by Bob Burton
Peter Sandman, an affable "risk communication" consultant from Massachusetts, is evangelical about his medicine for unpopular companies and industries--deal directly with your harshest critics, make concessions, and maybe even let them "win."
This may seem like unusual advice, but some of the largest companies in the world view Sandman as a crisis management expert and pay big bucks--between $650 and $1,200 per hour--for his analysis.
Sandman has been called in to rescue battered corporate reputations in cases ranging from Shell's bloody debacle in Nigeria to the dumping of the Brent Spar oil platform in Europe. His advice has helped companies combat public opposition to genetically engineered food, and has been used by the chemical industry to clean up its image following the disaster at Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal, India, which killed thousands of people and injured tens of thousands more.
In style and perhaps even in substance, Sandman defies many PR industry stereotypes. Formerly a Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers University, he works from a small office in Newton, Massachusetts. In an industry dominated by big companies, he adamantly refuses to let his one-person company get any bigger. He is scathingly critical of manipulative PR techniques and, unlike typical PR people, talks candidly about his strategies and tactics.
Sandman is a prolific writer and describes himself as a "moderate" environmentalist who is on retainer to the Environmental Defense Fund (see article in this issue). His writings on risk communication have been used to develop software designed to assist companies dealing with activist groups. He lobbies non-government organizations (NGOs) to "engage" with his corporate clients, gently wooing "moderate" groups and isolating those that eschew "engagement."
Scratch the surface of his "moderate" approach, however, and you can find attitudes that are surprisingly similar to the rationalizations of conventional spin doctors.
Take, for example, the case of Shell's collaboration with the military dictatorship in Nigeria. Military repression aimed at the Ogoni people has helped facilitate Shell's extraction of natural gas from Ogoni lands. When playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa became a leader for the Ogoni people, the dictatorship arrested him. Following a "trial" before a military tribunal, Saro-Wiwa and seven other Ogoni activists were executed by hanging in 1995.
Sandman sighs, however, when asked if Shell deserved the international condemnation which it received followed the killings. "Oh boy, is that hard," he says. "I think the outrage was absolutely legitimate. I also think that Shell had nothing it could have done."
Death to Common Sense
While acknowledging the Ogoni grievances as "largely justified," Sandman characterizes Saro-Wiwa as the "Tom Paine" of the Ogoni and describes their campaign as an armed rebellion. "Though Saro-Wiwa was not armed, . . . he was their pamphleteer," he says. "Some of the people whom he was executed with were soldiers in this rebellion."
Setting aside the question of whether people like Thomas Paine deserve to be murdered, the facts themselves in Sandman's rationalization are strongly disputed by Andy Rowell, a British-based freelance writer who has monitored Shell's activities since 1992.
"Sandman's views are typical of a corporate spin doctor relying on information from a client. They bear no relation to the truth about the events which actually occurred in Nigeria," says Rowell, who is the author of numerous reports and articles on Shell in Nigeria as well as the book Green Backlash (Routledge, 1996).
"Sandman's story is not what happened, but what Shell wants us to believe happened," Rowell says. "It is a virtual reality, which has been worked out in PR offices in Europe. Fiction has become fact, with Sandman trying to rebuild Shell's tarnished reputation using Shell's hollow lies."
According to Rowell, "The Ogoni struggle was a non-violent struggle for ecological and social justice. It was not an armed rebellion. All they were demanding was an end to the double standards of the oil industry that had devastated their environment and a greater share of the oil wealth that was drilled from under their land. The Ogoni suffered a brutal backlash. Over 2,000 were killed, 30,000 made homeless, and countless others were raped and tortured by the Nigerian military, which received logistical and financial support from Shell," he said.
Two Wrongs Make a Risk
As the Nigeria example suggests, Sandman tends to take at face value what he is told by his clients, but he is not totally uncritical. He is a complex individual who doesn't fit neatly into any slot. Most PR people are guarded in their words, but Sandman is expansive. Ask a straight question, and more often than not you'll get a frank answer rather than the usual PR spin.
