Crisis Communication, AI, and Public Trust: What Alerting Authorities Can Learn from Dr. Tim Coombs

What happens when emergency alerts fail, misinformation spreads, or organizations lose public trust during a crisis?

In this episode of The Alerting Authority, Jeannette Sutton and Eddie Bertola sit down with Dr. W. Timothy Coombs, one of the most cited crisis communication scholars in the world and creator of the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT).

The conversation explores the relationship between crisis communication, disasters, alerts, warnings, and organizational accountability. Dr. Coombs explains how effective communication brings crisis management plans to life and why instructing and adjusting information are critical to protecting the public.

Using real-world examples including the Hawaii false missile alert, the Paradise Fire, and the Los Angeles wildfire alert failures, the discussion examines what organizations can learn when communication systems break down.

The episode also tackles one of the biggest emerging challenges in emergency management: artificial intelligence. Dr. Coombs shares his perspective on AI-generated messaging, the risks of overreliance on automation, the importance of maintaining communication skills, and why meaningful human involvement remains essential in crisis communication.

Topics include:

•  Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) 
•  Accountability and public trust during crises 
•  Lessons from the Hawaii false missile alert 
•  Paradise Fire communication challenges 
•  Los Angeles wildfire alert failures 
•  Over-alerting and public response 
•  Crisis communication training and preparedness 
•  AI in emergency messaging and public warning 
•  Human-in-the-loop communication systems 
•  Research, peer review, and the future of crisis communication 

Whether you're an emergency manager, public information officer, alerting practitioner, researcher, or communicator, this episode offers valuable insights into how organizations can communicate more effectively when the stakes are highest.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:07

Hi, I'm Jeanette Sutton.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

And I am Eddie Bertola.

SPEAKER_03 0:10

And we welcome you to another episode of the Alerting Authority. And as always, we encourage you to subscribe, follow, listen, and most importantly, participate in these podcasts. We want your questions, your concerns, your ideas, your problems, your pain points, and your success stories so we as alerting authorities can better do our jobs and make our community safer.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

That's right. And again, we want to thank all our sponsors. So today we are sponsoring ourselves. This is from the Alerting Authority, where we help organizations move from uncertainty to confidence before the emergency happens. Our work includes alerting, governance, reviews, policy development, message design. You're going to hear that a couple times. The importance, guys, get it in there. Your temperate template libraries, training, exercises, and overall just practical support turning the policy into something that can be understood and actually used. Our goal is really simple. We want agencies to make better decisions, send clearer messages, and build alerting programs that actually work when the pressure's on. You hear us say confidence through competence. And competence isn't just a certificate on the wall or a class you've taken. It's knowing exactly what to do when the emergency happens.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

I love being part of the alerting authority as an organization that delivers training. And it's been a lot of fun. And we have a great time when we're out in the field talking with people.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

We're going to have a show on that. We just came from Texas. We're definitely going to have a show on that.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Thank you to David and Blake for being the mad scientist during our Texas event recently.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

If you're listening again, you guys don't know about that yet. You'll hear later. And if you've looked on Jeanette's um LinkedIn, you see a picture. I my family still cannot believe, because I when I got that, that someone that we did it, and it was amazing. It was so fun. Oh.

SPEAKER_03 2:17

There were such good sports. Such good sports. So yeah. Well, um, today. Today we are welcoming um our a guest who is exceptionally well known in the crisis communication space. We are welcoming Dr. Tim Coombs. He is presently the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management and a senior partner at the Center for Risk Communication. His primary area of research and consulting is crisis communication. And we're going to talk about that a lot about what is crisis communication, where does it fit into our thinking about alerts and warnings and disasters and emergencies and and he illuminates a lot of these things. I looked him up before we we have our conversation today. According to Google Scholar, Tim's research has been cited close to 54,000 times.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

He is the most important dollar or anything else for each time he's cited, or wow, that's a lot.

SPEAKER_03 3:19

No, but I I I bet that he's one of the top people in Stanford's 2% of scientists uh worldwide. He has to be. My research is in there and I'm not at the top, but at least I did make the 2% 54,000 times. Amazing. It makes him the most cited scholar in crisis communications research. He um he also has uh works that include the award-winning book, Ongoing Crisis Communication. He's the co-writer of a primer for crisis communication theory. He's the co-editor of two editions of the handbook of crisis communication. He's a co-writer of strategic sport communication. Um, and his crisis communication research has won multiple awards from professional organizations, including the 2002 recipient of Jackson, Jackson and Wagner Behavioral Science Prize from the Public Relations Society of America, and the 2013 Pathfinder Award from the Institute of Public Relations. He is a fellow, which means that his peers have recognized him. He is a fellow in the International Communication Association, and we are absolutely privileged to have him join us today. So welcome to the show, Tim.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

So I'll go ahead and start with the first question. So again, I'm really excited for you to be a part of this because there's a lot in your area that I want to know. But even as we talk about your title, I think there's things that I may not understand about it. Um, so can you tell us a little bit more about your career path and what you're doing with crisis communication?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Yes, it all started when I began as a young assistant professor and I was in the area of public relations. So I was in the communication department and trying to decide, well, where do I want to go with this? And I'd done some work related to crisis when I was a graduate student. And so I thought, wow, I want to look more at that. And I was working on a project and I got invited to this conference out in Las Vegas. It was like 98% practitioners. And what I was impressed with was their commitment to crisis management and their really their desire to help people. And I thought, yes, this is this is what I want to do. I I want my I reach my research to help people. And so I used that as a as a platform to start developing what became the situational crisis communication theory. I wish I had to catch your name, but it doesn't. And I would bounce the ideas off of them and work through with the with the practitioners to make sure I was on track to to see that this would actually work within the field because I wanted to create something that was going to be usable and helpful to people. And it worked and it caught on. And crisis communication went from a few people in a room at a conference to major conferences to international events. And it just kept growing and I kept doing the research in the area. And uh after COVID, for various reasons, uh my spouse and I, she and I are both were both professors, decided it was time to get out. And when I did that, I was invited by the center, which I had advised to help them out. And I do some training for them for the the Center for Crisis for the Center for Risk Communication now. And that's where I wound up now.

