Re: Sandman Against the World?
OK, here is the copy from
http://www.psandman.com/gst2007.htm#guenter
for the FT-archive. AnneZ asked me to post it
and Peter doesn't mind to have it copied here.
The links to the other boards and blogs - you probably
know how to find them. Seems that FT doesn't want them.
As for the "bashing" , I appreciate that Peter didn't feel
offended and addressed the points.
Just don't be peeved and "bashing" is no problem ;-)
I think that risk communication
isn't good when no numbers for
probability estimates are given.
What do I think about the controversy in the pandemic prep community about my role and my integrity? <TABLE cellSpacing=2 borderColorDark=#666699 cellPadding=2 width="95%" align=center bgColor=white borderColorLight=#666699 border=1><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top width="16%">Name:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top width="84%">Guenter Stertenbrink</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width="16%">Job/field:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top width="84%">Math</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top>Date:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top>8 Feb 2007</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top>Location:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top>Germany</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top>Comment:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top>Your quote:
Pandemic is on the back burner for the majority of Americans, where it should be, but it’s not on the back burner of governments and companies.
was disturbing for many of us, who are trying to convince relatives and friends about the danger and get them to prepare for it. Please explain and elaborate a bit.
Also, it has been speculated that you could have a conflict of interest because you were paid by pharma companies and public organizations. In your articles and statements, how can we know that you don’t just reflect the opinion of those who pay you for it? How does it usually go, when you get a job to write/talk? Can you freely say what you think or are there directives? Do you maybe silently, subconsciously adapt your opinion anticipating what your client of the moment will prefer?
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width="16%" bgColor=white>
Peter responds:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top width="84%" bgColor=white>
Anita Manning of
USA Today interviewed me for
a story that appeared on February 1 under the headline, “The great flu pandemic: Despite dire warnings, public interest has waned.” She used two snippets from her conversation with me, as follows:
“The risk of pandemic had its moment in the sun, where the public was interested, and people were talking about it in grocery lines,” risk-communications expert Peter Sandman says. “Then people got used to it, and interest settled into the new normal.” .... Pandemic is “on the back burner for the majority of Americans, where it should be,” Sandman says, but “it’s not on the back burner of governments and companies.”
The point I had tried to make in the interview was that convincing people to get serious about a risk that’s new to them is like climbing a whole range of mountains. You make some progress climbing the first mountain in the range. Then people settle into a valley of higher concern than before but lower than that first peak – the New Normal. Then you climb another mountain and make further progress. Then they settle into another valley, higher than the earlier one. Then you climb some more.
Precaution advocacy is a slog – a marathon, not a sprint, to change metaphors. It’s important to focus on teachable moments, when something happens (or you manage to make something happen) that makes people more-than-usually interested in hearing about the risk. In between the teachable moments, it’s important not to get too irritated at yourself or your audience for the periodic lapses in progress. And in between the teachable moments it’s also important to focus on consolidating prior gains – pushing to get them institutionalized in the policies of governments and companies.
That’s what I said, or tried to say. But the snippets came out sounding like I was saying that it’s not a problem that most people aren’t prepared yet for a pandemic. Some of those in the pandemic prep community, who are working so hard to spread the word about preparedness, felt betrayed.
The resulting controversy turned up on two pandemic-related websites. The
debate on Flu Wiki is very extensive, with comments from many perspectives. An even longer and more consistently hostile discussion appears on a blog called “Pandemic Flu Information.”
That discussion was cross-posted onto a third flu preparedness site called PlanForPandemic.com. On the
third site, by the way, a poster misattributes to me a statement written about me in a 1999 article in a journal called
PR Watch. Here’s the statement, with the poster’s parenthetical additions:
“To engage activists (sheeple), soothe them, and ultimately get them to accept whatever it is the giant corporation or institution (FED) has done or intends to do.”
That’s not, as the poster said it was, “what he does for a living from his own description.” But nonetheless, the previous
PR Watch criticism of my corporate consulting is worth reading. You can find the links on this site at the very bottom of "
Peter Sandman in the News."
