Don’t sack Stephen Rue – Optus CEO needs better comms

Don’t rush to sack Optus boss Stephen Rue. Besides owner Singtel’s interference, pause and think on this possibility: he’s a poor communicator, that’s clear, so he relied on his communication team, and the crisis was beyond them.

They weren’t prepared for this nightmare scenario. So, what we got was a series of missteps culminating in press conferences that further damaged Optus’ reputation.

My point is, in a catastrophe like this, we, the audience, want to connect with emotion and humanity, because that is what we are feeling. We are grieving and angry. Technical explanations, which is what we got, make it worse.

Optus desperately needed a report card that said something like: “They deserve to be severely punished for the catastrophe, but at least their responses showed they are improving.”

What happened was the opposite.

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Managing a crisis of this magnitude will always be horrendous. There was always going to public fury. That’s why you rehearse repeatedly. You’ve got to get the basics right.

1. 1. They must have prepared a detailed list of stakeholders who needed to be contacted. Or did they?

So how come premiers, Peter Malinauskas and Roger Cook were left off the stakeholder list? They needed to know, asap, of the potential for deaths. Hence Malinauskas’ fury.

He needed early warning, and a recommended key message from Optus, so he could say something comforting and empathetic, if needed.

Optus must be seen to be nimble. And empathetic. Messages must constantly reinforce that.

1. 2. Holding a press conference late on a Friday night!?! What were they thinking? I suspect the Canberra press gallery and news editors around the country would have been aghast that anyone would dare do it when only the most cynical politicians use that time to dump bad news to avoid the news cycle.

The first announcement should have been as soon as the outage occurred, long before things spiralled and the worst of consequences occurred.

A bit more detail.

1. 3. Who allowed Mr Rue to read an apology?  No notes please for that bit! Yes, notes for the rest, but an apology must be spoken from the heart. It must connect to the audience. That’s why we rehearse. And rehearse. Communicators, barristers, politicians, and a host of others know this.
   4. The most important people impacted by the 000 outage are the families of the people who died. Top of the stakeholder list. I was amazed to hear him say he hadn’t picked up the phone and reached out to them.

We learnt the importance of this, about four decades ago when Mike Willesee or Jana Wendt would grill a politician or business leader. “Have you spoken to the victim’s family?”, and if the answer was “No’, there would be a long, excruciating pause as the omission sank in.

The author Peter Wilkinson

We also know, from decades of experience, that someone as important as the Optus boss making a very brief empathetic and apologetic call to a grieving family would mostly, not always, be gratefully received.

What was Stephen Rue’s key message about contacting the victims?

Reporter: Have you reached out to the families directly?

Rue: I haven’t, at this stage, reached out to the families; my focus has been on this (referring to fact-checking and ensuring process). At the right time, and it has to be at the right time, I will do that.

Why is this important? Because we, the audience, are thinking of the families. And Stephen Rue, is talking about processes. That’s a disconnect.

He should have been able to say, “Yes, I’ve spoken to the families, personally and privately. Not for long, but for long enough for them to know how devastated we all are, and that they will get all the support that we can give them. It’s not much but it’s the least I could do.”   

1. 5. Another important stakeholder group are the people in the call centres, probably distressed that 000 failed. There were calls to tell the centres that 000 wasn’t working.

Reporter:   Have you listened to those two calls that came through to the call centre yourself?

Rue: I haven’t personally, but senior members of my team have. 

Reporter: What have they told you those calls were like?

Rue: Again, we will update you further at a later point in time.  

Reporter: Was it the one person who took those two calls?

Rue: Again, let me update you on the facts on that.

The advice he should have received was “Listen to the calls. It’s important. You are going to be asked about them. Think what it must have been like for the folks at the call centres. And find out who took the calls and check in. They might be traumatised.”

1. 6. Then there are the people inside Optus who are responsible for the catastrophic failure. They also need to be spoken to. There are almost always, in accidents like this, a chain of people who share responsibility. There might be the person who wrote the code; the supervisor who signed off, the person who threw the switch, the people who should have better checked that the upgrade worked, the person higher up who wrote the training manual, the person further above who approved the budget, all the way up to Stephen Rue.

Now you can call that, as Rue did, technical and process failures. Correct, but completely disconnected from what we want to hear, probably including thousands of other Optus staff, who would share our shock and distress.

So, while those people would need support, I suspect Rue could have said publicly, “It’s early and yes, we’ll have an investigation, but right now I think we have a cultural problem at Optus. I’ve only been here a while, but I’m determined to fix it. We have great people at Optus. But each of us needs to be constantly reminded that what we do is really important. And if we fail, it can have awful consequences. And ‘the standard you walk past is the standard you accept’. My focus is to make sure each of us live up to that.”

That’s a key message.

For comms people, think about:

1. Be rehearsed. Properly. It’s not a tick box exercise.
2. Have a trained team, small and nimble. With authority to act. Quickly design a plan.
3. Be clear on the Aim. It’s not always as simple as stopping the media or the crisis. Is it about consumer confidence?
4. List stakeholders and an objective for each one. The mistake people make, in haste, is to think tactically. Knee-jerk responses are dangerous. Constantly think about your Aim.
5. Then be clear on implementation, including strategies and tactics. Nail messaging.
6. Support your spokesperson.
7. Commit to the plan, but be nimble to change when circumstances change.
8. Be aware that resourcing is your enemy (time, people, dollars).

Peter Wilkinson is chair of Wilkinson Butler and a crisis communications expert.