Sandman has invented a formula for risk communications that is now widely quoted within the PR industry. "Risk," he says, "equals hazard plus outrage."
For most people, of course, "risk" and "hazard" are virtually synonyms, but Sandman's formula is concerned with corporate risk. It recognizes that beyond liabilities associated with a hazard itself, a company's bottom line and its reputation are affected by the way the public reacts to that risk.
Underpinning this analysis is Sandman's opinion that, on many issues, the public inaccurately perceives the level of risk. Where the public and the "experts" disagree, he thinks the experts are usually right.
"The most usual situation," he says, is that "the company isn't doing a lot of damage, but is acting like a jerk: unresponsive, contemptuous, even dishonest. The company thinks that because it isn't doing a lot of damage, it is entitled to act like a jerk. The public thinks that because the company is acting like a jerk, it must be doing a lot of damage."
This analysis suggests that companies, rather than focusing on real hazards or harm to public, should focus their public relations attention on perceptions of process. Does the public think the company is "responsive" or "unresponsive"? Is it "honest" or "lying"? Do decisions that affect the community seem "voluntary" or "coerced"? Is the company seen as doing something "natural" or "industrial"? "Familiar" vs. "exotic"? "Fair" vs. "unfair"?
Answer these questions, Sandman says, and you are well on your way to managing public outrage. In order to stop seeming like jerks, companies should adopt a posture of apologetic humility in its public communications. "Acknowledge your prior misbehavior," he advises.
Honesty has certain practical limitations, however. "I don't chiefly mean things you have done that nobody knows you have done and when we find out you will go to jail," he adds. "If there are any of these, I urge you to seek legal counsel before you seek communication counsel. I'm talking about negative things on the public record. . . . Should you keep talking about them or is it enough that you have revealed them once? The argument I want to make is that you should keep talking about them incessantly. You should wallow in them."
Similar reasoning explains Sandman's opposition to other traditional PR techniques. "Omissions, distortions, and spin control damage credibility nearly as much as outright lies" he says. "I think there is a very good case to be made that PR, as it is normally practiced, is a regressive force, because it's people going out there telling various publics why the company is right," he says.
Sandman also dismisses some "third party techniques" used by many PR firms of countering community groups by covertly funding or cultivating arms-length scientists and front groups who mouth their client's position. "Funding front groups and hiding the funding is both dishonorable and stupid," he says, although "I see little unethical about funding such groups openly--though it is only occasionally useful."
My Way or the Middle Way
Sandman's niche in the PR world is persuading corporations and their critics to "engage" with each other. Through humility and concessions, he argues, companies can "open communications channels," forcing stubborn activists to moderate their position or be marginalized. This strategy aims at what he refers to as "outsourcing trust"--rebuilding tarnished corporate credibility by involving activist groups in corporate decision making.
"If you have control, share it--with community advisory panels, third party audits and through negotiation with activists," he advises. Where industries such as chemical plants pose a significant risk to communities, he argues that opposition to the plant can be defused if companies "ask for permission; make the risk more voluntary, even if you can't make it completely voluntary."
For an example of what this might mean in practice, Sandman recalls the advice he gave to Shell in 1995 when it faced widespread protest, spearheaded by Greenpeace, against the sea dumping of the disused Brent Spar oil rig. He argues that Shell should have said something along these lines:
"We think the platform can be safely disposed of at sea, but since that is by far the least expensive option, our judgment that it is sufficiently safe is obviously suspect. . . . We therefore propose to dedicate the cost of land disposal to environmental protection, and leave it in the hands of environmental NGOs whether the entire sum must be spent disposing of the Brent Spar, or some can safely be reallocated to other environmental priorities of their choosing."
In this case, Shell decided not to accept Sandman's advice. In the short run, it would have cost more money, but he argues that it would have paid off in the long run by buying credibility for whatever disposal method the NGOs selected. "This is indeed a way of getting external groups to face hard choices, and of out-sourcing controversial decisions that would have little credibility if made within the company," Sandman says.
The payoff would have come in the future, Sandman argues. When Shell wanted to dispose of other disused oil platforms, it would be able to use the activists' preferred disposal method, avoiding future debates.
