The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or client — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

Once something goes wrong, it’s easy to criticize the message a company uses to respond. But it’s much harder to figure out what they should have said instead. In this episode of Hearsay, Michael Maslansky, Lee Carter, and Will Howard dive into the wrongs, the rights, and how Boeing’s language will matter in the weeks and months ahead.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

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maslansky + partners Twitter

TRANSCRIPT BELOW

HearSay Language Moments

Michael Maslansky:

Hi, everyone, this is Michael. Before we dive into this episode, I just wanted to let you know that we originally recorded this on January 16th shortly after a door plug blew out on an Alaska Airline 737 max nine from Boeing in the weeks since Boeing has had multiple additional issues. Most recently, a cracked windshield on another plane. Nothing that’s happened has changed our perspective about what we talk about in the episode and if anything, they make them more true. But if you’ve been following the ongoing crisis, we wanted to explain why you don’t hear any of the subsequent safety snafus mentioned. Hope you enjoy the show.

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Michael Maslansky: 

They said, what? Welcome to HearSay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this Hear Say. I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky and Partners and author of The Language of Trust. 

Lee Carter:

I’m Lee Carter, president and partner at Maslansky and Partners and author of Persuasion. Looking forward to this conversation today. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, and we have with us our colleague Will Howard, recently promoted to senior vice president, Will Howard. Welcome, Will. 

Will Howard:

Sounds good when you say it that way. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Michael Maslansky:

So what we are going to talk about today is the latest, because it’s not the first, the latest challenge facing Boeing Airlines that stemmed from a door sized section of a 737 Max 9 fuselage exploding at 16,000 feet over Portland, Oregon. And how Boeing and how Alaska Airlines have responded to that. And so let’s dig in. And I will just say, as we jump into this, one of the things that I see when you watch TV or read the news about crisis response is that it is incredibly easy to criticize what companies do in these kinds of situations, and that from an external perspective, take a step back and understand the dynamics that are at play and what needle they are trying to thread, then it’s very easy to point out what they did wrong, what they could have done better. And so we’re going to try and break that down a little bit and talk about what’s going on inside the organization. We didn’t work on this, but we’re going to talk about, you know, what we think is probably going on and how that makes it harder. And then what do you do in those circumstances? So first of all, how do you think they did Boeing and Alaska Airlines from your perspective, and then we’ll talk about why we think that. So let’s focus on Boeing first. All of a sudden, you get this horrible notification from Alaska Airlines or from air traffic controller, wherever it comes from, that there’s been a massive failure on a plane, on a Max 9 jet, Boeing gets this news. CEO calls a meeting of all the most important people on their leadership team or operating committee and says, okay, what do we do? 

Lee Carter:

You think about who’s on that distribution list that gets that email. You’ve got probably their general counsel who’s got a whole lot of weight. You’ve got CFO, you’ve got the head of marketing, the head of comms. You’ve got all of these senior executives who’ve got very different perspectives on what they should do. You’ve got the head of operations. You’ve probably got somebody in engineering and you’ve got everybody who’s trying to figure out either how to make sure that it’s not their fault or what went wrong right away so that they can address it but it’s a it’s a whole bunch of conflicting interests in a room right away.

Will Howard:

Yeah. I do think having been in rooms like that, it’s not worth, it’s worth reiterating first, probably everyone in that call has comes to the table with the same emotional reaction, which is that they feel terrible that this happened. It’s a disaster. They want to make it right. No one’s proud to be part of something like that happened. Their heart is probably their collective heart and spirit is probably in the right place. But their individual interests are often also probably aligned with the department that they’re in or the particular area that they’re involved with. So for example, you take someone operational or engineering, they are under a massive pressure to figure out what happened and why this happened. And they’re going to be extremely reluctant to allow anyone at the company to say or suggest anything in the vein of what might have happened or why it might want to have happened. So immediately you’ve got a guard rail there which is that we want to say something, but we don’t know what happened. And we cannot suggest that we do. And there’s a real risk if we. Misidentify or say something that’s not actually what happened before we know. And something like this, it could be weeks before they know months before they know exactly what happened and how it. 

