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Commentary: When the next shoe drops — Ebola crisis communication lessons from October (Article)
By Peter M. Sandman, PhD, and Jody Lanard, MD
CIDRAP, University of Minnesota, December 9, 2014
Audience: Public
In contrast to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, which started in late 2013 and will last well into 2015 or longer, the US "Ebola crisis" was encapsulated in a single month, October 2014. But there may well be US Ebola cases to come, brought here by travelers or returning volunteers. And other emerging infectious diseases will surely reach the United States in the months and years ahead.
Radical Candor: Making Clean Coal More Than an Oxymoron (Article)
Published in Public Utilities Fortnightly, March 2015
Audience: C-Suite
Most promising new technologies don’t keep their promises. That’s why an even-money bet on a new technology is a dumb bet. Venture capitalists lose most of their bets, but they make money because their successes pay off at a lot better than even-money odds.
So is a given clean coal technology likelier than not to fail? Absolutely. Does that mean investing in clean coal is foolish? Absolutely not.
And yet it might be foolish after all. People who know more than I know might be able to make a convincing case that clean coal is a blind alley. But I doubt it – not because I’m especially hopeful about clean coal, but because what I’ve read about technological breakthroughs strongly suggests that it’s vanishingly difficult to predict the winners.
Risk Communication in Practice (Audio)
Interview with Brooke Gladstone of "On the Media"; Fracking; Government Surveillance; Terrorism
Audience: C-Suite
This is an audio MP3 file, 77.6MB, 48:27 min.
Three Ways to Manage Controversies (Article)
By Peter M. Sandman
Audience: C-Suite
This is the 32nd in a series of risk communication columns I have been asked to write for The Synergist, the journal of the American Industrial Hygiene Association. The columns appear both in the journal and on this website. This one can be found (edited for length and with minor copyediting changes) in the January 2016 issue of The Synergist, pp. 20–21.
Your organization faces a controversy – any kind of controversy. Neighbors are worried that you might do X; employees are angry that you did Y; activists are fighting to keep you from doing Z. Maybe it’s about health, safety, or the environment; or jobs and the economy; or discrimination and social justice. Maybe all of the above.
Vaccine Risk Communications, Interview with Peter M. Sandman (Audio)
By Richard Levick
January 13, 2021 (part of Richard Levick’s “In House Warrior” podcast series, released January 20, 2021)
Audience: C-Suite
Richard Levick runs a crisis communication consulting firm and churns out an incredible number of podcasts, including the daily “In House Warrior” series for Corporate Counsel Business Journal. Our 38-minute conversation covered some generic topics, starting with my three paradigms of risk communication and ending with my views on whether corporations should take a stand on controversies. In the middle we focused on vaccine communication: what to do about vaccination hesitation; bandwagoning versus finger-wagging; what company COVID-19 vaccination policies should be; the politicization of masks and vaccines; key messages in this dark pandemic winter; etc.
This is an audio MP3 file, 34.5MB, 37:46 min.