By Joe Diorio
My second book, Crisis Communications and the Art of Making Nothing Happen, takes a look at another communications skill: Crisis planning. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
I was shot at by a crazed gunman during a mass shooting. He missed. I’m naturally as ugly as I appear. (Yes, I joke about it. The memory can be horrific if I dwell on it too much.) But he did not miss three of my coworkers. This happened on May 28, 1982, the Friday before Memorial Day.
Over 40 years later, I still have two distinct memories of that day. The first was the understandable fear of possibly dying by gunshot. I was convinced I had arrived at the moment where I would die as I lay on the floor under the conference table in the room where my coworkers and I hid, repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over. For me, the end wasn’t near. It was here. The second, less obvious emotion was frustration and anger with my employer, the IBM Corporation.
I wasn’t angry because the shooting happened. I was angry because I was severely criticized for doing what I thought was my job.
The shooting happened when a former IBM employee drove his Lincoln Town Car through the glass doors of an IBM building in Bethesda, Maryland, emerged holding two weapons and started shooting at anything and anyone.
He fired in my direction as I stood outside of a coworker’s office. Seconds before I heard Audrey, my admin, screaming, “There’s a guy with a gun, and he’s shooting the place up!” I saw Audrey running toward me and about 20 feet behind her was a man in a ski mask wearing what appeared to be a U.S. Army surplus jacket. His choice of a coat was strange to me since it was hot and humid outside. (Yes, I was dwelling on trivial facts at that moment.) He fired the gun—I think it was a shotgun—and the bullets hit the wall where I would have been standing had I not ducked. I saw the damage to the wall the next day when I returned to the building to retrieve my suit jacket, car keys, and wallet.
Three people were shot and killed in this incident and the hundreds of IBM employees who worked in that building were trapped for hours until a police S.W.A.T. rescued them and finally arrested the shooter … who had barricaded himself in an office.
The following Tuesday I returned to work. My coworkers and I ran a regional public relations office in Bethesda. Our primary job was product publicity but on this day, we were responding to dozens of inquiries from the press. “Can we film in the building?” “Can we talk to employees?” “Can you tell us about the victims?”
We answered the questions as best as we could. No, you cannot come into the building. You can talk to employees if you locate them on your own but, again, you cannot come into the building. And no, we will not release information about the victims. Maybe those weren’t the best responses, but we were flying by the seats of our pants.
That is until someone at IBM’s corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York got wind of what was happening in Bethesda. Rather than a “how can we help?” phone call we received a “What the hell are you DOING?” message.
From the perspective of myself and my coworkers, IBM did not have a plan for handling the onslaught of press calls. They did not, in other words, have a crisis communications plan. Or as I say, if there was one it was not shared with us.
And that was not necessarily anyone’s fault. IBM in 1982 excelled at product publicity; find stories that show how IBM products are used. Just a few weeks before the shooting I placed a story in the fledgling newspaper USA Today about a gym in downtown Washington, D.C. that was using an IBM Personal Computer to run body fat analyses on clients. That application is commonplace today, but it was a cutting-edge use of technology back in 1982.
But managing communications after a crisis was a horse of a different color for Big Blue.
After quickly calling my coworkers, supervisor, and myself on the carpet for answering press questions, IBM cobbled together a response plan that would have a communications professional who worked for another IBM division in Washington handle all press calls.
I wasn’t shot that day, so I wasn’t considered a victim. And I don’t consider myself a victim, either. But I nevertheless became a part of a mass shooting. It’s a club no one wants to join, but it is a club that sadly has a growing membership. The Gun Violence Archive estimates that, this year, as of July 4, 2024, there were 261 mass shootings in the United States. It is an out-of-control problem.
My anger at the time was real, but I hold no grudge against IBM. The anger was more from a feeling of, “Hey, I just got shot at, and you’re yelling at me?” Well, my emotional wounds from IBM’s corporate office’s verbal reaming healed quickly enough. Today I laugh at the memory (of being yelled at, not shot at) more than anything else.
As I said, IBM did not have a crisis communications plan for the events of May 28, 1982. Or if one existed, it was not shared with the regional press office in Bethesda.
There was no mention of the shooting in the company annual report for 1982. The CEO of IBM at the time, John Opel, visited the site over the weekend as repairs were taking place, and preparations were made to accommodate his visit. There was no press involved with his visit. In a sense, the event was pushed under the proverbial rug.
Yet IBM did a lot of positive things after the shooting. IBM streamlined the process of paying medical bills, significantly reducing the paperwork someone would have to complete. IBM also hired psychiatrists to be on-site in the building to talk to anyone who was experiencing any degree of post-traumatic stress. The company arranged for someone from the Montgomery County, Maryland district attorney’s office to conduct weekly updates regarding the status of the trial against the shooter.
IBM spent a fortune fixing the building quickly so that it bore no sign of damage when everyone returned to work four days after things hit the fan. By Tuesday morning, June 1, as people returned to work there was no sign that a shooting and a loss of life had happened. Damaged plaster walls were repaired or replaced, and a fresh coat of paint was applied to the entire building, not just the areas damaged by gunshots. Broken glass was replaced. The lobby was completely repaired, including replacing the carpeting where the Lincoln Town Car had sat after crashing through the glass doors.
The only faint sign of trauma in the building when everyone returned to work on Tuesday were the glass double doors that were destroyed when the car crashed through them. They were custom-made ten-foot-high glass doors. There was a double set of these doors at the north and south entrances to the building (the shooter drove through the south entrance); the space in-between the doors acted as a kind of vestibule to keep wind, leaves, and other things from blowing into the lobby. Since the replacement doors were a special order (“You could just about name your price for those,” one person close to the reconstruction of the building told me. And in reality, someone probably did.), the new doors were not ready for Tuesday’s return to work. Instead, one set of the ten-foot-high glass doors from the north side of the building were used to temporarily replace the shattered entrance at the south side.
Concrete bollards were installed at the base of the sidewalk outside of the building, a move to prevent another car from jumping onto the sidewalk and entering the lobby. Eventually bollards became “de rigueur” design elements on most buildings throughout the country.
All these things would be considered feathers in any company’s hat today. Yet IBM did not speak a word of it to anyone on the outside.
In the four decades since May 28, 1982 we have seen how mass shooting events are communicated by the businesses, the people involved, and interested parties. There were live tweets from the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2019, police departments use “X” messages for use in a variety of crisis and near crisis situations. Schools have partial and total lockdown procedures and active shooter drills.
It’s easy to see crisis plans in action today. Fast forward nearly 40 years to September 23, 2021 and a shooting at a Kroger grocery store in Collierville, Tennessee. When the store reopened several weeks later, after the damage to the store was repaired and law enforcement officials had completed their investigations, there were marching bands, speeches from politicians, and a more positive vibe that was communicated through events, live TV news conferences. The message being sent that day was: “We’re back, we’re stronger than ever, and this incident does not define us.”
The planning and implementation Kroger and other places where mass shootings have taken place come from conscious efforts to put a face on a tragedy. In each case there was a plan to identify the situation, activate a team, maintain clear and accurate communications with stakeholders, and to have a plan to recover, which are all hallmarks of solid crisis communications planning.
I wrote this book to provide a good read for the casual reader looking for something with an edginess and action to it. I also wrote it with communications professionals in mind; those who must work to create, maintain, and update communications plans … things that are still often considered a burden to create, pointless to maintain, and something that ultimately belongs in the “we’ll never use this” category.
Crisis Communications and the Art of Making Nothing Happen (Beaufort Books) is available for preorder now through Barnes and Noble and other online retailers.
Joe Diorio Writer, editor. 