way of background here, mary Sue started her career working in radio and television news and did that for about 20 years before segueing over and working on community engagement strategies, and that's what she does today through her own company, knowles communication strategies. Mary Sue, thanks for joining us. What's the biggest challenge you see in getting successful community advisory panels up and running?

Marysue Knowles:

Well, Tom, I think there's a big difference today. When I started doing this 26 years ago, there was a lot of interest stemming from the incident in Bhopal, india. There was a lot of interest in community right to know and it was really the advent of people saying could incidents like that happen in our backyard and our community? So there was a lot of interest both on the part of communities and also on the companies that were sponsoring and initiating these caps. I think what is different today is, you know, it's kind of a good news, bad news situation we don't have the types of incidents that may have occurred back in the 80s. I know back in my television career at that point in time I worked in a community that had a lot of chemical manufacturing and there were incidents on a pretty regular basis. So the public was very keenly aware and was very interested. I think what's different today I don't want to use the word complacency, but I guess that's really the best way to phrase it there's not those same issues, there's not that perspective of what happened back in the early 80s, and so there may be a reluctance, not necessarily on the part of community members.

Marysue Knowles:

I think community members who get engaged in caps are in them for the right reason. But I think sometimes the companies they're starting these. You know you gave a good overview, but there's, you know, sometimes there are other reasons. You know there's a mandate that they need to start a cap. There is pressure from either regulators or the community to start a cap, or from environmental groups, and they sometimes see it as a short-term venture.

Marysue Knowles:

And in my experience I mean I still work with caps that I've worked with 26 years ago, so they have been in it for the long haul and I think that's really the bottom line is a successful cap is long-term community dialogue, long-term two-way dialogue, and that's really what I think separates the successes from the failures. If a company says we have an issue or a project or we have this short-term objective, and they say, well, let's set up a cap, and I think right now there's a lot of swirling around with environmental justice, and so I think there are companies that are thinking, ok, we need to hurry up and do this, but we'll hurry up and do it and get through our permitting process and then move on. That is not, in my opinion, a good idea. I think you need to be looking at this as a long-term, sustainable dialogue that goes on beyond your short-term objective.

Tom Mueller:

Are companies generally thinking long-term? It sounds like you get a real mix of some who just say, nope, we need to get over this little hump and then we can move on from this. But it doesn't sound like a community advisory panel is kind of a short-term thing from your perspective.

Marysue Knowles:

No, and I have seen companies in not necessarily maybe a cap I've worked with, but one.

Marysue Knowles:

I've been around through colleagues or whatever, and I've seen that and they typically fail because the ultimate objective of a cap is establishing trust and credibility with your community and stakeholders and I don't care what sort of avenue you're in If you're looking to establish trust and credibility.

Marysue Knowles:

That doesn't happen overnight. That is a process and I know in personal experience you and I have had with a cap. That was a process that the objective was to educate people about a pending project and I think that is really the positive way to approach it and to be sure that you hear all their concerns, hear all their questions, have transparency and don't see it as a means to an end, but see it as an ongoing process, because the cap is really your sitting focus group and there may be things. You may have a short-term objective getting a new permit or an expansion or something like that but you're going to want to have a dialogue, you're going to want to know your community, you're going to want to know what are their concerns, what are the issues that may be lurking around the corner that at some point you're going to have to confront and these folks are good reconnaissance, they give you good feedback and input. And having that dialogue, that's where you established that trust and credibility over time.

Tom Mueller:

So, Mary Sue, you and I worked together on two different community advisory panels up in New Jersey and Delaware. This was for a proposed liquefied natural gas facility there and we had the unique position that our project would had to be permitted across two states. So we had panel in New Jersey and one in Delaware and as part of that I remember talking to you about you know, who do we invite to be members of this panel? Should we invite some of the people who are lining up to be opposition for us? Can we get them in the room? And then, of course, the question do we want them in the room with us? How do you advise companies on, you know, engaging opposition?

Marysue Knowles:

I think it's sometimes a little daunting when, especially if it's a new cap and you're talking about you know you're talking with the company representatives about how the cap should be structured. And you know let me preface that by saying, when you're setting up a cap, you don't just open up the phone book and start pointing at names, or you don't want just the president of every organization or HOA, you really want to have a cross-section of that community and every community is going to be unique. But chances are, if you're in an industrial area where you know, I mean there are communities that are fence-line neighbors chances are you are going to have someone who is upset about odors, noise, truck traffic, any number of things. And you also run the risk of organized opposition, whether it's, you know, a local group or something on a larger scale, the Sierra Club, whatever.

