Clock is ticking for Malaysia Airlines in crisis management
In this cross posting from The Conversation, Hamish McLean of Griffith University assesses the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 from a PR perspective.
For Malaysia Airlines, every hour counts as it deals with the loss of flight MH370 with 227 passengers and 12 crew on-board. The first 48 hours of a crisis are the most critical for an organisation as it aims to reassure people that it can deal with, and resolve, the crisis.
It is in this time period that people will decide whether or not to support the organisation in trouble. A failure to act decisively and with leadership can result in inflaming outrage and blame. For Malaysia Airlines, that time is now up. It is now entering a reputational minefield.
Flight MH370 lost contact with air traffic controllers at 2:40am local time (5:40am AEDT) on Saturday after it left Kuala Lumpur and headed for Beijing.
The worst-case scenario of an accident is compounded by the uncertainty of what happened, where it happened and why it happened. There are so many questions but few answers.
In the context of crisis management and communication, this information vacuum equates to a doomsday situation for the airline.
Dealing with a crisis
Although scholars are yet to agree on a definition of a crises, each event shares common themes – surprise, uncertainty, danger, reputation and relationships. All these facts have come to bear on Malaysia Airlines.
Crises can impact on individuals, families, organisations, communities and even nations.
Unprepared, organisations often collapse under the weight of three “crisis” realities – a lack of information, a lack of time and a lack of resources.
This creates what has been termed a “crisis smog”, where organisational leaders are blinded by pressure they have never previously experienced.
An effective response to a crisis demands accurate, timely and trusted information. Armed with the facts, an organisation can address many of the issues that surface in the hours after a disaster.
Information helps reduce the outrage and the blame felt by victims and relatives. Information helps people make sense of what happened, and information forms the foundation of the recovery process for all involved.
But Malaysia Airlines is facing a “black swan” event – an unprecedented and unexpected situation.
The reaction so far
The airline’s senior management has done the right thing in fronting the media early on and releasing the passenger list.
Some things are known but many questions still remain – in particular, how could a modern Boeing 777-200 vanish at 35,000 feet over the South China Sea without any distress signal before impact?
Feeding into speculation – symptomatic of an information vacuum – are questions over two passengers who boarded on stolen passports. How could this happen when air safety and security was supposed to be tightened following the 9/11 hijacks?
As time goes by, more questions will be asked, expectations for answers will be increased and tension will be heightened between anxious relatives and the airline. Anger will overtake grief as people seek to attribute responsibility. The blame game is likely to be overwhelming.
So, the airline must focus on two key areas. The first is to work closely with the search efforts – being seen to do something – as more countries, including Australia, join in.
Secondly, the airline must ensure it meets the communication and emotional needs of the relatives. This will be challenging. Communication must take a people-first empathetic approach from the perspective of the families.
The Singapore Airlines crash in Taiwan in 2000 is a good example of how this can be done. The airline provided counselling services at the destination airport for relatives waiting for the aircraft. It also offered a “buddy” system to support relatives.
Knowns and unknowns
There are some basic “rules” the airline should follow:
- Ensure as much as possible that family and friends are informed about developments before the media is informed. Keep family and friends together and have airline representatives on hand to offer support.
- Be consistent with information. The basic tenant of speaking with “one voice” is even more critical. Conflicting information adds to speculation and destroys trust and credibility.
- Anticipate the questions and concerns of family and friends. Although answers may not be known, it is important to acknowledge the impact of uncertainty.
- Address speculation quickly, particularly if it is circulating on social media. The danger is rumours can take control of the communications agenda.
With such uncertainty, Malaysia Airlines could adopt the communication model used by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the days following 9/11.
This is what we know. This is what we don’t know. This is what we are doing. This is what you can do.
People are more supportive of an organisation that admits “unknowns” in a crisis, at least in the early stages. Therefore, the “this is what we don’t know” approach builds transparency and trust. It removes doubts that there may be something to hide.
But for Malaysia Airlines, people will be patient only for so long. The airline industry will be watching to see if the airline has what it takes to emerge unscathed from this disaster, and what crisis management lessons there are to be learnt for the future.
Hamish McLean does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Surely not all of the problems listed are the responsibility of the airline?
Whilst they need to check passengars have a passport, I’m not sure that the Interpol database of stolen passports is avialalbe to them – that’s border control’s responsibility. And tracking the plane was up to air traffic control.
Of course, public perception may still be that all these problems are ‘the airline’s fault’.
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I can’t help but think this is a very Western approach to an aviation crisis where the majority of relatives and immediate stakeholders are Asian. I wonder if the same guidelines apply. Counselling is not to be encouraged at this stage I think because of so many unknowns. Applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would by a useful start, especially right down at the lower end.
Wherever the case, I’m preparing for lots of “You’re kidding!” remarks to be uttered
when the the location of the 777 is announced eventually, and a whole litany of “join the dots” theories emerge. Lots of face to lose by lots of stakeholders.