Lee Carter: 

You’re so right about that as this amount of precision that they’re going to absolutely insist on in every communication that goes out to make sure that it’s not overstated or understated but exactly stated 

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely. So that’s engineers, then take the general counsel. So I’m a former lawyer. I take particular pleasure in commenting on how other lawyers behave. And, you know, lawyers have a job to do, which is to minimize risk for their companies. And very often the starting point for lawyers is to say, how do we say as little as possible because we don’t want people to be able to twist it around and hold it against us. And so they are often advocates of saying less rather than more and believers in this idea that you can’t do damage to your case if you don’t say anything, which I fundamentally disagree with, but that is often their role that they are playing in the room. Who else is in there? 

Lee Carter:

Communicators and the communicators have likely been working on Boeing’s corporate reputation for quite some time because this is not the first instance that Boeing has had over the last several years this is one of many and so they probably have a playbook and a strategy and they want everyone to be really vocal and they’ve got one executives to be out front saying right away so that they’re on top of it 

Will Howard:

You’ve got the CFO and the financial kind of investment affairs department of communications who’s thinking about what the street is thinking, which is, what does this mean for the business? And what you want the street to hear is that everything’s fine, right? That we’re going to be okay that this isn’t a broader issue, right? They’re probably in a minimized gear, a slightly different version of the minimized gear over than the lawyers where they want to make it seem like they’re going to bounce back. This isn’t a reason for investors to panic. 

Michael Maslansky:

And how much is the fix going to cost? 

Will Howard:

And how much is the fix going to cost? How much is it going to set us back? Are we going to be redoing these planes? How much are we actually going to be spending here? And then just from a communications aside, you know, they want to spend what it takes to be safe, but their bias is always going to be. In some way to protect the bottom line in the same way and the same where possible. 

Michael Maslansky:

And then there’s the CEO. And while this is personal for everyone, it’s probably more personal for the CEO. It feels like a failure of the company is a personal failure. And while everybody wants to go out and protect the company, there’s probably no one who feels the need personally and emotionally to protect the company more than the CEO, right? 

Will Howard:

You think about what the employees are going through. Every single Boeing person at a cocktail party has to introduce themselves as working at Boeing. And immediately they’re on the defensive justifying their job and the work that they do. They have this ghost hanging over it. That’s gonna make people defensive. That’s gonna make people emotional. It might make people lose some pride and excitement in the work that they’re doing and they kind of go in the other direction. And you think about amplifying that to tenfold for the CEO who instead of getting beat up at the cocktail party, he has to go get beat up on the news in front of America.

Lee Carter:

–And with his board. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, so this is hard, right? You’re in there, we’re now in the room, we gotta figure out what to say and what to do. And I think what often happens is you end up with something that the engineer says we don’t know what happened yet, so it takes out some of the details. The lawyer says, don’t apologize, don’t say anything that can be held back as responsibility. And so… It sounds like a cold statement. The CFO says, don’t commit resources that we don’t know that we need to commit. And so it feels like maybe they aren’t going to spend what it needs, what is required to fix something. And the CEO maybe is emotional, maybe doesn’t think that it was anything that, um, that was their fault or that could have been avoided that things happen. And so you end up often with an initial reaction from organizations that doesn’t feel right to the external audiences, I would argue because it’s not written for the external audiences. It’s often written to satisfy the perspectives of the people inside. 

Lee Carter:

and you’ve got to also remember at this point to there’s some question whether or not is this Boeing’s fault or is this Alaska Airlines fault they want to see that so they want to know how much distance they can put between themselves and there’s an instinct to want to be able to put distance there 

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely. So how’d they do? 