SPEAKER_03 6:46

That's great. I I love hearing stories of young assistant professors figuring out their pathway and finding something that meets their intellectual needs and also provides this um broader impact to the community. It sounds like that's exactly how you stumbled into that.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Exactly. It was I I I found these practitioners and what they were doing. I thought, yeah, this is this is what I want to do. This is not the normal stuff in public relations, like releases and that sort of stuff. It it was to me more meaningful and also a little bit more exciting. There is a dynamic nature to it.

SPEAKER_03 7:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, I started my work as a disaster scholar um when I was working in in Colorado. And then I moved to the University of Kentucky, which you know has a very prominent communication program, but I'm a sociologist. So I did all this disaster research with a sociological spin. And then when I got to Kentucky, I learned that there was this field called crisis communication, which was not disaster communication. Um, I think of them as being very different but related areas of study. And I wonder, could you talk a little bit about what is crisis communication? And how how is does alerts and warnings fit into it? Like, is it directly part of it along the side? Like, where is that space?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Crisis communication and uh kind of kind of where I'm at in it is focused primarily on organizations and how organizations try and manage their crisis. So so for me, the crisis communication is is about bringing your crisis management plan to life. Because you you have a plan and you have principles and you train, and that's all in the background, but it's only through communication that it actually happens. So I see crisis communication as bringing to life your crisis management principles. And I think that holds across because we you can take crisis as a very broad heading, and under that you can put disaster and organizational crises and public health, and uh, there's a group called kind of political crises as well under that. But they they they share that that notion that you have to bring it to life through communication. Nothing really happens until you talk, is what it amounts to. And I see warnings are a key component within that. Because whenever you have a crisis, you have people at risk for various threats. And sometimes that's physical threats, sometimes that's psychological threats. Whatever that might be, they're gonna need warnings about it. And the sooner you deliver those warnings, typically the better it is for people on that side. And you know, some some organizational crises don't have that sort of imminent threat to them, but many do when you start talking about sort of industrial accidents that can occur or product harm types of crises, which are probably the most prevalent crises that we have. Those really need those warning messages. That's it, that's a key element in it. And and we kind of lump it under the heading of instructing information, and that's telling people what they need to do to protect themselves from harm.

SPEAKER_03 10:02

Right. So that's the work that Deanna and Tim Selnow have been doing on that instructing crisis communication piece, I think.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Yeah, and it goes back to the work of Sturgis. Sturgis was the first one to even talk about this and the need for it back in uh 1994 when he wrote about it. And actually, that's um we built that into SCCT. That's the first thing you need to do in SCCT is you have to do this base response, and your base response is instructing the adjusting information, and then you build off of that. There's a lot of people when they they see SCC SCCT, they focus on the reputation managed part of it, but that's a later concern. Your your first concern up is that well-being of your stakeholders, and that takes warning messages and that takes adjusting information, which is a type of supportive communication that you provide for people.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

So I think I it's funny, I need a separate show one of these times, Jeanette and and Tim, where you guys can help us, everybody else who is not a diehard academic, understand the different roles in a university of assistant or associate professor, graduate student, and all these things, because I am sure they they each have different levels and different meanings. And it it could be, you know, like sergeants, lieutenants, and everything else. There's different things you achieve each time that you move forward. I always think it's fun and I always try to Google. I'm like, wait, what does that mean? Um but like a couple things that I again I really like. So when it comes to crisis communications, me and and a lot of other practitioners, we went to the school of I guess hard knocks and experience. Um, and I didn't even know there was a specific field of crisis communications when I started in law enforcement. It was just something that we did and something you learned, and you made mistakes on and you got better and you tried to learn from each other. But as as we have more shows like this, and and again, I've been introduced to a lot, but I know there's a lot of people out there that that they may see crisis communication as a one-hour review that they have to do as a part of their certification to be a first responder, but there is so much more in it. And in fact, you mentioned something called the SCCT, um, which is the situational crisis communication theory. Can you can you break it down for for me and for other practitioners out there and how it applies to a crisis?

SPEAKER_00 12:44

It it goes it goes back a few years now. It goes back to sort of like the late 80s, early 90s, and and that's what crisis communication, crisis manager is really kind of emerging as sort of a distinct area where people really studying it. So a lot of people prior to that, there was no crisis communications learn. There were no classes in it at that time. And researchers were talking a lot about, like, oh, there's a lot of these different types of crises out there, and that was primarily coming from the management side. Then the comp people who were starting to enter into are saying, like, well, there's a lot of different strategies you can use in how you address this. But what I wasn't seeing was any connection between the two. And one of the principles that we learn in communication theory across a number of our subdisciplines is that the situation matters. It shapes what is effective communication in that situation. And my goal with SCCT was to connect the two so that when you're looking at the crisis types, you'd have an idea of what responses do I need to do to be effective or at least competent when I'm responding to that situation. Effective might be like too strong of a word. You know, like you want to build the competencies for it in that area. And so it was looking like, well, you know, we can we can group the these crises do group according to attributions of responsibility. So you might be in a situation where your organization is not really responsible for the crisis, but you're still gonna have to manage it. You're gonna have to manage its effects in some way. And in those situations, really, you you need that instructing adjusting information. That's the heart of it. And that's really what you're gonna focus on. And as you start being more responsible for the crisis and you get to this situation where, like, well, that explosion was our fault because through mismanagement, we allowed unsafe practices to occur. So it's completely our fault. Now you're gonna have to still have the instructing and adjusting information, but now you're gonna have to add on top of that. You're gonna need very what we call accommodative strategy, strategy to really focus on the victims, like, okay, we're gonna provide compensation for you because you've been harmed in some way, inconvenienced in some way, we need to address that. And then you engage in apologies, which are are are more symbolic, but are oftentimes people want you to admit, yeah, you're accountable. You're being accountable for what happened here in that situation. So as responsibility increases, it can change what you need to add into that communication mix.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

