Synergist - October 2011

Insight

RISK COMMUNICATION ; ETHICS

RISK COMMUNICATION

Advice about Advisory Groups
They Hold Your Feet to the Fire, and That’s a Good Thing

BY PETER M. SANDMAN

In recent months several clients have sought my advice on how to set up an advisory group. In each case, one of the client’s main motives was its sense that too many stakeholders had minimal trust in government regulators. “The government is making sure we operate safely” had become almost a laugh line, and so an alternative accountability mechanism was needed. The clients thought that an advisory group made up directly of stakeholders might make them more credibly accountable in the minds of critics and skeptics. I agreed.

Purposes of Advisory Groups Providing a credible accountability mechanism is one key purpose of advisory groups. Stakeholders can see whether the advisory group is forcing you to be more responsive to their concerns than you wanted to be, and they tend to worry less if they see that an advisory group is helping to keep you under control.

There are at least five other important purposes:

1. Advisory groups are a conduit for stakeholder outrage. Whoever is upset with you can speak out at an advisory group meeting, or maybe even join the group. Just as a pressure relief valve on a tank of gas can help keep the tank from exploding by venting some gas, an advisory group can help keep the work force or neighborhood from exploding by venting some outrage. (Of course it’s

not enough just to let people vent; you need to show that you hear them and are being responsive. That’s number four below.)

2. Advisory groups are a source of intelligence, an early warning system for stakeholder outrage. They let your organization know how many people are upset with you, who they are, how upset they are, and what’s upsetting them.

3. Advisory groups are a two-way communications medium. They occupy a middle ground between your organization and its stakeholders, and pass along information in both directions—helping you understand your stakeholders’ viewpoints and helping them understand yours.

4. Advisory groups are a venue for visibly giving in. Once your management has decided to do something that stakeholders are demanding, it needs to explain why it is making the change. Crediting its own virtue lacks humility (and credibility); crediting its most hostile critic may feel too humiliating to bear. Crediting an advisory group is a good middle ground.

5. Advisory groups give good advice. My clients rarely start out expecting to get valuable substantive input from their advisory groups, but they almost always end up getting some—ideas they never thought of and ideas they discarded prematurely. (Of course, advisory groups have a lot of infeasible ideas as well.)

6. Advisory groups can be local, regional, or national. They can be made up of employees, neighbors, customers, or activists (or some of each). And they can focus on an individual facility, an entire company, or lots of companies (an industry, an airshed or watershed, etc.).