Will Howard:

So for my money, given that this is hard and given the stakes, I think what I’ve seen from their CEO, talking about Boeing specifically so far, has been pretty good. Like, I don’t know if anyone listening has had a chance to watch the conference that he gave, the all hands safety briefing that he did internally. And he was fairly recently on CNBC, and I think he’s been doing a bit of a media junket. The thing that I think that’s jumped out to me the most is where he starts every single time, which is with the picture, the picture of the hole. He tells people to look at it. He tells people he looked at it. He tells people that his first thought was the empty seats next to it and who could have been there and how it could have been his kids. I think they’re recognizing the power of the symbol of that hole in a plane the power of people to see themselves in that seat and how emotional this is. And they are starting from a this is unacceptable. This is an emotional moment, which is the right place to start. 

Michael Maslansky:

But that’s a huge decision to make, right? To say, do you show the whole? Do you not show any visuals? Do you talk about it? Do you not? Do you confront what is arguably on the minds of everyone who’s read any news story about it? Or do you try and create a different reality based on the message that you wanna communicate? 

Lee Carter:

I think it was a really brave and bold decision that they made because I, we’ve been in the room a lot of times where people are afraid that that’s the image that’s going to get repeated. We don’t want to repeat it over and over and over again. We don’t want to make it worse. So let’s not repeat anything that comes out of our mouth that is going to make things worse. But what often happens when you resist the urge to acknowledge it is that you seem like you’re completely out of touch and don’t understand the magnitude of the problem. So I think what that decision did in that moment was show us that this CEO gets the magnitude of the problem, that this is personal for him, that he truly understands it and is taking it that seriously. And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes we see people make in crisis comms is that they don’t seem to get their arms around how big of a deal this is to everybody else. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. 

Will Howard:

They’re also doing something that I think is important, which the kind of the second thing out of his mouth every time he’s talking about Partners and giving credit to partners. So he praises the heroics of the crew every time Instead of seeking that distantly about is this Alaska Airlines’ fault? Is it our fault? He immediately says There was incredible what they did to land the plane to bring it back to us. They should never have to be in that situation It’s our job to make sure that they’re not right, he’s giving credit there. And then he immediately talks about embracing the oversight and he’s actually praises the FAA team that they’re working with saying that they’re all experts, they’re gonna get us to a great answer, we are eager to bring them in to make this better, right? So he’s reaching outwards, he’s welcoming the accountability, he’s praising the partners, which I think is also sometimes hard to bite the bullet and do. 

Michael Maslansky:

So he does a good job of kind of pointing out what’s on the minds of everybody in the audience. He does a good job of talking about the other stakeholders or the other players that have been involved and giving them credit instead of trying to take credit. If you’re listening and you’re thinking about getting on a Boeing plane, what’s he doing for you?  

Lee Carter:

So this is where I think we all have slightly different opinions, but I have a little bugaboo about something that’s happening here. And for me, this term door plug really bothers me. And let me explain to you why. Because they explain to you what happens, and there’s this thing called a door plug. And to me, without looking at the pictures of what a door plug is, without doing a whole lot of research, which later became explained to me. I’m picturing that this happened because of a very tiny piece of equipment that somehow went wrong. A little plug that somehow defaulted in the middle of a flight and it like made the door go flying off and it’s horrifying. So to me it seems like something so small could be so big and the correction in the language doesn’t seem to help anything for me. So if I were in that room in that moment, I’d want to start doing some language exercises around, how do we explain what happened? Is door plug the right language? Is repairing door plugs the right language? Should we have some refortification? Should we be doing something different so it doesn’t seem like such a small thing ended up with such a big problem? Because it’s actually a pretty big piece of material that we’re talking about that had a problem. And so I think all of the language around how you describe what went wrong and then what the repair is so, so critical. And in this, I just think that they could have done a better job. 

Will Howard:

I’m on the fence between whether or not it’s a better job that they could have done or whether or not this starts to be a strategic conversation about something they really need to be intentional about going forward. Like from here on out, this is going to be key because the there’s just not a lot of nuance in these very complicated conversations when they play out in the public domain. And you see these couple of terms become the placeholder terms that just stick in every news headline and in every interview. And so far it’s been door plug and loose bolt. And door plug and loose bolt both sound really bad, right? And in the CNBC interview, the CEO clarified what a loose bolt means. He’s talking about a couple millimeters of tolerance and not like this thing is wobbling around in the socket. That’s a losing battle if you’re explaining what a loose bolt is, right? And he owns that. He flips and says, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same outcome, right? But don’t even go down that path. You’re gonna need 

Lee Carter: 

Yes. 