One of the issues that keeps appearing on these three threads is the one you raise: whether I have a conflict of interest because I do a lot of work for corporations and for governments.
I earn my living chiefly as a consultant. Every consultant faces endless conflicts between the urge to say what the client wants to hear and the obligation to say what the consultant thinks the client needs to hear. I’m not immune to this problem, but I think I face it less than most consultants, because my reputation is as an idiosyncratic loose cannon who says exactly what he pleases. Most clients come to me knowing that that’s what they’ll get. And when word gets around that a client has fired me because management didn’t like what it was hearing, that’s a kind of advertising. Over time, the organizations that want to be challenged find the consultants who are willing to challenge them, while the organizations that want to be coddled find the consultants who are willing to coddle them. I think I’m known as one of the former.
But even so, you’re certainly right that the better I get to know a client, the more vulnerable I am to starting to think like the client. It’s much more subtle and unconscious than deciding to say what the client wants to hear; it’s starting to see things the way the client does. I think I lose a lot of my value as a consultant when that happens, so I work hard to prevent it. But it does happen. The key signal that it’s happening is when I catch myself saying “we” instead of “you.” My normal frame as a consultant is what you (the client) are saying to us (the public). If I start talking about what we (the client) are saying to them (the public), I know I’ve let myself get coopted.
The conflict of interest problem is much, much tougher for paid spokespeople. I am not a spokesperson. I talk TO my clients, not FOR my clients. Spokespeople do both. When their advice on what the client should say isn’t taken, they have to say what the client decided instead – or quit. I respect people who walk this tightrope, as my clients’ communications professionals inevitably must. But I don’t like doing it, and I don’t think I’m good at it. So I invariably refuse to speak on my clients’ behalf ... ever.
The last time I remember working as a spokesperson was in the early 1980s, when I took a sabbatical from my university job to do volunteer communications work for the nuclear weapons freeze campaign. A decision was made to oppose the introduction of cruise missiles into Europe on the grounds that cruise missiles would make a freeze impossible. I thought this was neither true nor wise to say (after all, we weren’t about to stop working for a freeze if we lost the battle over cruise missiles). I said so internally, lost, and ended up publicly voicing an opinion I didn’t share. I haven’t been somebody else’s spokesperson since.
I do speak publicly on risk communication aspects of a wide range of issues. (I didn’t have to talk to Anita Manning; I wanted to.) But I am never speaking on behalf of anybody but myself.
Occasionally one of my clients thinks
that is a conflict of interest. How can I take their money to advise them on how to address a controversy, clients sometimes ask, and then go give a speech or talk to a reporter or write a website column about the controversy?
The distinction I make here seems straightforward to me, though sometimes not to the client. People who hire me are buying access to my opinions – but not exclusive access. While of course I keep confidential information confidential, what the client does in public is fair game. I advise the client on what I think the client should say and do. And I reserve the right to tell others what I think of what the client actually said and did.
Thus I have worked for pharmaceutical companies and criticized (and praised) pharmaceutical companies; I have worked for the CDC and criticized (and praised) the CDC; I have worked for activist groups and criticized (and praised) activist groups. I don’t ever want a prospective client to imagine that hiring me is a way of guaranteeing that I won’t bite the hand that feeds. My clients know I will bite the hand that feeds, and often do.
Of course there’s no way for others to know whether I do or not, unless they listen to my speeches or read my writing. A lot of people understandably assume that I don’t bite the hand that feeds – that someone who earns his living as a consultant shouldn’t be trusted as an “independent” commentator. That’s a pretty reasonable starting position. So when I say something that people disagree with, it’s not surprising that they sometimes think I said it because I have a client that wanted me to.