I can see situations going like literally in my mind of ones we've either responded to where we were not in charge, right? Just as you said, but we still had to manage it, and then others that we ended up having to take over either because the one jurisdiction didn't have the ability, or ultimately we were the ones ultimately responsible for it. And and then seeing that all the way through. So no, thank you for explaining it that way.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yeah, and I think you've identified one of the key differences between disasters and sort of organizational crises. And in an organizational crisis, you're you're typically managing your crisis or or the effects like uh that a disaster might be having upon uh your organization and its ability to deliver such as utility companies. And in disaster, you didn't cause it, but you have to take care of it. So you have that responsibility to manage it, even though it's not your own. So these there's a slightly different dynamic, but there's still similar pressures that occur with within those same, within those two different fields.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Yeah, I've been listening to a podcast that came out a few months ago about FEMA and its role during Hurricane Katrina. And I think this is a good uh uh example of how Hurricane Katrina is a disaster that was caused by the c uh by a hurricane and then the levees failing and the flooding of New Orleans. And that's the disaster part, but the organizational crisis part comes in with the management that was occurring or the mismanagement of the event and the reputation and the communication processes attached to that organization were um have been investigated and looked at over and over again because of how poorly it was um depicted and poorly done. And so you have both the crisis uh and the organizational crisis happening at the same time that the disaster is happening. And those two things put together, I think, is where SCCT really shines because you're thinking about that instructing information and adjusting information for those who are victims of the disaster, and also thinking, how do I manage my organization when it is contributing to this disaster because it's organizationally like falling apart?

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yes. And uh we're seeing a little bit of that now with uh the CDC and the FDA as they're trying to manage the recent foodborne illnesses here in the United States. It's it's not going well.

SPEAKER_03 18:07

Right. Right. Yeah. So if we apply SCCT to some of the historical events that I think are pretty prominent within the alert and warning space, I I think we could probably think through how how would we assess what happened and what could have happened differently. Could you could could we play that for a little for a few times?

SPEAKER_00 18:31

Yeah, let's try that.

SPEAKER_03 18:32

Okay. Um, so I want to start with Hawaii. Because this is one when Eddie and I talked to to practitioners and the public, the the most memorable alert event that they always call to mind is the ICBM missile alert that woke people up in Hawaii in I think it was 2019, um, and it turned out to be a false alert that was sent, possibly on purpose of thinking that it wasn't false. Um and then it took 38 minutes before that second alert went out to tell people that the event was not um uh people did not need to take action. Um Eddie, did I accurately uh depict that scenario? You you have spent time in Hawaii and maybe you could say it a little bit differently.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Well, no, I think ultimately it goes to the the live environment, the training environment, and the lack of standards uh where it says if you're doing a training exercise, you need to put this in the message, right? If you're in a live environment, put whatever you need to. Again, there are recommendations that exist, but there is nothing that is a required piece of language you have to put in to say this is training. And this is an example, and we've had repeated examples of why this is problematic, because the individual who was doing it was doing a training, and essentially it was sent out um in the live environment, and because there was nothing in the message that indicated anything to do with training, it was treated as a real threat, which when you when you read the language, it was very direct. I mean, it it was a very real threat. Um, the part that that just floors me still is just as Jeanette said, is the amount of time that it took to do a response and ultimately the way that communications were managed from the time the mistake tap mistake happened, because I'll be the first one to admit too, I have made mistakes and I have sent information that that if there was if something wasn't correct or if it there was a bad link, and as a part of our policy and practice, it was you have a duty to immediately address whatever is incorrect. Um but I would love to get your take on it from Hawaii.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Yeah, uh that that's a case where you s the organization sort of created its own little crisis. They uh by a mistake that they made. And yeah, that type of time lag, given the severity of what the announcement was, is just unacceptable. You need to get that out quickly. And that's a case where this is completely your fault and you've got it, you've got to be accountable for it. And that's what people are waiting for, because people are people are forgiving of mistakes. I mean, you know, they can be a little bit critical, particularly on social media, but they realize people make mistakes. They just want organizations to own those mistakes. And there's generally a fairly widespread sort of really sense of you did a good job when you're accountable, because people will say it online. Well, we we respect that you actually took accountability for this. So you you've got to come out and say, here's what the Mistake was, we made this mistake. And that's when you start talking about your what you're going to do in the future so this doesn't happen. You know, like you say, like, well, in the future, when we're doing training, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. So you won't have this situation again. Uh, that one always makes me laugh a little bit because a friend of mine, when we were in college, was doing an internship at a radio station. Luckily, not a lot of people listen to this radio station. And she was changing at the time tapes, and she accidentally put in this is a nuclear attack alert and quickly pulled it out. But so that that can happen. The intern's there by herself.

SPEAKER_03 22:41

But and did she quickly say this is not real? And I apologize for scaring people. Like she did her management very quickly after she did that.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Yeah, she she she very quickly said that that uh that was a mistake. We we made this error. She she didn't try and hide it or ignore it. She actually she she owned that she made this mistake.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

What happens when an organization chooses not to address that?

SPEAKER_00 23:07

The the crisis is just gonna linger. It just sticks around because there's there's no closure to it. Because people are like, well, what are you doing? You should be doing something about this. Something went on. What's really happening there? And people start to think, and and that's when misinformation starts entering into it. And what that does is it just it damages the organization's reputation more because you have this extended period during which you're suffering from the negative effects of that crisis because you're not willing to own it. Because when you own it and take responsibility, that gives a fairly strong sense of closure for most people about the crisis. A good example of that is when Volkswagen and their dieselgate scandal didn't take responsibility and they kept saying, oh no, it was a few engineers, it was this, it was that. No one bought that. The media didn't buy it, you know, their customers didn't buy it, the government didn't buy it, and eventually it was shown, no, this is a systemic problem, and you just failed to address it. And that made it linger for months, and it didn't have to. They could have ended it very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