Will Howard: 

The only way you’re going to beat loose bolt and door plug is if you give them something better that’s an equally simple kind of memorable explanation of what happened that doesn’t sound as bad, right? That kind of sounds a little bit more buttoned up and a little bit more fixable I think than loose bolt or door plug. 

Michael Maslansky:

So we’ve got this question of whether language that was created for a different purpose helps or hurts in the context of a crisis, right? And we see in a lot of situations where engineers or other operations people who created terms for equipment, for… you know, processes for things like that have created terms that make a communicator’s life impossible, because it wasn’t intended for that purpose. And I think, you know, door plug in this case, I don’t know whether loose bolt is a technical term or, or just the term that they used is, you know, these are situations where the communicator kind of has to at least initially deal with what’s been given to them. I do think that there are times when you can get in trouble for trying to create a new term where one is not obvious. And that is if we go back to another airline issue, which is when Carlos Munoz tried to talk about re-accommodating passengers when they were being dragged off the plane by the police, it was not an effective use of a new term that was designed to kind of deescalate the situation. And so you can get into a lot of trouble by trying to create and manufacture, no pun intended, a different term that sounds better for a situation. Even though I do agree that a door plug sounds like a small thing and a loose bolt sounds like something that’s a real problem. 

Will Howard:

Yeah. I mean, you can go either way, right? You can either be too technical, like a fuselage O-ring sealant vector fractured or whatever, right? Where it’s like, okay, what the heck is that? Cause the engineers came up with that language and you just wholesale ripped it and tried to move it over, or you can go too far and you can PR the hell out of it and that’s how you end up with reaccommodation, right? And it’s about trying to split the difference. I don’t have an answer yet, but I mean, you look at something like a depressurization incident is another way that this has been talked about, right? There’s like, to me, that’s like starting to slip into that overly PR-polished term. I’m trying to think as someone who flies on airplanes a lot, what is language that’s going to be recognizable to me as a passenger and also sound very fixable, like something that is addressable, while also sounding like it wasn’t the result of some crazy oversight the way like loose bolt might like loose bolt is fixable, but it sounds like a crazy oversight to have allowed that to happen in the first place, right? So kind of one for two there. 

Michael Maslansky:

Now this was basically a door. Like if it was just a door, would that be better or worse? 

Will Howard;

Right. I think it might be. I mean, I think it might be better. Because at least it’d go ahead. 

Lee Carter:

I think with a door, there’s a lot that you could do that makes it seem like it’s a, that there, that it was a maybe one-off issue. A loose bolt or a door plug seems like it’s a very specific small part that could happen on any plane. If this was somehow a door, some kind of incident that you could call that you made it about this one thing that you could fix, I think it would be better but a loose bolt seems like that could happen anywhere in a plane and a door plug, well, there’s got to be more than one in a plane. So to me, it seems like a much more systemic and bigger problem that you need to fix than if you just had something with a door. And I also, as the more we talk about this, the more I think that the answer is we already have the language of door plug and loose bolt out there and so that cuts out of the bag in many ways. So Will, as you were saying earlier, the answer might be in how they talk about the fix. 

Will Howard:

Yeah. 

Lee Hartley Carter:

So. 

Michael Maslansky:

So a rapid door disengagement, how about that? 

Will Howard:

Ha! 

Lee Carter:

Ha ha 

Will Howard: 

Well, I just go to, I go to stronger vocabulary. If you think about the negative narratives, and we’ll talk a little bit about how, what the cascading effect of this is, there will be one, which is lack of oversight and to me, loose bolts is terminology that’s already starting the conversation down, someone didn’t do their job, right? The second issue is going to be Boeing cutting corners for profit. You already see this narrative cropping up. Door plug sounds like a baseline inadequate measure. A plug is a temporary fix, right? 

