Say “risk communications,” and people usually think of crisis management: what to say when bad things happen. That’s one part of it. But there’s another side to risk communications that involves taking risk with intelligence and purpose. President Obama’s State of the Union address offers a great example.
Imagine for a moment that you are President Obama. You’re in the final quarter of your presidency, with opposition majorities in both houses of Congress, and you’re getting ready to deliver the annual State of the Union address. The conventional approach – followed by other presidents facing similar circumstances – would be to deliver a really good speech, dominate the news for a day or two, and move on.
Instead, the President and his advisors decided to take some risks, and the result was a speech that dominated the media for days and advanced the administration’s policy agenda. They used four principles of risk communications to do it:
1. Discard the playbook. Few things in Washington are as tradition-bound as the State of the Union address. But the rise of social sharing and continuous news coverage offered a chance to do something different. A note on the whitehouse.gov site described it well:
“There is a ritual on State of the Union night in Washington. A little before the address, the White House sends out an embargoed copy of the President’s speech to the press (embargoed means that the press can see the speech, but they can’t report on it until a designated time). The reporters then start sending it around town to folks on Capitol Hill to get their reaction, then those people send it to all their friends, and eventually everyone in Washington can read along, but the public remains in the dark,” a White House message on the site explained. “This year we change that.”
The White House released the full text to the public on Medium.com. It also developed a constant flow of shareable images, data and graphics in what it called a “river of content.”
The approach won plaudits from media pros and helped the speech dominate the national conversation, producing 2.6 million tweets, along with countless headlines, shares and comments.
2. Be spontaneous. One of the most tweeted and talked-about moments was the President’s unscripted remark that he had no more elections to run because “I won both of them.” It was a great line – pugnacious, surprising, memorable – and would not have been as effective if included in the prepared remarks.
3. Ignore the miscues. The innovations around the speech weren’t perfect. The White House webcast froze and the graphics sometimes fell out of sync, but these were minor flaws. The White House wisely didn’t let a need for perfection paralyze them. This can be one of the biggest obstacles for any organization that needs to do something new with its communications.
4. Know the goal. The new approach to the State of the Union address were designed to support the President’s policy agenda and add to the momentum he’d won in recent weeks because of initiatives on immigration and restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba. The goals were clear, and they guided the innovations.
Taking risk without having a goal is reckless. Taking risk intelligently to reach a goal is at the heart of risk communications.
Who knows? With the success of the State of the Union address, we might see more risk-taking from corporate, government and civic leaders in their communications.