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Your right. Reputational damage could be serious. e.g. When there’s a couple of nice looking South African ladies invited up front in the cockpit on a previous Malaysian Airlines flight (good on the Tele), with one of the missing flight’s pilots, him having a smoko, and looking backwards, (like driving a car facing mother in law in the backseat), er , like , no problems. This flight vanished from radar better than the USA air force stealth bombers over Baghdad in the last gulf war.
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It is the Airlines responsibility to keep the lines of communication well and truly open. As speculation is growing from the layperson’s perspective to professionals within the aviation industry, their aircraft , their personnel, their reputation/brand is taking hits from all directions. Given today’s Airline Industry is intensively competitive and operates on the thinnest of margins they need to build efficiency into every part of their operations.
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You know what’d be awesome? Finding the actual plane before the PR of the airline starts being used for a case study and web traffic.
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Often real world disasters are not as cut and dry as “what you should do and what you shouldn’t do” as a company or a person acting on behalf of that company. It’s easy to sit back and judge this from your armchair… Let’s face it, the brand was damaged the moment the plane was lost, undoubtably. What happens next will not be the difference in deciding whether to fly with Malaysia airlines or Qantas if given the choice. That decision was made three days ago now for 99.9% of us. That’s unfortunate for the airline and something the brand will live with for the foreseeable future. The company PR (no matter how well handled) will not slow the bleeding of public perception at this point.
– Does Hamish McLean have any real experience in a crisis of this magnitude or is he simply reciting text he has read and learned over the years as an academic?
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Once various Governments and the military get involved and start muddying the waters, the airline is just one piece in the jigsaw. It handled the first 12 hours or so very well, but is now lost in the cacophony of other voices and theories. It is hard to see it regaining the control it would need to manage this effectively. The claims from families that they are hearing news first from other sources certainly isn’t good for them.
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@les posen… I am up here and I don’t accept that there is a ‘western’ or ‘Asian’ way of doing things professionally – people are people everywhere the same. In a way I feel sorry for the Malaysians – they really honestly have not got the first clue about where this plane is. They have had to stand up in the full glare of the world’s media and admit they are totally hopeless, to the point where they don’t even have proper functioning military radar coverage of their own airspace. They have a young transport minister who is smart but is hamstrung by a dottery old CEO of Malaysian Airlines and a couple of ‘tough’ but empty headed generals who are all hat and no horse. None of these older guys want to take orders from the young minister and the young minister is not in a position to ‘demand’ stuff. The Malaysian PM is absent and in any case is chronically into cronyism and is not so much a leader as a dispenser / arbiter of favors. Really, what we are seeing played out in these excruciating media conferences is deep dysfunction that dominates the Malaysian body politic.
The thing the Malaysians are only just starting to realise is that this is no longer about Malaysian Airlines – this is now about the national brand of Malaysia itself. It actually is already past the point where the Prime Minister needed to step in and take decisive and personal responsibility for this. They also have to get control over the journalists who are starting to be deeply disrespectful in their press conferences. Some of the questions last night were appalling.
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The other critical area for the airline is the way they handle their internal communications. Cabin crews in particular are in contact with thousands of (presumably concerned) passengers each day, and are also exposed to all that the media is saying. Malaysia needs to ensure that it is keeping them informed and motivated. You can never underestimate the consequences of poor internal communication at a time of crisis.
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@Les Posen, did you really suggest,without a hint of irony, that real-life crisis management calls for the application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?? How about: my child/mother/father/sister/brother/uncle etc is missing presumed dead in an airline crash and I want to know when how and why?
@Ben, or rather earth-to-Ben – you might not know about physics buddy, but when a big passenger jet runs out of fuel, it crashes. They don’t glide ’em down onto remote Laotian airstrips and wait for MacGyver to arrive. From the outset this was a mere search for wreckage. There’s no problem with a live discussion as to how the communications are being handled.
@Really, instead of having a nasty and unnecessary personal crack at Hamish Mclean, why don’t you spend more of your time switching your brain on? The fact that a plane crashed is far from the sole determinant of the immediate and gradual loss of patronage. The leadership, professionalism, knowledge, empathy, investigative processes, etc of the airline are also on trial, and much of the verdict will come down to communication factors – who says what, where, when and how. This will influence Malaysia’s reputation with its frequent flyers, marginal customers, regulators, workforce, government and so on. Crisis management isn’t about pretending that shit doesn’t happen – it’s about how that shit happening is dealt with.
What happens next will not be the difference in deciding whether to fly with Malaysia airlines or Qantas if given the choice. That decision was made three days ago now for 99.9% of us. That’s unfortunate for the airline and something the brand will live with for the foreseeable future. The company PR (no matter how well handled) will not slow the bleeding of public perception at this point.
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