Lee Carter:

Yes. 

Will Howard:

So that plays into a cut corner from the beginning, right? So you’re setting up on bad footing. To me, your solution has to sound like, I’m going to vocabulary like lock, fastener, seal, like words that are stronger than plug that communicate actual security of the hall. I’m thinking about things like hall or a better way to say fuselage that isn’t a technical term. I’m thinking about cabin pressure as a term because that’s one that I hear every time I’m on a play. Like we’re upgrading our seals to ensure cabin pressure is maintained, right? Like things like that. 

Lee Carter:

Totally. 

Michael Maslansky:

And let me ask you this. So, you know, people listening to this who are not communicators, their response to you may be, well, you’re just trying to manipulate me. You’re just trying to come up with a term that sounds better so that you gloss over this huge crisis that your company just created. What do you say to them? 

Will Howard:

I say the person who wrote the headline that says loose bolt when there was a millimeter tolerance difference was trying to frame it as negatively as possible to get a click, right? So the facts are what the facts are, and I don’t think that’s what the debate is about. The debate is being had over a straw man that was constructed using language around what happened, if that makes sense. 

Lee Carter:

And I also think that one of the assumptions we made in the beginning of all this is that every person in that room is devastated by what happened and is trying to fix it (19:08) what we’re trying to do is help them communicate what they’re really doing which is to address the problem they found that identify the problem they’re going to fix it it’s a systemic issue that is never going to happen again and we’re gonna assume that everybody’s doing their job and we’re just there to communicate it because you can communicate the same exact action two different ways. In one way, it’s going to instill confidence that everything is under control. In the other way, it’s going to be like, wow, this company is out of control. And so our job is really to come in and help them make sure that they’re getting the credit for what they’re doing.

Will Howard:

Absolutely. And I could really spiral on this one because it’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about. But just there’s something in that criticism that assumes that somehow door plug is the real word. And any other word that we picked to replace it is like a manufactured term. But the reality is that door plug is just a word someone came up with somewhere down the line a long time ago. There’s nothing about it that makes it the word we should use here. And any other word that we use is in some way dishonest. Door plug wildly undersells the technicality of what that thing is, right? It’s a multi thousand dollar piece of high octane steel multi, like, it’s a very complicated thing. And doorplug makes it sound simpler than it is. Right. It’s just a, choosing your words to better line up with what you, the image you need people to understand. 

Michael Maslansky:

So, okay, so we have this initial announcement from Boeing. Sounds like it’s on the right path. It shows a lot of empathy. It shows a lot of kind of awareness, and acknowledgement of what the public is thinking. And those are two things that we say are extremely important in crisis response. I don’t know, actually, I’ve not seen data on whether or not. Alaska Airlines or any airline’s numbers are down, whether people have actually decided not to fly as a result of this, although you could have seen that as a potential outcome of this. I do know that we have one colleague who is scheduled to fly on Alaska Airlines and feels like there has not been a lot of communication about this. And so, you know, whether it’s the airline or the manufacturer, what else should they be doing from here in order to make sure that people are not afraid to fly? 

Lee Carter:

So I think this goes back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier, which is how they brand or communicate what they’re doing to fix this. You know we had a conversation about companies who have done this well in the past let’s think about Toyota years ago they had their acceleration or issue and they came up with a you know five-point safety check that everything had to go through when they had all the problems with used cars they came up with this the certified pre-owned vehicle that comes you know cars have to go through a huge number of checks to make sure that they’re not going to be limits that kind of a thing. I think that some kind of measured or measurable safety check that every plane goes through to make sure that there’s you know no issues would go a long way in addressing an issue like this. 