Well, I'm gonna throw one out. Um, and I don't know if you've had a chance to study the paradise fire in California with uh crisis communication. Um with this one, obviously we're not we're not putting fault on the first responders at all uh for the communication. Um what what's interesting is there was a fire. There is ongoing litigation and talk about why that fire happened, who's responsible for it, and everything else. But what's interesting is when it came to that that level of trying to send out alerts and warnings. Um and I again I I have a lot of my own thoughts and memories on this one, but I do know that the the county did attempt to try to send out um wireless emergency alerts, but the infrastructure was essentially shot at that point and it did not have the ability to. Um I don't know. Have you had a chance? I mean, I'd love to get your thoughts on that fire if possible.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

I you know, I I don't think that's uncommon that you have a a technology that is built in to be a part of your system, and for whatever reason, it's not working. And so what are your other alternatives? And I I think uh we saw a lot of that with organizations during COVID trying to find other ways to talk to people and to reach people. I know I I did some some work um over for the European Union and I was all about to like, well, you know, there's there's these people out there who still analog. How do we reach them? It's like, oh, there's radio and there's actual telephones, like landlines, and like landlines, what are those? Like they didn't, you know, uh for that. And it's that's something that is gonna go back to your preparation. You're learning a very hard lesson that, oh, we needed a backup, we needed to have another way of doing this. So it's like, and that's a case where you're gonna have to explain why the failure occurred. You know, in that case, it's more of a technical one, and so it's it's not completely under your control. But in a way, you're still accountable. Well, how come you didn't have a different system? How didn't how come you didn't have a backup? What was your other way of reaching us? And so it's it's learning a lesson the hard way, not through training, but through the actual crisis, that we need to change how how we're doing this. We need to have some sort of backup. We have to have other alternatives when we're doing it. Or can we make our system more robust so that it doesn't get knocked out? You know, how how are you going to do it? So again, it comes back to that notion that you're still gonna be accountable for that one. You know, it wasn't completely your fault. It's it's a little bit, so you you still need to address how we're gonna take care of this in the future. And uh, I really see that when you talk about sort of what we're gonna do, these sort of curative actions for the future. That's really part of the adjusting information as well, because people want to know well, are things going to be different in the future and better in the future? You know, whether you're a corporation or you're a government entity responsible for the disaster, is this gonna be better? That's what they want to know. Because there's some anxiety after the disaster or the crisis. And that adjusting information helps to alleviate that anxiety.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

And a couple of things that I I think are important too from the paradise example. Um, we did learn a lot of lessons. And and I think it's it's being shared more and more. And one of them is is cross-jurisdictional support. Because those that were involved directly in this, in this fire and in this absolute tragedy couldn't, I mean, didn't just have 10 minutes to sit in a car and look at policy and then address, okay, well, their first system, secondary. I mean, it was chaos. And the response from first responders was nothing short of heroic in every sense. Um, we did learn uh, again, to set up that cross-jurisdictional so that if I'm in an area not impacted at all, I can have the tools and resources and policies to support me directly, supporting that level of communication so that I can take something off of their shoulders so that they can address a different threat. Um, I think the other part too is sometimes, at least as a on the practitioner side, we get fixated on the latest and greatest tool. And again, wireless emergency alerts was that uh at the time of the fire where it was talked about all the time. It's you can geographically target it, it's wonderful. But then we also saw how sensitive it is. And if you remove different cell towers, the ability to push information out really, I mean, it's just doesn't happen. And and I can see, and this is from my time when I was able to um work alongside with those at iPause, is the emergency alert system, just as you talked about from your experience um with the European Union, that analog, that that robust, reliable, older, tried and true signal through our radio and television broadcast could have blanketed the area with critical information. But again, because sometimes we get so focused on the newest piece, we lose sight of some of the more redundant systems.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

But that's like you said, that support from outside is essential because when you're immersed in your primary response, we got to help people now. And can we get to these other things? So communication kind of moves a little bit down the list because you you're dealing with other things more directly. It's the same way in organizations, uh, the people on in business continuity are so focused on keeping the organization running, they don't think about communicating. So that that has to go to another function. And if that's an entity outside offering support, you know, like another jurisdiction, that's perfect. School systems run into the same issues. I was up in Canada about a year ago talking uh about this with various school systems. It's like you you need support from other areas because you you don't always handle this. And you know, their big concern is violence on on campus. And they don't have they need support for that. So they, you know, you have these agreements that oh, if that's in your schools, our school district will help out on that. They'll they'll provide that type of support. That's that's really important. And also one uh I I saw firsthand when you know I was at a university where they had an incident where um it was going to be a mass shooting, but um by the admission of of the the person in charge of security at the university, luckily it it wasn't because uh the person's gun jammed and the police could get there in time. But that's when the the the state various universities got together and said, we have to work more together, we have to coordinate together because none of us have the resources to handle this alone. We need to work in support with one another. So it's the same thing that support across areas becomes critical.

SPEAKER_03 31:35

Yeah, I think um the the the third of example I want to talk about is so similar to the one that we were just discussing about the paradise fire, and that's in um the LA wildfires from last January. It's been almost a year and a half now. Um and we have all kinds of stories of of alerts and warnings that were going out and not going out across the county during the wildfires. The one that I find the most fascinating um is the there was an alert that was issued that was targeted for one part of the county, and it got um the non-technical word I use is stuck in the system where it was repeated for 24 hours and it lost its geotargeting so that it bounced around to different places in the county. So it was a technological malfunction somewhere in the system. Um, but the message itself, when it was issued, the contents, the first word in the message said new. So when it was bouncing around for 24 hours, everybody who got it said, oh, it's new. And um, the location information in the message said in your area. So it could have very easily applied to any place in the county and perceived as being a brand new message. So there's two pieces where you've got this technological problem, and then the actual what would have been the instructing information was poorly constructed. So that one's been a really fascinating one for me to think about. Uh, how does SCCT apply to that?

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Yeah, I I think you know it kind of goes back to the idea you you need to have instructing information. And in the theory, we didn't consider that you would give them bad instructing information. And that's and I think that's where the the the warning research that you all are doing is so valuable because like, well, no, this is how you should deliver it. This is how it should be. And in that case, had if it had been proper, people would have known if they're getting it's like, well, wait, they're giving a location. We don't live there, you know, if when you're given if you're given coordinates and that and so forth. And I know from from working with the people at at the center that, you know, when you're giving that information, you you're thinking about like, well, not just geographic, but often by landmark. So if you're by the such and such ability between this and that, you know, how you want to present that information to people, but if that's missing, yeah, you you've constructed your communication was bad from the start because it was constructed improperly from it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:16

Yeah. So how does an organization recover from that kind of thing when their messages are poorly written?

