The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 56 When The Power Grid Fails - The Art of Municipal Crisis Planning
What does it take to prepare a community for disaster? In this revealing conversation with municipal crisis planning expert Alicia Johnson, we explore the critical differences between organizational readiness and community resilience—and why both are essential when disaster strikes.
Drawing from her 20+ years of experience in emergency management, Alicia shares how her journey began with witnessing the Yellowstone fires as a child and evolved into a career dedicated to building community preparedness. She offers a powerful distinction that many emergency planners miss: while organizational readiness is built on procedures and protocols, community readiness depends on trust and relationships that can withstand crisis.
The conversation explores recent catastrophic events like the European power outages and the Texas freeze that left Houston homes flooding in freezing temperatures. These case studies reveal how quickly modern infrastructure can fail and the cascading impacts that follow. As Alicia notes, "We have to acknowledge that bad things happen to good organizations"—the first step toward meaningful preparation.
We dig into why "checkbox planning" continues to plague emergency response, with organizations creating plans that look impressive on paper but collapse under pressure. Alicia challenges listeners to move beyond the organizational chart to build genuine capacity through regular training, full-scale exercises, and empowered decision-making.
Whether you're a municipal leader, emergency planner, or simply someone concerned about community resilience, this conversation offers critical insights into building systems and relationships that can withstand the unexpected. Because when disaster strikes, trust might be your most valuable resource.
If you'd like to reach out to Alicia, you can reach her below:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/aliciadjohnson
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. We're very happy to have you with us again today. On this podcast, we share stories from the front lines of crisis management through interviews, storytelling and lessons learned as shared by experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. With me again, my co-host, mark Mullen. Mark, good morning.
Marc Mullen:Good morning Tom.
Tom Mueller:On our podcast. Today we're going to talk to an expert in municipal crisis planning and get her take on some recent issues and also kind of best practices in crisis planning for municipalities. I'm going to hand it over to Marc now to introduce our guest and to kick us off, Marc.
Marc Mullen:Thank you, tom, and I'm very happy to have this time together with you and with Alicia Johnson with Two Lynchpin Road. Alicia, that would be fun just to know how it got that name and maybe you can share that with us as well. As Tom already mentioned, alicia has deep background in crisis preparedness and response and we thought she'd be a great guest, because there's a lot of synergy that can happen between public and private planning and it would be nice, I think, to take a look at some of the differences, but some of the similarities and the strengths and and maybe wrap it up and talking about a few possible crises along the way. So, alicia, welcome, glad to have you with us glad to be here.
Alicia Johnson:Thanks, Marc
Marc Mullen:okay, and why don't we if you would? I've been reading about you on your website and following your newsletters and I'm curious. We all end up doing what we do because there's some passion or event behind it that has led us to it. So I'm curious to know, as you introduce yourself and tell us about yourself a little, if you could also sort of focus on what brought you into this field and what makes you stay in it.
Alicia Johnson:Yeah, that's a great question. So I think every emergency manager, frankly every emergency responder, kind of has an impetus event. For me specifically, that occurred when I was very young. I distinctly remember the Yellowstone fires and partially because my dad grew up in that particular area of Northern Wyoming and we spent almost every summer going through the park, and the summer after the fires we didn't go because it was too painful for my dad to see the destruction of that particular area and it really kind of stayed with me in a way that I don't think I recognized at the time, but it was just kind of hovering there in the background.
Alicia Johnson:And then when I got out of school, after majoring in communications and political science, I wanted to go to work in local government, as Tom alluded to, and there was a role available as a public information officer in a community that was near my hometown and it sort of all coalesced at one moment and I remember a key point in the interview when the director of emergency management said well, do you understand what this job does? You know as a public information officer, do you understand what this job does? You know as a public information officer, do you understand the role? And I said. You know, I thought for a minute. I thought, well, can I, can I like tap dance around the answer or should I be brutally honest? And I decided to go with brutal honesty and my comment back to them was you know, I don't understand everything this role does, but what I do know is that when something bad happens, the blue line across the bottom of the television screen comes on and tells people what to do. And this job has everything to do with the blue line. That's the whole point of it and apparently that was the right answer, because I got the role and then continued to kind of work in that process and I could never escape the orbit of emergency management. I tried multiple times to work in other areas and it just didn't happen. I kept coming back to the importance of risk communication, of community resilience, of building connection and readiness with a community, building that trust and all the aspects of that, whether that was in public information, in emergency management, as a director, working with area stakeholders through grants and other projects and that sort of piece, and now working as a contractor and helping communities support themselves in that kind of forward momentum. That kind of forward momentum. So I just couldn't escape that initial kind of awareness of how important it was for a community to be prepared for anything that might happen.