Will Howard: 

In some ways, Alaska is in the harder spot here because it wasn’t really their fault. I mean, indications seem to be, we don’t know yet. Sounds like it was a manufacturing issue and not their issue. Their crew went above and about beyond to save the day, but now they’re left holding this bag. And honestly, so are all airlines who are using this model of plane of consumers are now worried about this. And I think you have to step out and think about what our consumer is going to be doing. So the first thing is consumers are hearing that flights are grounded, planes are grounded. Everyone’s going to be wondering if my plane is grounded. You need to step into overdrive the amount of communication you’re doing about whether or not, or the likelihood of your plane being grounded. Our colleague spent three and a half hours on hold the other day because he wanted to answer that question because he hadn’t heard anything to, to answer it proactively in the meantime. Right. The second thing, and maybe I’m just a nerd, you can check in your app, what plane you’re going to be on. Some people are going to be looking to see if they’re on a max and that’s going to outlast this crisis, right? That’s going to be a thing now. So if you think about that, I’m assuming that what’s going to happen, it looks like what’s going to happen is max is Boeing is sending out procedures that should be conducted on these planes. To check, to make sure that these, to kind of fix this issue locally. If that happens or something like that happens, you need to get ahead of the fact that everyone’s going to be looking at Boeing Max on their app. You should put something in your app. That’s like a little green check next to it that says it’s been upgraded and, and checked. Right. Even if every single plane in your fleet has, you need to think about what people are going to be doing, they’re going to be checking and you need to get ahead of them doing that and reassure them that the plane has been addressed. Right. Things like that where you’re, you’re putting yourself in that shoes and you’re trying to, to preempt concerns. 

Michael Maslansky:

One of the things that we often run into is that companies want to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible. If I go on the Alaska Airlines site right now, there is no reference to this anywhere. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? Will, based on what you’re saying, the idea should be you’ve got to lean into this and over-communicate about it, I mean, we say this all the time, everything vague is gonna be interpreted negatively, right? If I’m not sure what kind of plane I’m on and I’m on Alaska Airlines, I may assume that I’m gonna be on the wrong plane and that it’s not gonna fly unless you tell me otherwise. And so, seems like it’s incumbent upon Alaska Airlines to be doing a lot more communicating right now. 

Will Howard: 

Mm-hmm. 

Lee Carter:

Absolutely. One of the hard things about this is they don’t want to draw attention to it. So you don’t want to go to Alaska Airlines and say, oh, if you have questions about door plugs, click here. So there’s got to be a conversation about how do you get people the information that they’re looking for. So I love Will’s idea of having on the app a checkmark or some kind of an indicator that says this has already been checked. But for people who do have questions, you need to have some kind of a place on that website that when you land there you know that you’re going to and if it’s if you don’t want to say the word door plug or You don’t want to talk about Cabin depressurization. I don’t blame you but you might want to have a you know a deeper dive Look at the plane. You might want to have you know, if you have questions about the max Or something like that because you want to have a place for people to go that are concerned 

Will Howard:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Michael Maslansky:

I actually find it kind of shocking that there is not something on their website that helps you navigate to that information, even if it’s an update on our fleet. 

Will Howard:

Right. Yeah, and keep me honest here, guys, because I’m trying to play out the different versions of this that I can think of. And to me, if you look at them the right way and you frame them the right way, they’re all positive for Alaska Airlines. So scenario one is they don’t think there’s going to be an impact on any of their planes because they can do it without the max for all these flights that they’re committed to, in which case, get credit for that. Say your flight will not be affected. You won’t be on a max. We’re committed to keeping your flight, right? The second is we don’t know, in which case you don’t want everyone calling you, asking you if you don’t have the answers, so get ahead of that. Say at this time we don’t know about any impact, but we will keep you apprised with regular updates, we’re doing everything we can to find out what the impact will be, please bear with us, right? And you’re getting ahead of the concerns. The third is they already know there’s gonna be an impact and they’re scrambling on the backend to try to figure it out, and people are in the dark and are gonna have their flight plans changed closer to the date, like, why not tell them earlier that there’s probably going to be an impact, right? Why not try to get ahead of it? 

