Don’t think of an elephant

The Lizard’s had his nose in a book recently called “Don’t think of an elephant” by George Lakoff. George is an academic and political writer and the title of the book is an exercise he gives his students.

The exercise is: ‘whatever you do don’t think of an elephant!’ Not surprisingly he says it’s impossible to do. When someone says elephant it immediately evoke a frame, a picture. Elephants are large, have floppy ears, big trunks and tusks. Even if you try to negate a frame you still evoke it.

So for example during the Watergate scandal when President Nixon addressed America and said, “I’m not a crook” everybody immediately thought about him in terms of being a crook.

So during a crisis when you are talking to customers, suppliers, the media or any other stakeholders don’t use their frames.

If a supplier calls up and says Acme Industries are clearly run by a bunch of incompetents don’t use the word incompetent and evoke the critical frame. Simply say, “That’s not true – we understand very clearly what we have to do.”

Exercising for Excellence

Interesting article on Continuity Central.

Three surveys published recently show that plan testing is not what it might be.

* A survey of 200 companies with between 250 and 999 employees by Vanson Bourne found that, of the 81 percent of respondents stating that they had a business continuity plan, 50 percent had only partially tested plans and 18 percent had not tested any aspect of their plans.

* A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found that almost half of disaster recovery plans have not been tested in the last year.

* According to the Chartered Management Institute’s 2008 business continuity survey, 33 percent of organizations with a business continuity plan still do not undertake any form of exercise to test their plan.

The article then goes on to pose various questions to BC professionals as to why this is the case. The answers are interesting and illuminating and you should check them out. Many say it’s too daunting / costly / or just plain difficult to stage a plan test. Read the full article here

The Lizard can immediately come to the rescue with the following advice. Go on to the British Standards website and buy ‘Exercising for Excellence’.

If you have responsibility for planning and delivering exercises to test your organisation's incident management capability, then this book is for you.

Written by Crisis Solutions and published alongside the new BSI standard, BS 25999, Exercising for Excellence is available to buy here: British Standards Bookshop

Low-hanging fruit

First of all the Lizard would like to apologise for the lack of fresh blogs over the last week. He was on his holidays – at his timeshare on the Isle of Wight.

Now safely back at the bar in The Crisis Lounge – and taking a lead from the previous blog - the Lizard has been conducting an in depth and rigorously researched analysis of jargon in the workplace.

Using a tightly controlled group of no less than three of the regulars at the bar the Lizard can report the findings of this important study.

The survey suggests that management gobbledygook and work place jargon are baffling people and getting in the way of clear understanding – the Lizard would go so far to say that phrases such as ‘brain dump’ (how ugly is that?) and ‘blue-sky thinking’ are giving people the ‘right old hump’.

About a third of those questioned – all right his name’s Gerald - said they felt inadequate when they didn’t have a clue what old so-and-so was on about.

So as a public service to all Crisis Lounge personnel here’s the Lizard’s handy, but in no way complete, guide.

Yer what? A guide to workplace jargon
• Blue-sky thinking: Idealistic or visionary ideas
• Get our ducks in a row: Have arrangements efficiently ordered
• Brain dump: To tell everything you know about a particular topic
• Let's circle back: A follow up meeting or ‘I’ll get back to you’
• Escalate: Tell somebody important that something bad is going to happen
• Painpoint: A challenge
• Goat rodeo: A complete disaster
• A herd of cats: Another complete disaster
• Lipstick on a pig: Reworking of ‘Silk purse from a sow’s ear’
• Drilling down: Getting more detail about a particular issue
• The helicopter view: An overview
• Low-hanging fruit: The easiest targets

And in a complete conversation

Bill: "What are you doing, Jack?"

Jack: "I'm ramping up for the Acme Project. After I download this info, I am going to reach out to London and get some intel on the lay of the land. My fear is that London has no real energy for this, so we may need to all get on the same page and get our ducks in a row. Circle back with me after you've determined if we can really add value to this deliverable. If not it could be a complete and utter goat rodeo."

Send your pet hates to lizard@crisis-solutions.com

Word Up

Whenever I drive past a pub with a big plastic tree house in the garden I’m reminded of a line from Alec Guinness’s autobiography - “We stopped at one of those awful pubs for lunch; where every meal on the menu was preceded by the word “jumbo” or “sizzling”.”



