Q&A with Joe Diorio

 

 

 

Joe Diorio is the author of the new book Crisis Communications and the Art of Making Nothing Happen. He also has written the book A Few Words About Words. He lives in Southwest Florida.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Crisis Communications?

 

A: My niche is writing about communications skills. I was working on a new edition of my first book, A Few Words About Words, and was playing around with the idea of flyspecking copy.

 

Flyspecking is a term applied when someone takes a first (or even second, or third, or fourth) draft of something and does a deep dive into editing and refining it; literally examining and questioning every word and every piece of punctuation.

 

While doing that I was thinking about a flyspecking session I had with a coworker just two days after a mass shooting took place at the office building where we worked. (And, yes, I was one of the people the gunman shot at.) This was nearly 43 years ago, and we were making crisis communications plans and tactics as we went along.

 

It was the memory of how we didn’t really have a crisis communications plan that became the genesis of Crisis Communications and the Art of Making Nothing Happen. I wanted to tell the story of a crisis, how a plan is made and how it plays out. AND tell the story of what can happen to a business if it does not have a crisis plan.

 

What I didn’t want to do was write a “woe is me I was shot at” story. That isn’t me.

 

I fictionalized the mass shooting I was in. Partially because so much time has elapsed, and I didn’t want to unearth bad memories someone may have and because to tell a story about crisis communications planning and implementation you have to look at businesses and organizations today, not ones from 40-plus years ago.

 

I moved the timeline up to the year before the COVID-19 pandemic rather than leaving it in the 1980s. That made the story modern enough to be current but not letting the story angle of a pandemic and lockdowns become a part of the story.

 

In the end I produced a book that is useful to public relations professionals … especially if they are working with clients who are reluctant to engage in crisis planning. It also is helpful to news professionals in that it tells you what is going on behind the press conference.

 

The title of the book comes from the practice of public affairs management. It is often said the best public affairs managers make sure nothing happens. I took that as a part of the title. It’s interesting how many people who work in public relations and marketing communications understand the subtle message within the title.

Q: How much was the book based on your own experiences surviving a shooting?

 

A: Quite a bit to be honest. I was standing outside of a coworker’s office when the gunman began his rampage. I heard the gunshots, but I knew there was construction work underway on the lower floor of the building and just assumed I was hearing a nail gun.

 

It was my admin, Audrey, who came running down the hallway screaming for people to take cover that jarred me into the reality of the moment. I ducked just before he shot at me. I know because when I returned to the building the next day, I saw gunshot damage to the wall where I was standing.

 

I and several coworkers barricaded ourselves in a conference room and waited. There was a phone in the conference room and we eventually worked up the courage to call the police, who advised us to stay where we were until a S.W.A.T. could come and escort us safely out of the building.

 

I suspect it is harder to sit quietly in a room in this age of mobile phones. So in the book I played on fear to keep everyone in one place and off of their phones, framing the characters as too afraid to use their smart phones lest the shooter find out where they were.

 

In my case I remember we didn’t want to use the phone in the room very often for the same reason. We were convinced the shooter would see an operator’s console phone somewhere near the room where we hid, then recognize the number of the phone where we were (it would light up on the console) and know what office the call was coming from. It’s silly to think back on that now, but fear can make you do strange things.

 

And like the characters in the book, I went back to work after the S.W.A.T. team got me out of there. I teamed up with other IBM communications professionals. We were mostly preparing for the building to reopen. We did not consider the tsunami of press inquiries we inevitably received, prompting IBM’s corporate P.R. offices to create a crisis communications plan on the fly.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: For starters I went back and talked to people who were involved – there aren’t many of us left, considering this happened in 1982. I used archive news clips from The New York Times and The Washington Post to help refresh my own memory.

 

But to keep the story current I talked to police officers who offered me a more up-to-date take on how police departments handle active shooter situations. I also talked to crisis communications consultants who offered me a wealth of knowledge. Their generosity really helped make the book a reality.

 

I also tracked down the one radio reporter who actually talked via telephone to the shooter. Her recollections were terrific and led to the creation of a key character in the book, Tara Westover, the fictional local radio news reporter.

 

I had to spend a lot of time looking through news reports, mostly on YouTube, to see how mass shooting events are covered. I wanted to see what was good and what was not so good about news coverage. Impressively, I think news organizations – even the smallest ones with very lean budgets – do an excellent job of reporting a crisis.

 

I spent a lot of time trying to find the original criminal complaint against the IBM shooter, but that seems to have been lost to time.

 

The timeline of court proceedings does still exist and I was able to build a logical timeline for my fictional shooter from that, showing when he was arrested, arraigned in court, when he entered his initial and final plea (he pleaded guilty).

 

For me it was making sure a chapter in my life was truly over.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

 

A: The biggest takeaway is that a crisis plan covers more than what someone says after the crisis happens. It involves what they do.

 

IBM impressed me with how it handled medical expenses for employees; it simply paid the bills and didn’t make anyone go through the hassle of submitting insurance claim forms. The company also spent a fortune making sure the building was fully repaired and never looked like a shooting had taken place.

 

I also created a fictional company – a car dealership – that did no crisis planning and the business paid the price for that. When I worked in P.R. I had a client – a coffee filer manufacturer – that tried ignoring a congressional subpoena and insisted I get them off the hook.

 

The only reason this company’s president didn’t get himself arrested is that the congressional hearing – it was supposed to be a session about potential toxins in bleached paper products – was called off at the last minute.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am working on that new edition of A Few Words About Words, as well as a science fiction story framed around public relations. It sounds corny as I write it, but I do like the way the book is coming out. Again, I’m writing about communication skills. I just look for an entertaining way to do that.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Joe Diorio.