Lee Hartley Carter (31:59.662) 

Yeah. And I also think it’s really important for all of those reasons that they get ahead of it. But because of the language, I know I’m such a word geek, but I keep going back to this idea of a door plug and a loose bolt. It could be the manufacturer’s problem, but it could be somebody that works at Alaskan Airlines who overlooked a loose bolt or a door plug, which to me, I don’t know as a flyer whose fault it is. It doesn’t matter to me, but I want to know that it’s done. So should they be featuring what the training they’re all of their engineers are going through or what the safety protocol is before every plane goes off. Without having to address this incident directly, I’m sure there are some people who aren’t sure is it Boeing’s fault or is Alaskan Air’s fault. Was it a mechanic at Alaskan Air who took this last check and it didn’t and failed to catch something? So there should be something featuring what they’re doing to make sure every plane that takes off is safe. 

Michael Maslansky:

I think I would fall somewhere in between, which is that strikes me that you got to be talking about this. I’m not sure. You know, sometimes we caution companies not to break into jail, you know, by going too far and, you know, communicating that there’s a problem where there might not be. I mean, I think one of the reasons why Alaska Airlines doesn’t have this on their site could be that the social chatter that they’re seeing on this is that it’s not an issue, right? And so sometimes we don’t have the full information either, but I think I would at least wanna acknowledge that people wanna know what they’re flying on and that the planes that they’re on are safe. I don’t know that it’s bled over into other Boeing 737 Max’s much less, you know, other planes. I would just be careful as to how much do we want to protest about the safety of airlines? They are among the safest forms of transportation that we have.

Lee Carter: 

To be clear, I’m not saying that they should be saying that they’re not safe. I think they should be talking about it’s like one of those moments you can highlight how safe it is, right? Without, so it’s not saying this is what we’re doing to fix the issue. You could just talk about the safety check that every plane goes through before they go off. 

Michael Maslansky:

Right. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think certainly something needs to be done to at least answer the question of what plane are you flying on? Is your plane gonna go off? Is it, you know, and confirming that it’s, that people are doing what they should be doing to make sure it’s safe. 

Will Howard:

Yeah. And one thing that this starts to get to, which I think is, is worth kind of talking about it, both in the context of Alaska and particularly in the context of Boa, Boeing is longer term, the power of symbols. Um, like I talked a little bit about how the hole in the, in the hall is a, is a very powerful symbol, right? You, you just show that picture and that’s going to be with you for a while. You need something equally sticky and simple to try to show the solution for Boeing, I think even if they’re doing a decent job so far of responding to this moment and this crisis, I think this is three or four incidents now that I can remember off the top of my head. I always say two dots starts to be a lot, two dots is a line. Like there’s now enough incidents that it starts to become a pattern and this isn’t just a issues management question, this is a brand question now and a reputation question. And I think long-term, if they want to rehabilitate honestly, this brand and this image of safety, I think there’s going to be more stories to come around this. I think people are going to be doing exposes, trying to find, trying to connect the dots for people. Um, this is not a time to minimize. This is a time to try to, to think about what is a symbolic, significant, simple action that we could take. Um, that’s going to tell people we’re reorienting our culture in some way, or we’re reorienting as a company to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, and I would say arguably, this forces the organization to refocus what it wants to stand for as a company in the competitive marketplace and not just kind of codify what it is that it’s doing, which might be to kind of brand it safety process as it is or an improved safety process, but actually think about how it can leapfrog the competition from a safety and maintenance perspective. You know, Boeing, I think has really focused on cost and on advanced materials and on efficiency. And this may mean that in order for them to overcome this now repetitive issue around safety, which is gonna plague them in the first paragraph of every story for the foreseeable future, that they need to not just kind of get to parity, but they really need to leapfrog from a safety perspective. And that’s what a lot of brands do in response to crisis. They kind of, they over-correct in a good way and try and establish a strong association between their brand and, you know, often safety to the extent that was the failing. All right, so if we were to give Boeing one piece of advice right now, what would that be? 

Lee Carter:

Only one. 