Marc Mullen:Very fascinating and you're obviously happy with your choice. You've done this for some time. You've moved, you've had multiple, multiple, different levels of impact as I look at your resume so you've obviously run with a passion in that.
Alicia Johnson:Yeah, thank you, it's been a fun 20-plus years.
Marc Mullen:Wow. Well, so between all of us it's like that Amco transmission ad when they say we've done this for 10 days now, so we have more than a week's experience. Between the three of us here, we've been doing this since the dawn of time, practically.
Alicia Johnson:Yes.
Marc Mullen:But it was interesting that you mentioned again that it's all about the blue line, because you could almost say it's really all about communication. Any response ends up being a communication challenge. So I noticed that you talk on your website about helping communities and organizations prepare for disasters, emergencies and any other type of crisis. So it sounds like you work with communities themselves, you work with governments, you also work with corporations and so on. So it gives you a unique skill set to live on both sides of the fence, and I'm curious to know what's the difference between getting a community ready and getting an organization ready?
Alicia Johnson:Well, let's start with the organization, whether that's at the corporate level, at the nonprofit level or even in terms of the government organization. Right, all of those recommendations are structurally driven. They're driven through standard operating procedures. You have very clear roles and protocols, ideas of moving things forward. This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens. If this happens, do this type of thing. It really revolves heavily around those standard operating procedures and the training for those standard operating procedures and the continuation of that conversation.
Alicia Johnson:I think one of the key aspects of that is also recognizing that bad things can happen to good organizations and so you have to be prepared, and that idea of having a continual level of awareness and then preparedness that follows when it comes to the community. I think it's a little bit trickier, only in that it's relationally driven. You can't create an SOP that handles the trust building of your community. You can create protocols on how to do that, but it is really about building trust within the community that you're a part of, so creating networks and capacities where you're actually connecting with key stakeholders who help you spread your mission. It's not necessarily a very formal process.
Alicia Johnson:It is adaptive into moving at the speed of trust at whatever your community or the groups you're working with can handle, and so it's a little bit more fluid in its development and I think it's also, by its nature, can be more fragile, because trust is easily broken and not easily developed, but if you are able to cultivate it in a way that is resonant with the people that you serve, then it lasts through crisis right, it's not so. It's fragile in that it takes time to be built and if you ignore it it can be broken. But if you are putting in the effort, then it becomes resilient and flexible in its need. So they are interconnected and you know, as we've talked about in relationship to municipal government, you need both sides of that coin. You need both the community readiness and the organizational readiness to pull it off.
Tom Mueller:One of the things I've been thinking about lately is just the reactions to the widespread power outages that hit the European continent just last week. As we're recording this, know thinking about all the different municipalities, counties, states, countries and dealing with you know a sudden loss of all power to do everything you do. I'm just curious your take on. You know what would be going through the minds of you know people running those local government agencies and you know how do they prepare for something as sort of devastating as losing all your power.
Alicia Johnson:When you think about it, especially in a US context. Right, we think about that almost as if, like that's unfathomable, it would never happen here, but it does happen here all the time. Right, it happens in what California calls the public safety power shutdowns, where they preemptively cut off the power for wildfire events or potential wildfire events. They don't even have to have a light fire, it's just there's heavy wind, it's a drought, it meets certain qualifications. The power comes off for a period of time. Hopefully it's restored in a timely manner. It not always is right, I've been through a public safety power shutdown that lasted more than 48 hours. That's a long time to be without electrical capacity and most homes don't have a built-in generator like they do in other parts of the United States.
