Five communications takeaways from the Texas energy crisis

As professional communicators who also happen to be Texans (as well as transplants from colder places), we had a front-row seat to the Texas energy crisis and decided to tap into those perspectives to offer unique insight into what went wrong and why. The mistakes of the last two weeks are ones that any brand and executive can learn from and highlight the crucial roles that crisis planning and response play in reputation management and communications in general. This one’s a bit on the lengthier side because, well, we have a lot of opinions.

We were also witness to so many brands and people going out of their way to check in on each other. At Red Fan, we’re in the preparedness business and take great pride in empathy as a business value. So it was no surprise that our team found an extra gear during last week’s storm, making sure colleagues and clients were safe and had access to resources while also keeping our business running at the standard our partners and we expect. That’s where we’ll start today, as well.

We sincerely hope you and your family are safe, warm and well-fed. Many Texans continue to feel the storm’s impact in their stomachs, homes, wallets and health. For anyone who would like to donate to help Texans in need, please visit www.feedingtexas.org.

Every crisis has the potential to do two things. First, it highlights the failures and blindspots of the decision-makers attached to it. Every action and reaction is more pronounced and scrutinized. Second, it brings out some of the best humanity has to offer. While we would much prefer to always focus on the latter, it’s our job as communicators to prevent and mitigate the former.

What millions of Texans have experienced for the last two weeks is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis that was entirely preventable and absurdly mismanaged. For those of us on the ground who were heating canned soup over homemade candles, sleeping with upward of a dozen blankets, or trying to stay dry in an apartment flood, knowing that it didn’t have to be that way made suffering through it even worse.

Frustration doesn’t heat homes or convert natural gas to electricity, but it can be a kind of fuel. It can bring accountability to leaders who refuse to hold themselves accountable. It can be a force for change to ensure the same mistakes aren’t made again. We hope both of these outcomes can be achieved as we emerge from the back-end of this crisis. It starts with shining a light on what Texas’s leaders could have done better or differently across the three phases of crisis communications: planning and preparedness, real-time management, and post-crisis evaluation.

The difference between scrambling to get a grip on a potential crisis and confidently managing (or even preventing) it boils down to one word: preparedness. When a crisis hits, it’s immediately clear who’s prepared and who isn’t. In this case, it’s even easier to recognize because the storm affected millions of people, hundreds or thousands of brands, the state government and hundreds of municipalities.

Compare, for instance, H-E-B’s consistent ability to respond to a crisis with compassion, empathy and action to the state government’s own response. It really isn’t a comparison so much as an indictment. That’s because H-E-B has a crisis plan for everything: winter storms, hurricanes, global pandemics, supply chain disruptions, food shortages. Last year, H-E-B president Craig Boyan told Texas Monthly, “We are constantly in a year-round state of preparedness for different emergencies.” They even have a director of emergency preparedness. They are constantly assessing, “What if…?” If you need any evidence that crisis response is one of the most important elements of brand reputation management, just do a quick search for “H-E-B” on Twitter.

No store prepares more than my H-E-B.

Now juxtapose that with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s preparation for the storm: a 40-second conversation in a two-and-a-half-hour meeting on Feb. 9.

That’s not even a notable fraction of the time an organization—particularly one with an audience of nearly 30 million people—should spend assessing how it would respond to and communicate during a crisis.

Consistent, accessible messaging

Like millions of other Texans, Red Fan staff woke up to a text message at about 2 a.m. Monday morning to learn of rolling blackouts. They were told to expect the power to be off for about an hour. One hour passed. Then 12. Then a whole day without any additional communication. Homes got colder. Food reserves diminished. Phone batteries died as people logged onto Twitter to try to learn more. This is a mortal sin in communications. It’s unforgivable because it’s one of the first questions every company needs to answer: “When and how do we communicate critical information to our stakeholders?” The answer is not, “One direct text message, then we’ll expect people to watch the news or scroll through their Twitter feed with dying phone batteries.”

Brand promotion vs. preservation

ERCOT’s communications director also decided that the day the storm hit was the perfect time to sneak in a little brand promotion and adopt a passive-aggressive brand tone that amounted to a chastisement of Texans for poor purchasing behavior.

We’ll repeat it as many times as we have to: You preserve your brand during a crisis. You don’t promote it, and you don’t talk down to your audience. Ever.

Leaders who respond to a crisis by grandstanding, pointing fingers or deflecting responsibility are usually guilty of one of two things: They’re either woefully unprepared—because they don’t have a plan to rely on or they’re not trained to communicate effectively—or they are hiding something they don’t want their stakeholders to know. We saw both play out in gross fashion last week.

Scapegoating

Gov. Greg Abbott called ERCOT”an independent private entity that candidly I have both investigated and prosecuted before as attorney general of Texas…it is something that needs to be looked at—it is kinda opaque the way that it runs, it is not transparent.” However, ERCOT is regulated by a government agency…whose members Abbott appointed. He and other prominent Texas leaders spent the most critical moments of a crisis blaming others when they should have spent it solving the problem. Just imagine if Tom Hanks’ Captain Jim Lovell spent all of his screen time in “Apollo 13” ripping into people on the ground for giving him a malfunctioning spacecraft. The movie would’ve been an hour and a half shorter and it wouldn’t have a happy ending.

Inconsistent messaging

Responsibility for the energy and water crisis fell on renewable energy (a lie), ERCOT (partially true), electricity markets and local power companies (mostly true) or federal regulations (twisted) depending on which Texas official was speaking and which media outlet was listening. While we certainly advocate that spokespeople customize their messaging for specific audiences, it’s usually better to keep the messaging consistent, focused on actual problem-solving rather than a CYA blame game, and, I don’t know…truthful.

Politicizing a crisis

Former Texas governor and U.S. energy secretary Rick Perry said that Texans should be willing to make sacrifices if it means the grid remains immune to federal regulations. Using a humanitarian crisis as political capital is egregious, and he wasn’t the only one to commit this mistake. Democrats jumped at the opportunity to throw their Republican colleagues under the bus. Grandstanding does nothing to solve the actual problem, and it left millions of Texans feeling like the leaders who represent them on both sides of the aisle cared more about making a political statement—or taking a vacation—than restoring their power and water.

It was hard to find a day last week when we weren’t collectively rolling our eyes or checking to see if the steam coming out of our ears was because of the cold or sheer frustration. We’re now entering the fallout, the period of evaluation and analysis that will determine whether Texans will suffer through more of the same two, five, 10 years from now, or if the people and organizations most responsible for this crisis have the courage to change and the will to do what’s needed. Because as much as we love the pure kindness and compassion that people and brands showed last week—like a Houston furniture store opening its doors to hundreds of people without power or a Leander H-E-B (there they go again) giving away groceries after its power went out—we’d prefer they didn’t have to happen at all.