Marysue Knowles:

And I think, especially when you're dealing with, you know, folks that have local concerns, you're squeaky wheel, who's calling the switchboard or the guard all the time complaining about the odor issues. You want to reach that person and bringing them into a community advisory panel where the atmosphere is not us versus them, it's not company versus community, it's a very as you'll recall, tom, we kind of sit in a horseshoe. It's a very open, cohesive, you know, no one is pitting anyone against each other. So it's an opportunity for that person to have their questions and their concerns addressed. It's an opportunity for them to learn about whatever the issue or the project might be.

Marysue Knowles:

But I think when you have someone who is a real detractor and they are there and they do become a little difficult it's usually the other community members who kind of get them into the right place for lack of better word, peer pressure that they begin to see that okay, you know, the company is being reasonable, they're answering all of our questions, they're being transparent, and so chances are better than not that when you bring a I'll just call it a squeaky wheel to the table, that person, you know they may never be a staunch advocate but they may no longer be a strong opponent. So they are, they're being a lot more objective. It's hard to hard to sometimes articulate to a plant manager or a corporate representative when you're saying you want to do this. But I've seen more successes than failures in and you and I have had experience. We had, we had some squeaky wheels on the Delaware side of that project and I think we, you know, we made some headway.

Marc Mullen:

So you're saying that, at a certain level, an effective cap actually levels out the dialogue between opponents and participants, or opponents even, that the one function of the cap can be to bring reasonableness to the conversation?

Marysue Knowles:

Yeah, and you're always looking. You know you're trying to reach a consensus. You want to know if people have and I think it's. I cannot stress enough the importance of your company representatives being good listeners. And you know, when I talk about an effective two-way dialogue, I think where caps get into trouble, especially if they, you know, sometimes you have a single company cap that self facilitates, so you have a company member who is, who is trying to be the objective, neutral facilitator, but they're still a member of that company and so sometimes that doesn't come across as well as it should.

Marysue Knowles:

But I think you know you're striving for consensus, you want people, you know you want transparency, you want people to ask tough questions. I mean, you don't want this to be and again, I think this is something that you run the risk of when you have a company that self facilitates is, people get the perception well, this is just a PR effort and we're just going to get the one-way push of information that they want us to have, and that is certainly not the way a successful cap is run. Your company people, yes, they're going to present information, but they have to be effective listeners. And if people are afraid of something, if they're concerned about something. If they see their, you know maybe they're upset about traffic. But if you don't know that they're concerned about truck traffic at the time their kids are heading for the school bus or coming home from school, there's a simple remedy there you limit track traffic at that time and so you don't know that. You don't fix that problem unless you have that kind of dialogue, and that's what you want to achieve.

Tom Mueller:

Do these conversations ever go sideways? Do things get out of hand in panels, or does it become a counterproductive kind of exercise for some companies?

Marysue Knowles:

I'm sure this will be disappointing for you to hear, but I've never really had the experience of seeing something go terribly sideways. I think that is part of the role of facilitator is to keep everyone on an even keel. There are times when you could have there's a lot of emotion, depending on what the issue is. You could have confrontation, if you will, just a confrontational dialogue, but some of the things, of course, caps have bylaws. We also I would say majority of my caps we also have something called a team agreement, which is simple rules of the road.

Marysue Knowles:

Be respectful of other folks. This is something we allow the panel to establish these points, but they may be turn off your cell phone, be respectful, don't interrupt someone. It's just common courtesies. I think, by and large, people follow that. We're pretty civilized people. I think, by and large, people are respectful of others. The worst case scenario is when, if you have a presenter whether it's someone, a third party, that's a guest speaking about something, or a company representative who allows their. I guess it's semi acceptable if a community member gets upset, but it is not acceptable if your company representatives get a little overheated and confrontational with the community Because you're trying to build positive relationships, and that's going to just undo all the good that you've done.

Marc Mullen:

So, mary Sue, you referred to facilitator. I gather that ideally it's a neutral facilitator, and then you have company representatives and community representatives that are engaged in the dialogue. So the facilitator is not necessarily, or is not usually, an employee of the company.

Marysue Knowles:

As I said earlier, occasionally you have companies that will self facilitate. In my experience, I've worked with caps that are are single company, and I've also worked with multi company where you may have.

Marysue Knowles:

You know, I had at one point one that had 12 companies represented. That's like herding cats, that's a. That's a big challenge. But the role of facilitator, you know you could. You could picture somebody in a referee shirt. You know, in a situation where you do have, you know, maybe some emotional dialogue or you know you need to, you need to jump in. You need if someone is, you know, rambling on, taking too much time, you need to step in and keep the meeting going and stay on task.

Marysue Knowles:

The role, my role in terms of managing and facilitating or, in most cases, creating, forming the cap. And that means getting the right compliment of representatives. And you know I use a process where I will do some research in the community interview some key community leaders, find out what the perceptions are of that particular industry or industry in general, what people are concerned about past incidents that may have affected people's attitudes towards industry, and then also using that information and recommendations from some of these key community leaders to seat a panel that represents the various constituencies in the community closest to the facility or facilities. So once you have the cap established, then my role is to manage all the communications. We go through a typical planning process each year to set the agendas.