Alicia Johnson:So, similarly in Europe, right, you're living in an apartment in Lisbon, you maybe are. You know your landlord does not have a generator for the entire apartment building, right, and if you're in an apartment, you can't have a generator right next to your kitchen, right to run your refrigerator or something like that. Or even, you know solidly with the fact that we are incredibly dependent upon electricity and when it goes out sometimes there's nothing you can do. Sometimes you could have a generator. It's temporary, you power your refrigerator and you call it a day, right. Sometimes if you're in a hurricane prone area, you know, maybe you have a generator, maybe your neighbor has a generator, hopefully you're not dealing with other things on top of that like flooding and things like that. But there is definitely kind of, I think, a real awareness that must come with the fact that this is now a risk that we run every single day. 10, 15 years ago that wasn't a risk necessarily right, we didn't think about it actively like we do now.
Tom Mueller:If you're a planner for a municipality - you worked with the city of San Francisco for some years - and you know what's your priority list, you know for public safety, and that you know in your as you're putting together a plan to deal with something like this, it just seems overwhelming to me, because you lose your traffic signals on the highways and byways right, you may lose water circulation if you don't have backup circulation for water supplies, which was an issue in some of the European countries for water supplies, which was an issue in some of the European countries, absolutely so the planning process around that just feels like it'd be so intimidating.
Alicia Johnson:It is. It is Absolutely A hundred percent. It's intimidating, right, because you have the road and bridge issues, right, are we able to get people on and off in a safe fashion? Are they able to travel If they need to do we even want them to travel, right, because everything's dark, so we may not even want them to travel.
Alicia Johnson:And then you have vulnerable populations. And my first, you know, as the resilience and recovery manager for the city of San Francisco, working with their emergency management team, one of my first pieces was how do we take care of those vulnerable populations? If you have people in skilled nursing facilities and hospitals who do not have a generator, or have a generator but it's only good for certain pieces, are we able to continue to give them the care that they need? Do we need to transport them? Can we make sure that you have the capacity you need to do that ahead of time? That's where planning comes in, you know, in a clutch situation because you need to think about those kind of potential instances.
Alicia Johnson:And then I think there's other pieces where you're looking at, you know, from a private sector perspective. If they do not have generator power for things like a grocery store, all of their foodstuffs that are in frozen or refrigerated areas are no longer viable. That's a problem because now they have written off lots, many hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, depending on what it is that they. You know the type of location and how does that fit in. Where does that come into the structure and how do you help them prepare for that particular instance? I think we're still waiting for some more data from what to come out from Europe and from this particular outage and what we can use to implement here in the States.
Tom Mueller:We went through that a few years ago here in the Houston area where I live. It was in February, where we had a huge freeze, came into the area and took out a lot of the power generation for a variety of reasons, and so we had suddenly, you know, balmy Houston in 20 degree Fahrenheit temperatures with no electricity, and so we had something on the order of 100,000 homes where pipes burst, flooded the homes and, you know, just created all kinds of issues. Now you've got cold temperatures, people can't stay in their homes, you need to open shelters and of course, that in itself spurred the home generator market in Houston like it's never been spurred before. You know, all of my neighbors suddenly have Generacs trucks parked out front and installing generators right, and I did that myself to try and get through that. You know, even dealing with, as you said, the vulnerable populations is a huge, huge issue that planners have to deal with in these types of crisis planning sessions.
Alicia Johnson:Yes, and those are partners. So as a municipal planner and, you know, as a public information officer or an emergency manager as a whole, you cannot control what they do or don't do. So it is about building that we're back to community readiness right. It's about building that trust and the capacity that this can happen to us. Here are some possible solutions. We urge you to make these appropriate decisions, and it's tied to your economic bottom line right. The more prepared you are, the more likely you are to be able to serve your clientele, your customers, your partners successfully, and I think that is a big part of emergency management. It's not just about the planning. It's also about making sure that we bring everyone to the table, that the table is large enough, that everyone's present so that we can have really solid conversations and take next steps on behalf of the people we're supposed to be protecting.
Marc Mullen:Sounds like there's an issue here of trust and really portraying and helping people understand that trust doesn't mean don't worry, we'll take care of you. There's a point you've just got to say. There's a line here and at this level above this, we cannot take care of you. It's funny, Tom, you're talking about the European events were like a major storm without a major storm. All the power went down, as if it had been knocked out, and yet you know the cause was who knows what. Yet, and you had in Houston, you had water damage like a hurricane, but without a hurricane. It was all self-generated. No pun intended, but the real, it seems like. One of the real questions is how do you clearly portray that we are planning everything we can to take care of you, but there will be events that we can't take care of you?
