Better #53

Kia ora legend,

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Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

Today I’m chatting with Lisa Glass, an absolute legend of an emergency communicator.

Lisa was a journalist before moving into communications, finding her niche in emergency management comms and PIM (public information management).

As someone who followed a similar path, I didn’t initially think much of the PIM world. It felt a bit … stale. Lots of processes (for good reason TBF), but also all quite sterile.

That changed when I read The Spinoff piece (featuring Lisa) on how a Civil Defence account became one of the most beloved pages on Facebook.

It was a real reminder that even in high-stakes, highly structured environments, there’s still room for empathy, humour, and personality - and that those qualities can be the thing that really helps makes your message land.

Today, Lisa and I get into the nuances of emergency comms (not to be confused with crisis comms, as she’s quick to point out), and what good looks like when the pressure is on.

If you ever have to do social or comms in an emergency, this interview is for you.

Enjoy.

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Firstly, Lisa, how have things changed in emergency comms over the last few years?

There’s definitely been a change. When I started in Civil Defence Emergency Management comms - which actually wasn’t that long ago, it was 2020 - I was the first specialist emergency comms person they’d had full-time. They absolutely had good comms support before that, but I was the first person doing it in a full-time role.

At the time, the style and tone of everything, especially warnings and emergency information, was very “3.7mm of precipitation from the northwest at approximately 4:27pm” vibes. And I thought, oh, this is very formal and important, so I must completely rethink my style so that I also sound very important and official, because we’re not mucking around here.

But you come to realise that’s not necessarily the only way, or the best way, to do it. Timing-wise it also coincided with 2020 and everything that happened then - with Covid accelerating changes in how people viewed official comms. So while I was thinking, “I’m not a natural fit for this style, but I need to bend myself to it”, it was also becoming apparent that maybe people didn’t just want to be told things in a very formal, data-heavy way. Maybe there was a different way we could connect.

Those things converged. And eventually, through having a very understanding boss - partly because social media wasn’t really his thing, and partly because he trusted me - I was able to say our approach would be a bit different. It wasn’t going to be silly or trivial, but it was going to be human. We were going to try to connect and be part of the community, more like your smart neighbour than your grumpy lecturing relative. That was the shift we took, and it sat well with our community, which is the most important thing.

Alarm bells can go off when people talk about balancing a personal, caring voice with maintaining authority in those spaces. How do you see that fit, and what does that balance look like?

There are a couple of things. First, you need to be coming from the right place. It has to come from connection and respect, not from “I’m trying to have fun here”. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun, but connection and respect have to be the foundation.

But also, when we say authority, what do we mean? In an emergency context, authority is having people do what you need them to do, trust that you’re doing the right thing, and believe you have their best interests at heart. So authority doesn’t mean ruling. It means gaining trust.

And if we want trust, how do we get it? Through connection. How do we connect? By meeting people where they are. So they’re not two different things.

Is some of that almost just transferring into digital spaces what you’d expect from people in real life?

Yes. And the funny thing is, despite my early impression of civil defence comms being very formal, the people actually doing the work are almost invariably delightful. They’re doing their job, but they’re not robotic or unfeeling. 

The masterclass that was your Cyclone Gabrielle comms - tone, language, empathy, sense of going through things together - describe how that came about.

Because Gabrielle was so big, people forget it came only about two weeks after the Auckland Anniversary floods. That response had been slammed - to some extent unfairly - but it had become a political football. So we knew anything we did in the comms space was going to be scrutinised, and any mistakes more visible.

So I thought: I’m not going to give them an opportunity to criticise us for gaps in communication. Because we knew Gabrielle was coming, we had a chance to get ahead of it. We weren’t going to wait until something happened and then tell people about it. We were going to fill the gaps where we could.

We could see how many people were online, how interested they were, how much they were sharing. There was clearly a strong appetite for information. So I could either wait until something happened and drip-feed it, or do what we used to call in journalism “process reporting”: here’s what we’re doing, what’s happening behind the scenes, and what’s being put in place in case something happens.

One of the big downsides of civil defence is that people don’t see us. They see police and other responders. But we’re often sitting in a room in a council building with no windows, and people can’t see us. So it was an opportunity to say: we’re here, we’re ready, we’re doing this. Once people started asking questions, it became obvious what they really needed was to know someone was there.

Which counts for so much, doesn’t it?

The trouble is - and the gift I had with Gabrielle - was that the start of it was a slow burn and we were set up early. Normally you’re flat out from the start. You’re busy, busy, busy, and the tempo of what you’re putting out externally can falter because you’re focused on everything else.

Sometimes you’re not pausing to think, actually, when was the last time we told people about XYZ? We’ve been ticking other boxes but haven’t thought about that. With Gabrielle, I had the luxury of a holding pattern at the beginning, so I could concentrate on that. That doesn’t normally happen.

One of the things I noticed was those small acts of care, which on social media you can do publicly and which get amplified.

Yes, although even in the years since Gabrielle, Facebook has declined both in use and in utility. Twitter was already getting ugly and X has obviously made that a whole lot worse. 

And with the loss of internet and comms Gabrielle also showed us that social might not even be an option. So you’re having to split your attention in lots of directions. Yes, social matters and we need to do it well. But it can’t be the only thing we’re doing.

Is it fair to say these high-pressure moments also offer a unique opportunity to build trust?

