Synergist - September 2010

to deserve this?” to “I’d like my life back,” top management keeps leaking its sense of its own victimization. The corporate expressions of compassion for the real victims ring false, I suspect, because they are false. Compassion is hard to fake.

But maybe BP management does feel for the victims and just can’t communicate it. At least part of the problem is that compassion isn’t credible (even if it’s real) when it’s expressed by a perpetrator who’s unwilling to express contrition first. Almost everything BP has said about what Gulf Coast residents are going through could have been said by a sympathetic third party.

Determination is a different story. BP hasn’t just expressed its determination to make things right. It has acted on that determination.

Days after the spill began, BP announced that it wouldn’t try to hide behind the $75 million statutory liability limit for marine oil spills but would pay all legitimate claims.

Instead of praising this decision, commentators complained that the word “ legitimate” was a loophole that could let BP out of paying some claims. And they pointed out that the $75 million limit wouldn’t apply anyway if BP or any of its contractors had been grossly negligent or had violated any federal safety regulations. The latter, at least, is a safe bet. There are so many regs it’s inconceivable that none were violated. So BP may have been smart rather than generous in forswearing the limit rather than giving the government yet another reason to document the violations.

In the months that followed, BP set up a claims payment procedure that critics have grudgingly conceded was fast and fair. (Even fishermen who had cheated on their taxes were allowed to submit “informal” evidence that their lost income was higher than their tax forms showed.) Then BP and the Obama administration negotiated a $20 billion claims fund, with more money to come if it turns out to be needed.

It’s not especially surprising that a company run by engineers would be more genuine in its determination to fix the problem than in its contrition for having caused it or its compassion for the victims. Fixing problems is what engineers do; contrition and compassion are the sorts of things humanities majors go on about.

But BP hasn’t been able to convince anyone of its determination either.

At least one reason is that normal people think like humanities majors. Certainly victims do. We rightly sense that BP isn’t really contrite or compassionate. That exacerbates our outrage. It makes us doubt the evidence that BP is determined to plug the leak and clean up the mess. Worse, it makes us want to see BP as the kind of company that will try to wriggle out of its cleanup obligations unless the government keeps its boot firmly planted on the company’s neck.

We think like humanities majors in another way as well. The unfolding drama of the Deepwater Horizon spill has revived the public’s sense of the tragic: our sense that not all problems have solutions. People realize that no one can “clean up the mess” in the Gulf of Mexico entirely. One source of our unwillingness to trust BP’s determination to “make it right” is our understanding that making it right is relative.

4. Say how stupid you feel.

When a company misbehaves, there are only two possible explanations for its misbehavior that don’t sound like excuses: evil/greed and stupidity/incompetence.

Which is more common, corporate evil or corporate stupidity? I’d say stupidity, by a mile. Which does the public think is more common? Evil. Which does the company’s reputation more harm? Again, evil.

These facts are the basis for what I call “the stupidity defense.” Unless you aggressively claim stupidity, the default explanation for your misbehavior is evil. If you were, in fact, stupid, you should say so.

Having lost roughly half its shareholder value, BP pretty obviously was stupid. On clearheaded days, I’ll bet BP management feels it was stupid (on less clearheaded days management no doubt feels it was unlucky and victimized). But the company isn’t saying so, and evil has become the almost universally accepted explanation … as if an oil company would greedily twirl its mustaches while it intentionally destroyed half its shareholder value.

Smart companies assess the probability
and magnitude of various risks, and the
assessment helps them decide which risks
to take and which to avoid or mitigate.
Almost by definition, a company that
loses half its shareholder value in an oil
spill did a faulty risk assessment (or none
at all). It was stupid. A lot of precautions
BP didn’t take look pretty obviously cost-
effective now. And not just in hindsight:
it’s obvious now that it should have been
obvious then.

Author’s note: I have consulted periodically for BP sincethe1980s,includingworkonits1990American Trader oil spill in Huntington Beach, Calif. In 1992, BP publishedanadmiringprofileofmeinitsin-house magazine, Shield. My most recent work for BP was in 2003,ontheBaku–Tbilisi–Ceyhanpipeline.

PeterM.Sandmanisariskcommunicationconsultant andspeaker.Muchofhisworkonriskcommunication can befound on his website, www.psandman.com, andinvideosandabookpublishedbyAIHA®. Commentsonthisandfuturecolumnscanbesent topeter@psandman.com.