Alicia Johnson:That's the question emergency management as a whole is really dealing with right now, and one of the biggest ways I have found, in both working inside municipal organizations and as a consultant, is admitting that bad things happen.
Alicia Johnson:Right, breaking down this wall, like breaking down the taboo that we do not talk about disaster, we do not talk about crisis and making it something you can talk about at the dinner table so not just with emergency managers, because we use a lot of Black humor to process all the things that we have seen or heard or participated in and responded to. And having that conversation with your neighbors, with your you know, the businesses you frequent, right? How are you preparing for X? Have you heard about this? What does that look like here? Right, and not being afraid to have those general conversations One of the things I see the most is that if we don't have those conversations, then we definitely can't get any farther down the road. Right, we can't. We can't build better trust, we can't build better response systems, because we haven't actually jumped to that first hurdle of really admitting that something bad could happen.
Marc Mullen:Sure, so it sounds like again that's. One of the first hurdles you have to have is an understanding that this can happen and we need to be ready. Is that common that people get to that point and then their list of what could happen is shorter and smaller than your knowledge of what could happen?
Alicia Johnson:Absolutely, absolutely shorter and smaller than your knowledge of what could happen, absolutely, absolutely. They're oh well, we're at risk for earthquakes and wildfires, you're like, and at least 10 other things because they might happen to you. They're like, oh no, that the power outages in the EU. I think a lot of people will be like, well, that isn't going to happen here because our grid isn't X right, which is kind of irrelevant. Yes, maybe that, not that exact thing, will happen, but there are precedent for that to happen all across the United States in various areas, both rural and metropolitan. We have to acknowledge that.
Marc Mullen:Well, just think of all the European airport emergency managers that did a quick check to see can we survive a fire in a substation. And they'll say, sure, we've got redundancy. And then the whole continent goes black.
Alicia Johnson:Yes, and then everyone's flight is canceled for a week,
Alicia Johnson:Alicia, I was thinking back to a crisis situation that hit a community where I own a home in a little town called Wimberley in Central Texas, and a massive flood hit that community one Memorial Day weekend and the river that runs through it went from five feet to 48 feet over the course of about an hour and a big holiday weekend all of that. But I was thinking back on their crisis response and the potential conflicts that can arise between leaders in a response. Right, I think about the mayor and what's his or her role in this response versus the fire chief or the police chief or the emergency manager, and there's just seems to me there's huge potential for conflict. You know when something actually happens. How do you coach people to make sure there are clear roles and responsibilities in situations like that?
Alicia Johnson:I think that's a really great question and also an amazing example, actually, that is just mind-blowing, from that much flooding in such a short amount of time. As emergency managers and, frankly, as response personnel, public safety responders we always go back to the incident command system and having an ICS org chart. And in my experience, you can have the org chart, you can print it out, you can post it on your wall in your emergency operations center. But if no one is filling those roles or trained to fill those roles, that organizational chart collapses under the stress of the incident. And so being able to, as we talked about before, acknowledge that there is the potential for certain types of disasters to happen, even when they exceed our imagination, like a river flooding with that extreme amount of water and then saying, okay, so a flood is possible and these are the roles that we will be filling within our organizational structure. Here's how you would fill that position, right, if you are the mayor at the time, and, of course, the mayor changes every few years, right? So how are we training those individuals repeatedly, over and over and over, even every year, whether they're new to the position or not? Are you familiar? Do you understand? Have you practiced your conversations, do you know how you're going to relate to the structure as a whole? How are we going to connect to other communities for mutual aid, for additional assistance, whatever that looks like For the people who are there, if there's a lot of tourists there because it's a holiday weekend, or if no one is there because they all left and it's a holiday weekend, right, what are the extenuating circumstances of that particular event?