Yes, but the flip side is the stakes are higher. If you do someone a favour when they really need it, they value it more than when everything’s fine. Emergency response is the same. If we do a good job, it’s valued more highly than it would be in BAU. But if we let people down, that lands harder too.

That’s why I’m big on expectation management. It’s a slightly clunky phrase, but it matters. Be clear about what we are and aren’t doing and what people can expect. I try to set a pattern: a big update at 7am around breakfast time, then probably not much again until midday unless something dramatic happens.

It also gives people a small piece of structure when they often have very little. And if you break that pattern, the loss of trust is greater than it would otherwise be.

There are different stages of an emergency. How are you judging where people are at?

Partly you can feel it in the room, because the people in the room are running on adrenaline just like the community. You all get tired around the same time. Some of it is research into human stress responses, some observation, and some common sense.

At the start everyone’s focused: keep yourself safe, keep others safe, evacuate people, protect lives. Nothing else matters. But a couple of days in - especially in a longer response - people get tired. They think, okay, I’m alive, now I want to go home. Maybe their home is wrecked, or they can’t get back yet, or it’s technically livable but needs six months of repairs. Suddenly everything feels awful and too slow.

That may have nothing to do with how the response is run. It just happens. It’s biology and human nature.

So two things matter. One is giving the response team a heads-up that this is coming. The other is signalling it to the community too: hey, it’s day three, you’re probably going to be tired and grumpy, and so are your mates.

It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps people understand what’s happening to them.

As a leader in the emergency comms space, how are you looking after your team?

In training I try to be practical rather than clinical. This system is meant to help you. If it’s not helping you, change it. If roles aren’t working, adapt them. The goal matters more than rigidly following a template.

I also like matching people’s strengths to roles. It’s stressful enough already. If someone hates dealing with media and that can be avoided, let’s avoid it. If someone’s great at admin, put them where they’ll thrive.

And the hardest thing is stopping people burning themselves out in the first couple of shifts. Everyone wants to go hard at the start because it feels like the most important moment. But if they empty the tank too early, it gets ugly a few days in.

There’s always slightly more time than we think, isn’t there?

That’s true. One of the paradoxes of emergency response is that it’s the simplest thing you’ll ever do. It’s not easy, but it is simple in that you’re not juggling multiple conflicting objectives. At the start, you’re trying to protect lives and property.

If you keep pulling back to that, it helps. You might not have done the beautiful, polished job you wanted. But did you get out the information that protects lives and property? Yes? Then that matters.

The time between emergencies is shortening. How is that changing communication?

It does feel like we’re all a bit more jaded. There’s much less of the old “oh for God’s sake, another weather warning” reaction now. People also have clearer expectations of what they should get from us, which is fair. And if we don’t learn from past events, that will be held against us.

The problem is there’s always a lag. You do the after-action reviews and identify lessons, but you need time and resources to make those changes. When events keep coming and resources are thin, it starts to feel like a treadmill.

There are still big gaps we haven’t addressed. The obvious one is generative AI misinformation. We could already see during Gabrielle how rumours spread. Had those rumours been backed by convincing fake video or images, there’s no way we could have shut them down effectively.

Is there good best-practice guidance around that yet?

No. I think we need some kind of national buy-in for a verification system - some form of metadata stamp or public-good verification tool. Some way that if we publish something on an official channel, people can verify it is what we say it is.

Is it hard to keep engagement between events?

Yes, although I look at it slightly differently. What I care about most is that when people need information, they know where our channels are and how to get there.

It’s a bit like going away to uni and only calling your mum when you need something. As long as you’ve got mum’s number, you’re fine.

So yes, we have an important role in readiness and public education between events. But human nature is what it is. It’s hard to make that consistently engaging. So you do your best, but I don’t die in a ditch over it.

The power companies do this well, don’t they? They’ve trained people not to go to social for outage information, but to go straight to a web page and serve themselves.

Yes. And that gets to something I feel strongly about: websites have spent decades being treated like the ugly sister, but now they are the only guaranteed source of truth.

They’re the only place where you can reliably see the latest information in the right order rather than having it served up late by an algorithm.

Social still has an important role, but I’d like to see much better integration between web and social so the website regains prominence. If you can build a website people trust, that is gold.

Quick 6 with Lisa Glass…

1. Strategy or tactics?
It’s a cliche, but I do believe culture eats strategy for breakfast - authenticity and genuine intent are key, and subsidiary to that, your big picture strategy always has to be front and centre. So it’s: ‘Who are we?’ then it’s ‘What are we actually trying to do?’

2. Favourite platform?

Probably Insta, but from a public comms perspective, Facebook is still the go-to because of the groups/communities element. But I am hammering the drum for better emergency websites (and many CDEM groups are working on this). People’s needs are vastly different in an emergency, and lean (low bandwidth demand) emergency pages that meet those needs are increasingly critical - a background/standby site that can be switched on in a response makes a lot of sense to me.

3. Least favourite platform?
After W, before Y.

4. One public sector account to follow?
I’d like to send some love to my former colleagues at GeoNet - their funding is being reduced, but that service is a true national asset.
 
5. One non-public sector account to follow?
Its not a Kiwi account, but @tymaylay (aka motivasian) is awesome.

6. Something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?
Just because things are done a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way (with the caveat that sometimes it is, so don’t rush to judge either!).

Alrighty dear reader, that’s it for today.

If you have any questions or feedback, please hit reply on this email and send it my way. I love hearing from you.

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See you soon 👋