Strange Bedfellows
As this example illustrates, Sandman's approach does not fit easily within stereotypical notions about what corporations and PR people do. In fact, he sees himself an agent of progressive change through opening companies up to moderate community input. With liberal credentials and disarming frankness, he has become an important lobbyist for persuading some groups that they can achieve more by working with corporations than against them.
"Activists and others must notice that companies have changed and reward them for changing," he argues. "Activists who want progress have to reward progress."
"Activists who want progress
have to reward progress. . . .
I certainly remember
that I became a feminist
in order to get laid.
The women I found attractive
liked feminist men.
So I thought, 'Well, I know
I can do that,' and you know,
it worked on them
and it worked on me."
--Peter Sandman
This can be a seductive appeal, and in fact Sandman explicitly uses the idea of seduction in defending its merits. "Greenwashing is real and common," he concedes, but argues that activists should give companies the benefit of the doubt anyway, citing one of the mottoes of Alcoholics Anonymous: "Fake it till you make it."
"I certainly remember," he says, "that I became a feminist in order to get laid. The women I found attractive liked feminist men. So I thought, 'Well, I know I can do that,' and you know, it worked on them and it worked on me. It changed who I was and what my values were."
Before activists start climbing into bed with corporations, however, they should recognize that there are serious risks involved. If Shell had heeded Sandman's advice over the Brent Spar oil rig, for example, the result might have produced a divisive controversy within the environmental movement. Sandman's approach is in fact specifically aimed at splitting moderates off from radicals--the age-old strategy of "divide and conquer."
An example where Shell actually drew on Sandman's approach came when activists opposed the company's plan to develop the Camisea gas project in the Peruvian rainforest.
Shell knew Camisea was going to be controversial. A decade earlier, Shell's operations in the region had brought western diseases that killed half of the members of a local tribe, the Nahua, which had no previous contact with outsiders and therefore no immune-system resistance to outside diseases.
Before pushing ahead with Camisea, therefore, Shell opted for dialogue with NGOs, inviting some 90 interested groups or "stakeholders" to a series of workshops in Lima, Washington and London.
"Leopards do not suddenly change their spots" argues Andy Rowell, "Here was a company that had an appalling environmental reputation in Nigeria. It wanted to justify to the world that it could operate in one of the world's most culturally and ecologically sensitive rainforests. They just had to think of an acceptable way to do it."
The agenda of the workshops was directed not to whether the project should go ahead, but how it should go ahead. "The whole process divided different groups on whether to take part in the Shell initiative. It was a classic divide and rule tactic, and it worked," Rowell says.
"Time was very limited, the processes inadequate and at no point was the company willing seriously to consider the view that it should not be there at all," observed Nick Mayhew, the director of a British research organisation called Oikos.
Despite Shell's use of progressive language to describe its plans, the project also drew criticism from the Rainforest Action Network and Project Underground, which published a joint report concluding that the Camisea project would disrupt a "a remote, pristine rainforest region inhabited by vulnerable indigenous populations. As such, it is one of the largest environmental and cultural threats facing the Peruvian Amazon today."
After the initial appraisal phase, Shell pulled out of the project, citing disagreements with the Peruvian Government over infrastructure and arguing that full-scale development was uneconomic.
According to Sandman, however, the moral of the story is that Shell's engagement with activists actually recruited some groups into lobbying the Peruvian government on behalf of Shell.
"NGOs protested and went to the government," he recalled approvingly. "They said, 'Shell looks like it's going to do the right thing and do it in a way that both the environment and indigenous people wind up better, not worse off. We are terribly afraid that ten years later somebody else will do it terribly. Can't you reconsider not doing it?' "
"Engagement" had succeeded in persuading some groups to buy into a plan that would have further eroded the forests and people of the Amazon.
In October 1998, Peter Sandman was the keynote speaker at an environmental workshop sponsored by the Australian mining industry. With characteristic candor, he told industry representatives that they will be lucky to get the public to think of them as a "caged beast." (photo by Bob Burton)