Alicia Johnson:Of that particular event? But often, particularly in municipal organizations, I have seen organizations come through with this beautiful looking org chart and it's got three deep, because that's the industry standard, that's the best practice on every single position. Those three people, if they are all currently still employed by the organization high five, because often they're not. And if they have been trained that's always the question Like well, when was the last time this person was trained to do X or Y or feel comfortable here? When was the last time you guys practiced a full on activation? Did you test your IT? Like those are basic questions that we continue to ask over and over and over because they are incredible points of failure. And then, if you've surmounted all of those little tiny pieces that are like we're completely capable, we're ready to go. I think you go back to that question. Do you know what you're going to say to your community when things go utterly wrong and not as you expected for Memorial Day? Utterly wrong and not as you expected for Memorial Day right. How do you combat that and what does that look like?
Tom Mueller:does that look like? I don't think the org chart is enough. I think you have to go beyond that. Yeah, one quick example on that is I survived one of many downsizing. I worked in the oil and gas industry and 2008,. There was a major downsizing. We cut a lot of people out of the communications and external affairs team, including the person who was responsible for our crisis communications plan I would never imagine that.
Tom Mueller:Did not replace that person was no management of change process with that. So, in addition to losing a lot of the people who were on the org chart in 2008, you know, by 2010, many of those people were gone. There had been no training in new roles. And then you know, major incident occurs and you're in the mode of let's wing it.
Tom Mueller:Let's just tap our people. Let's get out there and do what we can do. But to your point about just managing change through the organization and trying to do those periodic updates and adjustments to plan so to make sure everybody's trained Easier said than done though.
Marc Mullen:It reflects what I've seen over the years, which is still a lot of emergency planning is what I call checkbox planning. We need an emergency plan check we have it. We need an org chart check We've got it. People are concerned with checking it off of a list, but they're not actually taking that and integrating it into what they do. As far as they're concerned, the problem was solved. When you can say we have a crisis communications plan, we can let them go. Now we have a plan. And that's really dangerous because you end up thinking you're ready but, alicia, as you say, you've never actually tested it, it's never been tempered.
Alicia Johnson:Or you have tested it, but in a way that is so contrived that it isn't actually real right? I'm currently working with a client who has gone through an exercise and when we started to probe more about how did the exercise work was you know, were you able to test this piece or this piece you know? Tell us about the information flow from field gathering all the way into the EOC and beyond that, right into recovery. Did you test your field teams and they said no, because we were just fed the information from the field, right? So the sim cell fed them the information. So the only piece they tested was directly inside the EOC. When they received the data, what did they do with it? And then they, you know, we put it in this spreadsheet and then that's where the exercise stopped.
Alicia Johnson:So it was. It was. The rest of it was notional. That's fine. If you're going to, you're specifically only testing one piece of the puzzle, but then you need the rest of the process to also be tested. And if you're not going to stage an exercise or even have a tabletop you tabletop discussion about what happens before the EOC and what happens after the EOC then you haven't done your due diligence on the process.
Marc Mullen:I was curious to know what you see that breaks most often. But I think we just discussed that somewhat of underpreparedness and lack of focus and not understanding the scope. But if you could mandate, we'll give you all the power in the world. Now, if you could mandate three actions for every emergency planner to take, what would they be? I think one.
Alicia Johnson:This is hard to think about. Three is not enough.
Alicia Johnson:But let's and this is in no particular order, these are just the thoughts that are coming to my head. One, I think, is run a full scale exercise around the issue that is most pertinent at the time, right, so that could be a power outage, that could be a natural event, it could be a human caused event, whatever it is, but run a full scale exercise because you want to test everything tip to tail and see where it breaks right. Once you get that, then you have a really good operational checklist of what you want to be moving forward on and fixing. So that's one thing that I would quote unquote mandate.
Alicia Johnson:The second thing I would mandate is deeper conversations with the communities that we support.
Alicia Johnson:We are here for them. That's the job of municipal governments and we need to be able to connect with them. So focus more on building that trust and resilience over time and do what it takes to make those relationships solid and also flexible right, so they're able to withstand a diverse piece of types of events that are happening. And then I think the other piece that I would say is that we need deeper conversations with our decision makers, not only those who are directly in positions of leadership, but also those beneath them who would be making regular, you know, hopefully accurate decisions during a time of crisis and designate and empower those decision makers as they move forward in their process, so that they are not waiting to make a critical decision because they need someone else above them to sign off and so being able to ensure that there's. You know, we're moving again at the speed of trust that we have already built with the community to bring, and with our responders as well to bring things full circle.