SPEAKER_00 34:24

I I think again, that that's an accountability factor. We we should have done better. You know, that at this point, we here's where we failed you. Like we we had this message, we thought we were getting out. It wasn't good. We need to do better in in the future. And then talk about how you're gonna do it better in the future. Like they should go to the war room and understand what it is how to construct. They should do training where they're learning how to construct these messages better, you know. Because yeah, the the training component of it, uh, I think you all know, just gets overlooked too often.

SPEAKER_03 34:58

It really does. And in your work with organizations, how do you get them to see that they could use more training?

SPEAKER_00 35:06

Sadly, it's usually because they've had a crisis and they weren't properly trained. And then they're like, oh, we we need some training now. You know, things things didn't go quite right. I we were working with a group up in Canada that realized that their crisis response really wasn't as good as they thought it was when they actually had the crisis. And so they're doing some training to work on that. And I remember uh I knew the this this one consultant, and he said he was he was up in Michigan, and he's doing this training about workplace violence for Ford. And he said, these people are looking bored. Like, like, why are we sitting through this? This is never gonna happen to this. And he said, at about 11 o'clock, suddenly it all changed. And people were really intent and really involved in asking questions. It's because that they had learned by 11 o'clock that there actually had been a shooting in one of their facilities. And now they really needed to know what was going on for all this. So that it tends to be it's the same reason like when you ask organizations why did you create a crisis management plan? The majority of them say because we had a crisis and we didn't have a plan.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

It's interesting after. Yeah, it's that whole after thing. And I know, Jeanette, you're gonna make that make a comment, I'm sure that'll be much better than mine. But practitioners, everybody who's out there listening, that example of the LA fire, and and Jeanette said, you know, what can we do? You know, what can be done? If the message had been written in a complete way that gave location, time, all those things, source in addition to new, so much could have been prevented, right? Even if it was regurgitated over and over, like they would you would have been able to see. So I know we harp on this over and over, but there's a reason. Sorry, that was my little cut and rant. It happens sometimes.

SPEAKER_03 37:05

Well, it's funny. We just spent two days in Texas doing a training, and and one of the pieces that I cover in the training is the one of the recent articles we published on over-alerting. And what how do how does the public experience over-alerting? One of the pieces is relevancy, and if they don't perceive the message to be relevant to them, they tune it out. And I wonder, trying to bring this back to practitioners who are getting training or not training on alerts and warnings, do they think that this is not relevant to them? Do they need, does the crisis raise this awareness of, oh, now it now training is relevant? Like up to that point, they just don't recognize the need for it.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Yeah, they they assume that it just gets done. And I I've seen that uh, you know, far too often in even in simulations where people are going like, well, communication, of course we do that. You know, you know we we have lines and they think of it as as a technology, and they don't really think of it as delivering messages. And oftentimes when you ask them point blank, say, well, that communication is not important. It's important that we handle these situations. Like, well, we're not disputing that what you're doing isn't important, but communication is important too.

SPEAKER_03 38:24

Right. Right. And there is a difference between delivering the message, the contents through a channel versus delivering something that is clear and actionable, the message contents. I mean the contents and the contents are two different things. But you're trying to help people to the actions you want people to take have to be delivered through that channel. Both things have to be correct.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

Yes. And people outside of communication think channel. They don't think message. They think messages magically write themselves.

SPEAKER_03 38:57

Right. And they don't. And they don't.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Can we talk about messages writing themselves real quick?

SPEAKER_03 39:05

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:06

I it's I I call it check the box syndrome that whenever you're in a training environment, an exercise, and we talk about actual communication and we talk about, okay, then we would send this alert. And then we just move on. We've checked the box and said we've done it. We don't talk about what it says, how it's going to go out, who's going to get it, any specialty groups or or populations, access, functional needs, everything else that may need something different. We just check the box and move forward. And then when the actual event arrives, um, we're not prepared for it. And just as you said, there's the really important balance of if you take a violent act, whether it's at a school or or anywhere else, that's you basically have this um different. I mean, you have people that are addressing actual crimes and and threats. And then you have those that are pushing for communication to say, hey, what can we do to help everybody? Right. And and there's two separate things and they're both important. Can you help me though? Because one of the areas that we are trying to address is, and I'm I talked a little bit about, hey, we are attracted to technology sometimes, is the big thing of AI. Um, I think artificial intelligence, which has existed for a long time and it's it's moving forward, but now we're starting to use it more than just a little bit. Uh, I think people are starting to rely on it for the development of their emergency communication. And I want to get your thoughts on what do you think it does for the public or um even internally about trust and credibility? Um, because I think trust and credibility are so important. So, how can we understand it and use it effectively?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

