Watch out: Ineffective issues management may be a toll gate to crisis!

Issues management is one of the important aspects of the communication and public relations field. Experts argue that it plays a crucial role and has an influence on reputation management. However, to date, not all companies consider issues management as vital as other activities within the corporate communications function. For instance, when it comes to budget, issues management still tends to be less prioritized than other company’s communications efforts, such as media relations and or PR campaigns. This is how issues management is usually perceived by some organizations. 

Even when many companies already pay attention to issues management and place sufficient resources for it, it is still often too organization-centric. This means that the issues management usually only focuses on gathering information that is directly related to the organization. For example, the issues management only looks closely at how the company or its brand and its competitors are mentioned and perceived by the media and public, whether the articles about them have positive, neutral, or negative tonality. This is not wrong but shows that the organization has not utilized issue management optimally.  

We need to look at the definition of issues management to fully grasp its strategic function for an organization. Reputation Management experts Doorley and Garcia define issues management as a corporate process that helps organizations identify challenges that come from internal and external of the business environment and mobilizes corporate resources to help protect the company from the harm to reputation, operations, and financial condition that the issues may provoke. It is also emphasized that organizations which engage in effective issues management will be able to understand potential threats and prevent them from becoming a crisis.

As an example, some companies with strategic issues management functions were already fully aware of the potential disruptions that COVID-19 might bring to their business and operations even before it was declared as a global pandemic. Early enough those companies were ready that raw materials delivery and production process might be interrupted so they had to take special measures accordingly. Hence, stakeholders and customers were well informed and there was no unnecessary turmoil.

However, the above formula for crisis avoidance also works in reverse. This means that an organization with ineffective issues management is in fact paving its way to crisis. This may sound funny, but it is no joke when our company has to deal with a crisis because it cannot handle an already known potential issue. Volkswagen’s (VW) emission scandal is a good example of this. The issue was already identified in 2013 when the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) and West Virginia University conducted research on the discrepancies of emission levels. VW had actually been fairly warned, but it did not take any action (please read my other opinion piece about this here). The failure of managing and responding to an identified issue quickly has brought about the company's biggest scandal in its more than 80-year history. The scandal was first blown in 2015 and still causes legal consequences until now. This shows the cost will be too expensive for the company to fix the damages caused by ineffective issues management.

I believe many other examples can showcase how paramount issues management to an organization, particularly in preventing crisis. The quote from US politician Kissinger may be the best to illustrate this: “an issue ignored is a crisis ensured”. As Doorley and Garcia also suggested above issues management is beyond media monitoring activity. Enlightened companies will usually apply issues management as a proactive effort to prevent a crisis and hence have a systematic issues management function in place. They will establish issues management planning process where each issue, not only the mention of company and competitor’s names, will be identified, prioritized, and analyzed to see its significance to the organization, whether it has the potential to become a crisis. In many cases, they take issues management to a higher level, where they use it to also seek opportunities, which may come from the government or industry or others, that may be beneficial to their organizations.