Marc Mullen:Very good. Tom, d o you have anything to add to that? Because you can look at it from the other side in your experience of how does a corporation build resiliency and trust?
Tom Mueller:Well, yeah, certainly I'd start off with have a plan and test that plan and train your people to that plan. Themes we've already talked about here with Alicia this morning Gosh, so much can be accomplished if you just do that right. Given the speed of change, the speed of transitions that we're all working through these days, whether it's politically or personally, there's just constant change that's roiling us in our global environment, us in our global environment. So that to me, is just a huge one is have a plan, train your people on your plan. Worked with clients who really had really great people on their communications teams but had never really thought about a crisis thing. That's usually something that the media relations team is going to deal with.
Tom Mueller:But when it's something that is a brand crisis or that affects the overall company, your reputation heaven forbid. You injure people in a community somewhere and now you've got the whole world looking over your shoulder and watching it. What is your plan to deal with that and how trained are your people to be able to manage that? And I think, alicia, to one point you made you know what's the trust, what's the delegation of authority that you give to your people out in the field to engage and to manage relationships on the ground, or are you controlling all of that from up on high? So there's a lot of trust that goes with that.
Tom Mueller:But you know, I think back to you know we worked the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and we took everybody we had and threw them out into the field and it wasn't nearly enough people, but we had. The people who were left after the big downsizing were good people and we just said go out there, find the community leaders, find the TV cameras that are there, tell them what we're doing and be a source and be a good communicator there. And we let them run right and did our best to provide updated information each and every day so they had good things to talk about. But in the end we put a whole lot of trust in those people out in the field and it was because they were well-trained, knew their jobs and could work independently like that. Those are all great points to make, mark. Excellent question there. Thanks for bringing that in.
Alicia Johnson:Sure. So one of the questions Marc had posed to me was what are the things that break the most often? And I was thinking back to pretty much every AAR I have ever read, and it's always communications. But more generally speaking, what they're actually saying is like we just couldn't talk to each other, we didn't understand, there was no way to communicate, there was no way to have sort of this broader conversation about. Here's the talking points, here's the the importance of communication, and yet every single AAR reflects that it's a piece that's broken, and yet we can't seem to communities and organizations to struggle to get past this, like what's happening on the radio kind of thing. We haven't figured, we haven't cracked the nut yet. We haven't figured out how to do that, and I think that's something that probably will you know. Hopefully we see more momentum in the coming years on what that looks like and how we do it better.
Marc Mullen:That's where the organization chart we depend on so much starts to go to war with itself, because it's built to direct information in one direction and built to take multiple information up to single source. And you're talking about the opposite. How do we take um a lot of information and get it across the across the board march? So that will be an interesting dynamic. I do know that when you're in a jake, a lot of times what the jick forgets is you have a stakeholder group called everybody else in command, because everybody's doing their job and nobody has time to figure out everything else. So that was a lesson I learned from a drill where we had a glass wall and we just put everything up on the wall and because it was a glass wall, we saw the people that came over to read to say what's going on anyway, and these are people that were right in the middle of their response. So I think that's communicators need to remember. You've got this other stakeholder group called everybody else in the room with you.
Alicia Johnson:And Tom mentioned that they were empowering in Deepwater Horizon. They were empowering the communications professionals to go into the community and have those conversations daily. Getting briefs, here are some great stories we can talk about. You're giving that information to us as well. Everything you find out there is a level of. When we talk about communications breaking down, it's not just the technologies that don't work, it's often the technologies are working just fine. It's that we're not talking about it, we're not giving those conversations, those talking points, and we're not receiving that information back. And so the combination of both technology and the talking right, that is where the breakdown happens. And you're absolutely right, we forget who else we can tap into for information and to help us get the message out and continue to build the trust that we need so desperately when we're in the middle of response.
Tom Mueller:It's been a really fun conversation. So thank you, Alicia, for joining us today. Marc, thank you again for being with us as well.
Marc Mullen:Absolutely my pleasure.
Alicia Johnson:Thank you,
Tom Mueller:and that's
Tom Mueller:going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. We do thank you for joining us. If you like what you're seeing and hearing, then please like and subscribe to the podcast and we'll see you again soon for another episode.