I my favorite use of AI is in training. That it can help you develop training scenarios. It can, you know, if for more advanced users, they can even get kind of real-time feedback through their scenarios from the AI. But but your AI is only as good as training. So if you've poorly trained, you're gonna get poor results in the end. But it's helpful, particularly for someone who might be the only person responsible for doing the crisis work. So it's it's a it's it's another resource for you to use to help you develop training and working through those processes. Uh my concern about message drafting is not that AI is not good at it. It has shown repeatedly it is very good at it. Right. If it's giving given the correct prompts for that. The problem is that people should learn how to write the messages before they use AI. And I'll give you an example of this. One of my great nephews is diabetic and has to have insulin. And before he had a pump, the doctor made sure that his parents and his grandparents knew how to give injections to insulin. Because they said, you know, if this pump doesn't work, you're gonna have to do this. And if you don't learn now, you don't want to have to learn when the pump has gone out. And that's the situation with AI. If you don't learn how to write those messages, and then you're in a situation where you don't have access to your generative AI, what are you gonna do? You have you have de-skilled yourself in some way. So maybe, maybe you knew how to write those messages, but you've been so dependent on AI, you give it a prompt, and maybe you edit it, but you don't really know how to write those anymore. So over time, and cognitive psychology supports this, you're gonna forget how to do it. And if you're hired new onto the job and you and everyone's using AI, you're never gonna learn how to write that. And we see that with students in communication programs. They'll say, oh yeah, well, I'll just ask the AI. It'll target for the stakeholder and write to it. Yeah, it will, but you're not learning how to do that. You're just learning how to give it a prompt. And you know, I was recently uh at this uh conference, and one of the there was a one of a practitioner there, and he was talking about how he was working on this major airline disaster and they had no internet access. And this was only about four years ago. So, what are you gonna do? You you have no internet access that goes out, your AI doesn't work, you can't write those messages. You know, and you know, AI can help you pre draft the messages really well. Because if you need to generate, you know, maybe a hundred different possible scenarios, like an organization is just supposed to pre pre draft these messages, that's great. And you can edit to them. But you need to know how to do that from the start. You know, so you need to be able to write them and then have the uh I add to them. It always has to begin with the human. And I'm I'm very worried when I see discussions of AI that says, oh yeah, you you have you give it to the AI and then you edit. It's like, no, you you give the command, then you edit the command. You give it a text, it gives you feedback, and then you edit from there, or you're gonna lose that skill. And and that's that's my big concern is that the communication skills are gonna erode because of a dependence on generative AI.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

I look at it with the self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are wonderful, like, right? You still need to learn how to drive a stinking car if you are going to have a license and be responsible to drive. For those that are always in a taxi, bless your heart, no issue. Okay. But if you're gonna hold a driver's license, right? If you're gonna hold one and say, I can drive, and then you simply rely on self-driving vehicles, if the time comes when you you have to get behind the wheel, I don't want you on the road. I don't. And the same thing is with this type of communication. And see that you're you're you're a good influence, Tim, because now I'm feeling ranty again. Is if you go to a training and you're being advised not to use AI and take advantage of it, don't use AI. Take advantage of the training. So, no, I really appreciate how you put it because when you don't have that ability to use AI, your community is still gonna require you to push information out.

SPEAKER_00 45:34

Yeah, I'm I'm with you. Self-driving cars bother me. Um, when I was teaching at Texas AM, when I used to walk to class, I'd go by the the self-driving car in the parking lot in the group to run. It's just like, yeah, you're just evil. It's like, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see this self-driving car. Because you're right, because people forget how to drive. Like, oh, I have all these lane assists, so I don't need to look for another car. And yeah, even my spouse, she goes through that because we have one car that has lane assist and one doesn't. And then she's when the car then's like, oh yeah, it didn't tell me there was that car over there. And it's like I I almost made a bad mistake. So yeah, you can lose as quickly. And then people's like, oh, well, you're you're resistant to AI. It's like, no, not resistant. I want it used properly. You know, that you know, there's there is that when you take the human part out of it, it's it's problematic. And we also know from the research that when you tell people AI did it or wrote it, they hate it. They and that goes back to your trust. They don't trust the AI, so they don't trust the messages. If a company were to say, oh yes, oh, all of our crisis communication was written by AI, people would would just crucify them for it and would not trust them in the future because they used AI to write their messages. Is there's the research goes across so many different domains showing that if they think it's a human, oh, it's okay. You tell them, oh, that same thing was AI, they hate it. Because there's you know, there's a kind of terminator mentality that it's it's out to get us to it. But you know Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:04

Are there are there particular safeguards that can be put into place if crisis communicators are using AI for their work? Like what should they do?

SPEAKER_00 47:13

Yeah, if if um the the broader heading is often called that that it has to have meaningful human control, that you you can't let your your AI just run on its own. And a good example of that is people like say, oh, well, let a let agenic AI do do the simple tasks. Well, yeah, it it can do simple tasks. And for instance, if if I'm having a product recall, so let's say I'm Taylor Foods, I know I'm gonna get a lot of inquiries about you know cryptospora and what's going on in my lettuce supply. I can have FAQs and I can train an Agenic AI to answer FAQs. But a human has to monitor that and have the ability to see is it really sticking to the FAQs or is it answering questions it should not be answering? And particularly, you should put in certain words that if those words appear in a message, it immediately goes to a human to address, is it doing that or not? And so you have to monitor that system. So you don't let it become fully autonomous. So the people say, oh yeah, you can just let it go. And that feeds into this automation bias that goes back to when computers were first being introduced into the workplace. That if a computer said it, it must be true. So I'm just gonna follow along. And that's why it has to be meaningful that you you have to do it, that you have to require them to look at that. There has to be this verification. And that can be built into the system that every so often a human has to do certain things so that they are paying attention to what's going on, or they have to make the final call on even what is considered a fairly simple task to keep them involved. And another example that would be like um every so often the system requires the human to do it. So there you're monitoring it, but every so often you have to do it. Like, I don't know, every 20th time you have to do the action and not just the AI, so that you keep that skill with it. So you you can have this meaningful human intervention, needs to be a part of it, but it has to be designed in and it has, you know, the employees have to embrace that as part of it.

SPEAKER_03 49:17

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I do like this this idea of what people have been calling human in the loop as being more than just uh reviewing. It's actually touching it and practicing and keeping your skill set um really robust and able to tackle the hard problems and not so the humans not outside of the system, they're they're foundational to the system and interacting continuously instead of just giving it a prompt and just letting it run. It's a very different approach.

SPEAKER_00 49:54

Exactly. Yeah, the human in the loop is sort of um sort of if if you want to put it, bring it down to sort of a governance perspective, that it's taking that larger design philosophy of meaningful, meaningful human, you know, intervention there, and taking it down to the the level of this is how we're gonna do it.

SPEAKER_03 50:13

Yeah. Um, so I want to ask you one more question. And this is in your role as a journal editor, because this is something as an academic. Okay, so Eddie, going back.

SPEAKER_01 50:27

This is gonna become like the thing people say, okay, let's do it for Eddie here. Let's take it down.