Marysue Knowles:

And again, this is not, you know, the company saying we're going to talk about this and tell you about that. This is an opportunity for all of the people at the table to say what they're interested in, what they would like to talk about, what they would like to see in terms of a tour, speakers they might like to have, and then we go through a weighted voting process of, you know, a easel full of topics to establish a meeting calendar for the year. So I manage that. I get the speakers, I take the minutes, I, you know, send out the minutes, handle all the communications. So it's a lot of logistics between meetings and then running, facilitating the actual meeting okay, what I'm always looking for is resources for people.

Marc Mullen:

When you walk into an incident or something. There's always too many issues and there's never enough bodies, so to know who's been involved in the cap it seems like it could be very helpful. If you walk into actual response, have you ever had a response breakout in the middle of your, your planned cap meetings where, all of a sudden, something bad has happened and the cap is now saying what do we do with this? You mean like in real time in real time like uh oh, something just blew up.

Marysue Knowles:

I actually had a cap that I was taking over from a colleague and it was my first time at the meeting and when the cap was established and we ultimately revised this down the road, but just about everybody at the table was an emergency responder. So I get to the meeting and there's no one there. Like, where is everyone? Finally, I was able to reach one of the one of the folks and here there was a major incident. It was a big fire, but everybody was at the fire and so no one, you know so. Hence you don't want to, you know, have all emergency responders, because that's going to happen.

Marysue Knowles:

But to your point about a crisis and and I think this is important and this is one of the the benefits of having a cap is you may have something, it may be a large-scale incident or it may be just something small, but if you have that sitting focus group, they are going to give you good intel on what the broader community is saying, what they're thinking. You know, and I've had incidents where we've used the cap of a situation to not only give a you know, a good debriefing on exactly what happened, what the path forward is, but to, you know, make sure that all the concerns that you know the the community has, that maybe the company is not aware of that, all of those are. So the cap really is a good tool to to mobilize in a crisis situation.

Tom Mueller:

So, Marysue, just kind of building on that, though, if we jump back to the railroad derailment there in East Palestine, Ohio right, Huge community issues there around the vinyl chloride and potential air contamination issues, water contamination issues, lots of concern among local residents there about safety for them and their children. But you know the cat's out of the bag and it's happening now. Can you effectively set up a cap in those kind of circumstances?

Marysue Knowles:

Kind of as an afterthought? You can..

Marysue Knowles:

you know, I don't know if there was any sort of mechanism in place in East Palestine, but I could use another example in South Jersey where there was a train derailment about a decade ago. Really, a lot of similarities. And this is a community where, you know, I've worked in that community for upwards of 20 years and there was a lot of effort on the part of the cap, where we did a lot of emergency response discussions. We provided shelter in place, training at community groups, in schools. So at one point I would have thought, you know that everyone with a pulse knew how to shelter in place in that community. Well, that was how many years ago.

Marysue Knowles:

And then you fast forward a decade and the landscape of a community changes. People move, companies change, industry changes. So when this particular incident occurred, there was a huge communications disconnect and people were very much in a panic about what had happened. They did not believe there was good communication and we had a cap in place and we did debrief and we dug through the issues and we, you know, we had emergency responders, emergency management people who have been members of that panel and we worked through the issues and we talked about training. So there's an example of where you know you have a cap in place and it serves a valuable function.

Marysue Knowles:

Flashback to East Palestine. If you did not have that, what you did have was you had these big community meetings where tempers were flaring and people were yelling and screaming and it was an us against them. That's what you want to avoid. If you have a cap and you could take that conversation, you're addressing the same issues and the same fears but in a totally different environment, and that's why you know you don't want to wait till the day of a crisis to think about doing this. I think it's a good due diligence to say you know it's like an insurance policy. You may never need it, but you're going to be mighty glad you have it. On a day like that, when you have that sitting focus group, you can engage.

Tom Mueller:

Yeah, that's terrific advice and of course that's, you know, for companies with fixed facilities or planning new projects. But I always feel for the railroads and the pipeline operators who. . . you never know where an incident might occur. Right, it could be anywhere across the country where your facilities operate. So it's a huge challenge, maybe a business opportunity, who knows? I think we'll wrap it up there, Marys ue. Thank you very much for joining us today on the podcast. It's been a really engaging conversation.

Marysue Knowles:

Well, thank you both, it was my pleasure.

Marc Mullen:

Appreciate the time with you.

Tom Mueller:

And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks for joining us. If you like what you're hearing, then 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. We'll see you on the next episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. English Trans adventur� break.

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