Ever noticed how some words really grate? Here’s the Lizard’s top three at the moment:

A lady was doing a reasonable job trying to sell advertising space when she said, “In which sectors do you get the most traction?” Now, when a friend of mine rode a quad bike during a team-building event in Colorado he needed traction to get through the mud. When the bike toppled over and tried to rip his leg off he also needed traction not to mention painkillers and bandages.

The second word cropped up in the same conversation. In the old days you wrote articles and you placed adverts. Maybe you even provided content or copy. Not any more. I was asked to write an infomercial. As it’s a cross between an article and an advert it doesn’t have to be reasoned, unbiased or objective. I can just dress my advert up as an article, and the magazine or website doesn’t have to provide any content of its own. Everyone’s a winner.

But straight in at number one, right at the top of the Lizard’s list is coworkers. Years ago we had colleagues. I understood colleagues. Now in trendy business articles we get coworkers. As it’s obviously uncool to use hyphens these days my brain separates it into two words – cow orkers. It sounds like some terrible agricultural disease.

The Lizard also has some thoughts on jargon in the work place. What’s the most irritating word or phrase? Perhaps we need to take a helicopter view, think out of the box and really drill down to find out what it is.

Communication breakdown

The Lizard is a bit old school when it comes to spelling and grammar. He is of the opinion that the language of Shakespeare should be treated with respect.

At Crisis Solutions some of the Lizard’s colleagues say he’s a bit of a pedant on the subject and argue that, as long as communication flows, a hanging apostrophe is nothing to get upset about.

So it was with undisguised joy that some less than caring members of Crisis Solutions were able to hoist the Lizard on his own petard. Here’s the story.

The Lizard produces videos to enhance our crisis simulation exercises. Recently we were employed to run such a simulation on behalf of a government department.

The scenario revolved around the topical issue of lost documents, a leak of information and the subsequent loss of confidence in the department.

Unfortunately on a video caption the Lizard saw fit to spell Leak – Leek. So in effect a large Welsh vegetable was undermining one of the great departments of state. Something it may take the Lizard a while to live down.

Bugs life

Here at Crisis Solutions fuel distribution, the lack of fuel, the cost of fuel and indeed all things fuel related seem to be occupying our time.

Come to think of it the last time you filled up your car your credit card probably thought it was undergoing some form of crisis or trauma.

Well step forward Andy, the technical supremo at Crisis Solutions, who spotted an article in The Times last week that might just solve our problems.

Now before I go any further I should point out that we are nowhere near 1st April nor are we yet in what my newspaper chums call the silly season, but blimey this is an odd one.

Apparently, and this is The Times talking, scientists in California are genetically modifying bugs, (that’s as technical as the Lizard gets – don’t forget he just eats them) then feeding them agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw and then they do something (and I apologise for the revolting image this conjures up) – they poo petrol. Whether it’s four star, diesel or two stroke the article doesn’t say.

But is does point out that to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need quite a few of these bugs – actually as many as you could jam into a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

Well as the old saying (nearly) goes, where there’s bugs there’s brass and there are clearly a lot of people trying to make money out of this, trying to up their bottom line I suppose.

But there is something about this that’s really bugging me, when you buy your sleek new BMW or SUV are you really going to be happy filling it full of bug poo?

If you still need to know more about this, and if you do then you probably need help, you can read The Times article here.

Crisis comms

At Crisis Solutions we like to think we operate at the cutting edge of crisis management. To that end the Lizard would like to introduce you to the latest thinking in crisis communications…POETRY!

Here’s Wendy Cope on:

How to deal with the press
She’ll urge you to confide. Resist.
Be careful, courteous and cool.
Never trust a journalist.

‘We’re off the record’, she’ll insist.
If you believe her, you’re a fool.
She’ll urge you to confide. Resist.

Should you tell her who you’ve kissed,
You’ll see it all in print, and you’ll
Never trust a journalist

Again. The words are hers to twist,
And yours the risk of ridicule.
She’ll urge you to confide. Resist.

‘But X is nice,’ the publicist
Will tell you. ‘We were friends at school.’
Never trust a journalist,

Hostile, friendly, sober, pissed,
Male or female - that’s the rule.
When tempted to confide, resist.
Never trust a journalist.