On pandemic preparedness in particular, my clients have mostly been government agencies – HHS and CDC at the federal level; a score or so of states, counties, and cities; the World Health Organization; and health and emergency preparedness agencies in Canada, Singapore, and elsewhere. I’ve also worked for a few companies seeking help on their pandemic plans and their pre-pandemic employee communications. And I’ve worked for a few academic institutions with a focus on the issue, particularly the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I also write extensively about pandemic preparedness for no client at all; for a list of pandemic articles on this website, see my “
Pandemic Flu and Other Infectious Diseases Index.”
The flu blog posters criticizing me now are in the camp that believes most of these organizations (especially HHS, CDC, and WHO) are trying to tamp down public pandemic concern in the service of corporate capitalism. My
USA Today blooper was easily interpreted as yet another example of the ways “TPTB” (the powers that be) conspire to keep people apathetic. There is another camp, also well-represented on the Web, that believes HHS, CDC, WHO, and their ilk are conspiring to keep people terrified, also in the service of corporate capitalism. This group has criticized me for helping my clients do that. See for example Sherri Tenpenny’s “
Throw Out the Playbook: A New Plan Arrives,” originally published in September 2005.
Two other conflict-of-interest issues are worth mentioning.
The first is the conflict between keeping a client’s secrets and telling the world. I obey confidentiality agreements; I keep my clients’ confidences even without a legal agreement. I have always known that someday a client may tell me something so important that I feel a moral obligation to violate confidentiality and blow the whistle. In my ethical judgment, confidentiality trumps little secrets, and serious risks to public health trump confidentiality. But this is a genuine conflict of interest, because breaking confidentiality would almost inevitably end my career as a consultant. Like doctors and attorneys, consultants have a strong incentive to decide that it’s ethically okay to keep the client’s secret – since the alternative is professional ruin.
One of the client secrets consultants have to keep is what the consultant advised the client. I am free to criticize a client’s public behavior, but I’m not generally free to say “I told them not to do that!” Once in a long while my advice to a client is revealed by others. In late 2005, I was hired by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) after the company was implicated in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. I advised contrition. AWB rejected my advice, and I kept my mouth shut. Ultimately a legal proceeding in Australia compelled the company to reveal the details of what I advised and how management responded. If you’re interested, read
a story from
The Age of August 16, 2006, headlined “Sorry is the hardest word for AWB.”
Although I had nothing to do with its becoming public knowledge, the fact that my advice to AWB did become public knowledge – to the further embarrassment of the company – decimated my consulting clientele in Australia. Who wants to hire a consultant if you’re liable to get creamed for deciding not to take his advice?
Bottom line: I know things about my clients (including my pandemic preparedness clients) that others would like to know. My judgment that it is ethically okay to keep my clients’ secrets is inevitably influenced by my self-interest in keeping my clients. If I ever hear a client secret that poses an imminent threat to public health, I hope I’ll have the integrity to reveal it (if I can’t persuade the client to reveal it) and retire.
The final conflict-of-interest issue is working for both sides. I don’t work for both sides at the same time in the same place on the same specific controversy. But I do work for organizations that are on opposite sides more generally. For example, I work for environmental groups that are advocating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and for oil companies and electric utilities that are among the principal emitters. My opinions don’t change depending on who’s asking. The principles of risk communication are the principles of risk communication. But even so, isn’t this a conflict of interest?
My corporate clients rarely think it is. They require me to keep their secrets, and they understand that I won’t reveal the other guy’s secrets to them – but they generally think it adds to my value that I have experience working on all sides of a controversy. Activists are likelier to decide they don’t want advice from someone who’s willing to work for the enemy. I’m not sure they see this as a conflict of interest, exactly. They just prefer getting their advice from dedicated supporters, not paid professionals. In general, I am a paid professional. Ironically – considering the criticisms from some writers on the flu blogs – pandemic preparedness is a partial exception. It is a personal cause both for me and for my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. Most of our pandemic work is
pro bono or very low-budget.
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width="16%" bgColor=white>
Addendum:</TD><TD vAlign=top bgColor=#666699></TD><TD vAlign=top width="84%" bgColor=white>There is some
additional dialogue on the topics discussed in this Guestbook entry.</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<CENTER>
</CENTER>
ffice
></o
