Crisis Management with Damian

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now Roman Kemp. The broadcaster opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health.

0:14Hi there, this is High Performance, the show that reminds you it's within. Now, you may or may not be aware that we have a High Performance app. In fact, some of you might be listening to me talking to you on the app right now. But if you don't know, I wanted to share with you an incredible piece of content available right now to High Performance Plus subscribers that is on the app. Now, Damien, who, as you know, usually sits beside me for our high performance episodes, he reads more than anyone I've ever met. And he's created a collection of content, which is essentially him exploring different ideas that he's read about, linking them to other thoughts, suggesting exercises you can do to help you explore those thoughts yourself and making them really accessible for you to digest in just a few minutes.

0:58I think it's a really valuable series for anyone. So I just wanted to play you quickly one of the pieces Damien's done. And if you'd like to hear more, then check out the High Performance app, where you can subscribe to High Performance Plus, and you get loads of other great exclusive content as well. We're making more all the time to give you even more value and greater learnings. Anyway, over to Damien. If you're like me, I don't know if you've been recently watching the TV programme on ITV's drama series Mr Bates vs the Post Office. It's a four-part drama that's incredibly moving but also quite disturbing given the true nature of the events that relates to a case in the early 2000s where the post office implemented a flawed Horizon IT system.

1:48The system itself cost the post office an estimated£1.5 billion to set it up and roll it out. When there were problems, rather than accept that the new system was incorrect, the post office accused the sub-postmasters of stealing and committing fraud, including false accounting based on incorrect information from the system. The story tells of the 555 claimants involved in the case, where the accusations had shattering consequences on their lives, including financial ruin, imprisonment and severe stress and anxiety. The situation impacted many of the submasters' mental health, having devastating consequences including suicide.

2:31The case also made a mockery of the British justice system. I think there's some important lessons that we can all learn from when things go wrong. And it reminded me of a research paper I read back in 2017. The paper explored the case study of Johnson & Johnson's response to the Tylenol crisis in 1982. which refers to a significant event when seven people in the United States died after consuming Tylenol medicine that had been laced with cyanide. This incident caused a major nationwide panic across America, and it raised concerns about product tampering and public safety. It's often considered as one of the most infamous cases of product tampering in history.

3:18Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of Tylenol, faced a major crisis and they had to respond quickly to protect public health and restore consumer trust. Based on their analysis, the authors Kim and Lee conclude that Johnson & Johnson's response to this crisis had some significant lessons that we can all learn. They felt that the company's swift actions, transparent communication and commitment to putting consumer safety first played a crucial role in rebuilding trust and maintaining the company's reputation. In their paper, they emphasize the need for all of us, whether we're in individuals or in organizations, to adopt similar methods.

4:02Johnson & Johnson implemented seven key approaches in their response. These are the ones I wanted to share with you, because there's some big lessons that we can all learn. The first one is the need to take swift and decisive action when things go wrong. So in the case of Johnson & Johnson, they acted incredibly quickly when they understood that this tampering had been taking place. And they recalled approximately 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide. What they did by recalling these items was reassure the public that consumer safety was far more important to them than simply financial considerations.

4:44The second lesson was that they were transparent in the way they communicated. So Johnson & Johnson provided regular updates on the progress of the police investigation and the steps that they were taking to ensure product safety was paramount. They communicated with the public, media and authorities By holding daily press conferences to keep everybody abreast of a situation The third lesson was that they cooperated with others Johnson & Johnson shared their information and findings of their investigations In order to identify the source of where the tampering was coming from They worked closely with the law enforcement agencies and the Food and Drug Administration which was later cited as a key part of how it was eventually successfully resolved.

5:31The fourth one, and this is interesting for us in this day and age, is the understanding of how they subsequently redesigned their products and packaging. So Johnson & Johnson redesigned the Tylenol packaging to include safety features which we take for granted today, such as foil-sealed capsules and triple-sealed tamper-resistant packaging. They did this because they wanted to set a standard for the rest of the industry To put consumer safety first and make sure that nobody else fell victim like this again The fifth one is cited as the way that they invested time, energy and focus in rebuilding trust Johnson & Johnson launched an extensive advertising and PR campaign around this time To assure the public of their commitment to putting safety and quality first This was because they wanted to place a strong emphasis on rebuilding consumer trust and confidence that they knew had inevitably been rocked by this scandal The sixth key lesson was again it was about collaborating with others outside of their circle in this case the medical community So the company collaborated with healthcare professionals and medical experts to address concerns and provide them with accurate information about the crisis rather than let people make up their own narrative and stories instead.

6:53And the seventh and most important lesson I think that we can all learn at a time of crisis is about how do we process and learn from the experience effectively. The Tylenol crisis prompted Johnson & Johnson to establish best practices for when crisis happened, conducting pre-mortems if you like, which have since been widely adopted by other companies and organisations. these approaches collectively help the company navigate the crisis protect public safety and rebuild their brand reputation pretty much everything that the brilliant mr bates and post office drama showed us is what the post office didn't do now i thought that these seven points are relevant to any of us in any situation hopefully we never face situations like the post office or what Johnson & Johnson did.

7:45But when things go wrong, taking swift decisive action, communicating transparently about what we're doing about it, cooperating with other people, take a learning and reapply it so we avoid it happening again, emphasizing the rebuilding of trust and being willing to learn from the experience are all lessons that we've heard so often from our high performance guests and hopefully you can apply on your own high performance endeavors too as ever thanks for being part of this community thanks for listening thanks for you continued and incredibly helpful feedback i hope you've enjoyed this and i look forward to catching up with you again soon how cool is that and if you want to hear more and get more then just head to the high performance app download it from the app store now

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