SPEAKER_03 51:02

So your assistant professor is the brand new baby professor, kind of getting their feet under them, and then they've built a research agenda, and then they become an associate. And then when you're really famous, you become a full professor, like Tim Coombs and uh and other big names that have gone through the additional jumpover hurdles and submitted their paperwork and gotten the president to at the university to say, yes, you are now a full professor. So Tim is an editor for a journal called the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, which is one of the really leading journals in this crisis communication space. Um, and my team has submitted public uh manuscripts to JCCM and um have been successful at getting published. And um, but one of the things that I've been looking for in the crisis journals and the disaster journals are things about AI. And thus far, what I've seen is thought pieces. Like what we think AI can do, but what I'm really looking for is evaluation of whether or not AI is working. So in your role as a journal editor and talking with other crisis and uh communication journals, are we starting to see any of that evaluative work come out yet?

SPEAKER_00 52:24

We're we're getting closer. We're seeing people talk about like, oh, uh, these are how these systems have been integrated in, and did they think it worked well or not? But it's still, I think, more on the thought level. How do we do this? How do we integrate this in? And sort of like, yeah, because there's a there are systems out there, and yeah, we do need some kind of assessment of that. And I think that's that's been sort of a general lag on on the academic side is the is they would say, like, well, you know, is that really academic enough? And that this is a this is a discussion that you know uh typically only only academics have is like, well, is is that academic enough? And that's coming, you know, do we need to understand? It's like, yeah, we really do need to understand that. And one of the roles I've tried to do when I took over the journal was to get more back to its some of its roots of being connected up with the practice. And I think that's a case where we we did have uh we did publish one piece that was more uh of a thought piece about AI from a practitioner perspective. And I would love whether it comes from an academic research team, a combination of practitioners, just from a practitioner group. Like, here are these AI tools that are being now used in in crisis communication. Here's what's working, here's what's not, and you know, have kind of some kind of assessment of that. You know, um it you you could have some theory that you're using or some principles that you govern how you evaluate them, or that might be, but I think that would be highly valuable to have. And so I would, you know, I if there's people out there listening who are thinking about it, do that, send it, send it our way, and I'll do my best to make sure that it gets the right reviewers. You know, not some reviewers go like, well, I don't think this is academic, because I've had I've I've seen reviews where people say, like, well, you cited a white paper from this PR firm. It's like, yeah, because it's like really good research and probably better than most of the research in your journal. But you know, your your reviewer says, Oh, no, we we can't have this because a practitioner wrote it's like that. I I don't know. I I don't get that. Yeah, I didn't get it when when I was in academia, and I don't get it now that I'm outside of it. But yeah.

SPEAKER_03 54:42

And that is an academic argument about what is what is legitimate to site. And it's yeah, we get into that. Um can we can we publish something quickly enough with AI moving so quickly? Like, could we get actually get it into a uh publication online or in print fast enough?

SPEAKER_00 55:02

Uh yeah, it can it can move as quick if you um if there's something that really should be out there um as an as an editor, I can I can route it to reviewers that I trust and say this is something we really need to move through. And as soon as it moves through that process, it's immediately published online. And that's because now uh the the journals, as soon as something is accepted, once it's accepted, well, of course, Wiley then they'll say, like, it's going through, I and they call it some kind of weird system that's going through, it's going through some some technical review they have, then it immediately goes out, then it's immediately published, so it's immediately available. So things can get out very quickly. You don't have to wait for the next issue to be released, like it used to do, because um JCCM is uh you know just on is just now digital, so you can get it out there quicker. So it can go through if if you're motivated.

SPEAKER_01 56:02

So a break to make this for Eddie here. What is the normal timeline? Because you guys are talking about we can go quick or anything else. I was just hearing editorial jargon. Editorial jargon. Um yeah. Are we talking weeks or months for normal process?

SPEAKER_02 56:20

Months, months for a normal process.

SPEAKER_00 56:22

Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. Here's here's our here's a rough idea of how it works. So someone sends it in and and and once it clears the screen process that the that the uh probably run by AI has for the journal, it gets to me the editor. I then ask people to review it, and I wind up asking a lot of people because people are busy, they they don't have their time. And so that's a process, however long for me to secure the reviewers. So that's a time period. Then the reviewers have, you know, uh sometimes a month or so, depends. And uh sometimes they get it back, and sometimes they get it back very slowly, and and so there's more time, and they'll say, Oh, well, we want to see these changes. So then there has to be revisions made to it. And if it if it's a really big revision, we call them major revisions, that means it has to go back out to the reviewers. So uh typically the reviewers reviewed it the first time, then review it the second time. But there are occasions where the people who reviewed it the first time decide, ah, I don't want to look at it again. And so the process restarts. So it can go months, it can go a very long process, you know.

SPEAKER_01 57:31

Ideally, and the idea is when it's published as a peer-reviewed article, that there's significance rather than just seeing an article online, correct? I mean, there's definitely a difference, and that's for people like me who are like, well, okay, it's in a journal, but I read this on whatever news source, right, where it's just an article. The difference is the information that's in your journal, in this article written by these authors, has been verified, vetted, all these things, right?

SPEAKER_00 58:01

Yeah, and I would say in 90 to 95 percent of the time it works really well, but there's there's stuff that slips through that that happens. It's who the reviewers are, and you know, did the reviewers really understand the research? And if the editor doesn't know that because I there are areas that that I oversee that I I rely upon the expertise of like my AEs or the reviewers, and so I'll look at like, whoa, I can't overrule that because I don't know. And so in case anything slips through, but for the vast majority of the time, it is good, it's it's it's it's vetted, it's really good stuff. You can rely upon it and you can trust the information that you're getting. You know, it's not something that someone posted to Reddit who may or may not know anything and just kind of speaking their mind. So so it is it is verified in a way, but you know, if if there's something really good, we do try and streamline it and get it through. I've I've done pieces which uh um we used to call case studies, but I I like to call them lessons from the field that those get through pretty quickly because um if if I read it and it looks good, I get someone else to read it and if they agree, we just we publish it, you know, usually with just some minor changes to it.