Michael Maslansky:

Just, yeah, what’s the one? 

Will Howard:

I think for me, it comes back to the, don’t think of this as managing a crisis, think of this as a moment for the brand. There’s enough of these incidents now that the stories are already getting written about Boeing’s culture of safety and cost corners cut and questions being raised about them as a business. There’s probably a bigger one coming. This is not a time to minimize. Minimizing is that ship has sailed, that plane has taken off. You’re going to need something big. You’re going to, and, and symbolically big rather ideally financially and kind of demonstrably big as well, but you’re going to need something symbolically big to write this, to write this ship, um, going forward and you should, you should already be thinking about, about what that is because the sooner you can start to talk about it, um, the better. 

Lee Carter:

I’m with you, Will, and I think I would sort of try to sum it up best as saying you need to brand your fix, which is whatever it is that you’re doing to fix these safety issues, you need to brand it like it’s a product, communicate about it until you’re nauseous. Like if you have not repeated whatever this fix is so many times that you’re nauseous from repeating it, it probably hasn’t begun to get traction. You probably need to give toolkits to the airlines and all of your partners on how they can communicate this is going to be an ongoing effort we know that uh… you know this isn’t just like something they can talk about now for the next two weeks and have it over this is going to be an ongoing effort for the next year or two and they should really look at how they brand it.

Michael Maslansky:

I would say very much along those same lines that spend more now. Any time that a company thinks that they can get away with spending less today, that maybe it will go away, that they don’t need that full fix, they don’t need to reimburse customers, they don’t need to kind of overdo the solve, they end up spending much more money in the long term and that you have to go overboard now in order to shift perceptions. And if you don’t, you’re gonna likely live with it probably internally from an operations perspective and also from a brand perspective for a long period of time. 

Lee Carter:

I do want to add one more thing because I think we’ll raise something that’s really important earlier. Your employees are feeling this right now if you’re at Boeing and I’ve seen some of the best reputation initiatives really go in and go deep with their employees to help them understand what happened to give them the tools they need to feel better because we’ve worked with companies who said we used to be so proud to wear t shirts to our kids soccer games and now we won’t because we don’t want to have that conversation of your employees as part of your brand and recovery here. So invest in your employees at this moment. 

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely.

Will Howard:

I feel like you can go wrong in one of two ways here. You can not, you can not go far enough with the action right now, because you’re trying to minimize. Um, and, and in so doing your, whatever you say will be undercut because you haven’t demonstrated you’ve gone far enough, but equally dangerous is you do take bold steps internally and make big changes and spend a lot of money, but you don’t talk about it. And you don’t find the single simple symbol that’s going to sit on top of that for people to know you’ve made the change and then not only did you spend all that money, but you aren’t going to get 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, so I think just pulling a bunch of these threads together, first of all, I think that it’s important to acknowledge that this is hard, that there are a lot of competing objectives and reasons even beyond feeling terrible about any kind of horrible catastrophe like this. But it’s still hard to figure out the right response. And very often companies get sucked into what matters to them, their own instincts, instead of thinking about things from a broader public perspective. And what we see over and over again, what you’ve talked about is acknowledging what everybody thinks, empathizing with how they feel about it, not trying to minimize it or hide it, being really thoughtful about the language that you use both to describe the problem and the solution, branding a solution so that it is clear that this is something that goes above and beyond, it’s kind of ordinary course of business not trying to get back to business as usual, but recognizing that this is an inflection point for the company and the brand. And that in order to get both internal audiences and external audiences back on board, that it’s going to require a significant investment of time, money, and resources in order to make a change. Well, Will, Lee, great conversation. Hopefully, somebody’s listening and they take some good guidance from this, I mean somebody at Boeing or Alaska, hopefully, we know that other people are listening.

And thanks to all those people who are listening. Appreciate having you join us as we do more and more of these episodes. And for more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other stuff we’re doing, please follow us on LinkedIn at Maslansky + Partners. That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more episodes of Hearsay because when it comes to truly effective communications, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.