SPEAKER_03 59:21

So that would be a very fast turnaround.

SPEAKER_01 59:24

Yeah. I do have one other question that's that wasn't a part of our questions that I think we were talking about before.

SPEAKER_02 59:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 59:31

But I I started I tend to write stuff down during these podcasts, folks, because I have questions or things I want to look up later for okay, because I'm I'm in a student mindset, I'm always trying to learn. That's great. Um I started listing out all the different crisis communications classes that I've been through as a police officer. Okay. And I have been through uh annual crisis communication general. I went through um crisis and hostage negotiation general, one for domestic violence and one for terrorism, all negotiator school stuff. Interview and interrogation, different levels of schools, which they mention crisis communication, because as you're talking to people, if they're in a traumatic situation, or if they've just committed a major crime and they're at this level, it's like you have to be able to communicate. Then there is crisis intervention training, and then there's a whole separate one on de-escalation in crisis. Okay. Ever like the things that you were talking about, I am going back in my mind and thinking these trainings, and I've actually got to help write a couple of these, and so I know the answer for some. But why aren't we including your research and and similar things into these? Because I think it's very valuable, and I think there's a lot of stuff that that already aligns really, really well. But how how should we be adjusting our courses? Because these are required courses for a lot of different agencies, and I think they might be missing out on some key things that I feel like I've been learning today.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:16

Yeah, and I I think it comes down to probably a lot of of what particularly the the stuff related to trauma tends to have more of an interpersonal level to it. And uh one of the things I'm trying to do right now is to integrate more of sort of the interpersonal ideas into sort of the adjusting and instructing information to focus more on well-being. And so I think in in the future, I think uh, and there are other people too in the field who are focusing on well-being. I think they're gonna be better aligned with those types of trainings and they're gonna be able to see the connections better. It's like, oh, I see this is about well-being because that's what it's about when you're dealing with, you know, if you have a trauma-informed perspective for it as part of that, and you know, and making decisions. I I remember we went to um this one conference, and it was primarily law enforcement and talking about SWAT teams and decision-making negotiations they go through. And it was very similar to what we talk about in terms of you know making the evaluations and so forth. And I just remember I was uh with a friend of mine does crisis communication. We were having lunch with with these with these SWAT officers and the stories they're telling. It's like at the end of the meal, we just looked at it, it's like, you know, I guess we're the only ones here who haven't shot somebody at this table because they they had they had been very active. And they're and they were talking about how, like, when they're they were about to go breach this door of this hotel because they they had a report and they had had some other events that the guy they wanted was in this room. And before they're about to breach it, the the leader goes, Are there any concerns? And the logger goes, this isn't right. Something's not right. Let's go back and rethink this. He goes, the the original tip, there's something wrong with this. And they went back, they reviewed it, and they didn't go in. And it was the right call because the person was not in there. And so he said, There, I there's something bothering me. There's something about this original uh tip, and it's like, yeah, so it showed how decision making is made and how anyone should be allowed to speak up and why that's valuable, and that goes across for the crisis teams, that type of trend.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:26

You're literally gonna help me. Well, you're you're already helping me think that I know in law enforcement, maybe we we need to start doing peer-reviewed courses because I can write courses and I've written many courses, and then people are like, Great, you're done. And we start teaching it. But again, it's not reviewed by any other peers or anybody else. It just becomes the course or the standard. And uh things that I've learned from you and Jeanette today about the process for getting an article published in the journal and the benefit of a peer review. Um, it might help us align a little better. So it's not just the experience of Eddie Bertola says we need to do this versus this is what the research is showing.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:09

Yeah. And uh I'm we're just starting a project, and hopefully in October we'll have the first meeting about, and it's about thinking more about crisis pedagogy and crisis courses, and even what that means for training, crisis training, such as we we call it executive ed, but that would be anyone who's kind of not a typical student, be part of that, and trying to come up with some criteria and some guidance for that. So that might be something helpful in the future, and to be thinking about uh specific applications in fields like you like like police work.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:47

That is a fantastic way to to summarize and bringing it all back together about the importance of theory and practice and bringing them together. And uh this has been a great conversation. I want to have you come back and join us again, Tim, because this has been really fun. I think that our listeners are they're hearing a very different perspective that they really need to have more knowledge about. And I think that you've you've brought some really key insights to us today. So thank you. This has been really great.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:20

I'm glad it was useful. I I enjoyed it and I appreciate the invitation to be part of this.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:36

So this was just such a great conversation. I have not met Tim until today, and I loved having this discussion. It was so geeky and academic and theoretical, but I think there were some practical pieces in it all.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:55

Um, and I say practical, that's a practitioner-based. It's all practical, right? But practitioner-based, because again, like I think I mentioned before, I do write notes down and different things while we're doing this. And while there's different types of crisis communication, um, as Jeanette has has talked to me about and Tim, um, there's still a lot of value in this. And I look forward to when more research is done because I want to be the best equipped I can be, and for everybody out there who's doing the work every day to be the best equipped. But it but learning from the research, I think will help us just do our jobs better.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:35

Yeah, I think so. That I mean, it's one of the reasons that we continue to do this research that's very applied, trying to put the tools into the hands of the practitioners, which is exactly what we do in our trainings. Um, anyone who visits the warn room sees the research that has been conducted by scholars and then translated for practitioners in the blogs that are available on the warn room. If you visit the editor's desk, you can see not only the evaluation of warning messages, but the application of our research to demonstrate how messages can be improved. Um, you could also visit the warning gallery blog and read more about the application of research. But um we we are we have such a great time training and um bringing information to the practitioner groups that really want to utilize the research. Um, and that's where I hope that people will reach out to us and engage with us, bringing our training to your communities virtually or in person. Um, you can reach out to Eddie or to me and um invite the Alerting Authority to have a conversation about coming to your community.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:51

And just thank you for spending some time with us this last hour. Um, this is something we enjoy doing and again, learning. Um, we know that every second has a story, and here at the Alerting Authority, we're here to help share yours. So thank you, and we'll see you next time.