Prepare for the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Part I: What Tennessee’s Failed Execution Can Teach Us About Communicating Through the Unexpected

There are some incidents no public information officer ever wants to communicate. There are others we know are coming, plan extensively for and hope will unfold exactly as expected.

And then there are the moments when the plan breaks.

That’s what happened Sept. 30 when the Tennessee Department of Correction attempted to carry out the execution of Christa Pike.

There was already significant national and international attention surrounding the execution. Pike would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years. About an hour before the execution was scheduled to begin, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay. Tennessee appealed, and later that day the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the stay, allowing the execution to proceed.

So before the execution team ever entered the chamber, this was already a complicated, fast-moving event with significant media attention.

Then it went wrong.

Pike remained alive after receiving two doses of pentobarbital. Media witnesses began reporting what they were seeing and hearing. The curtains to the execution chamber were closed. Pike’s attorneys returned to court. She was eventually transported from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to a hospital for emergency medical care.

There are a lot of questions about what happened inside that execution chamber. Those questions need to be answered, but I’m not going to try to answer them here.

I’m also not interested in debating capital punishment in this article.

I’m looking at what happened from the perspective of a communicator and someone who has sat in correctional leadership. And the question I keep coming back to is pretty simple: What are you going to say when something you planned extensively for suddenly becomes something you never expected?

A nightmare scenario

I think there’s some context that’s important here, particularly for people who haven’t worked in corrections.

The correctional agency doesn’t impose the sentence. It doesn’t decide whether an execution should happen. The courts do that. Legal challenges can continue right up until an execution is scheduled to take place, as they did in this case. Once the legal process is complete and the execution is authorized to proceed, corrections is responsible for carrying out that lawful sentence.

That’s an enormous responsibility even when everything happens according to plan.

Now imagine being inside the organization when it doesn’t.

There were correctional employees responsible for what was happening operationally. Leadership needed to understand what had gone wrong. Attorneys were involved. Families and witnesses needed information. Reporters from around the world wanted answers. I’m sure phones were ringing and text messages were coming in faster than anyone could respond to them.

And the communications team was somewhere in the middle of all of it, trying to figure out what was accurate, what was releasable and what they could actually say publicly.

I’ve been on the inside of high-consequence incidents. The view from inside is very different than the view we have afterward.

That’s one reason I’m reluctant to look at a timeline and say TDOC should have issued a statement at a particular time. We don’t know enough to say that.

We don’t know what the communications team knew at 8 p.m., 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. We don’t know when information was verified. We don’t know what required legal review or executive approval.

We also don’t know what was happening elsewhere in state government.

How involved was the governor’s office? What about the attorney general’s office? Agency counsel? Were other state officials involved in discussions about what could be released? Did any of that affect the timing of a TDOC statement?

I don’t know. And from what is publicly available, I don’t think any of us on the outside know.

That matters.

I’m not raising those questions to make excuses for TDOC. I’m raising them because it’s easy to reconstruct a timeline afterward and assume we know what was happening inside the organization at every point along it.

We don’t.

That deserves some grace. It also deserves study.

They were prepared for the execution

One thing seems pretty clear to me: TDOC had done a lot of planning.

A month before the scheduled execution, the department began accepting applications from news organizations that wanted to serve as official media witnesses. Witnesses were selected weeks later. TDOC published detailed media guidelines covering credentials, arrival times, where reporters could operate and how access to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution would work.

This wasn’t an agency that suddenly realized on Sept. 30 that the media might be interested.

They knew. They planned for it.

That’s important because I don’t think the lesson here is, “TDOC wasn’t prepared.”

They were prepared for the execution.

The better question is whether the communications plan was prepared for the execution to go wrong.

That’s something all of us who plan for high-consequence events should think about.

We tend to plan around what is supposed to happen. We build timelines. We assign responsibilities. We identify who will speak. We prepare talking points. Sometimes we’ll even draft most of the news release ahead of time and fill in the final details afterward.

I’ve done it.

But how much time do we spend planning for the moment when the script no longer applies?

What if the operation stops? What if someone is injured? What if something happens that nobody can immediately explain?

And then the harder question: What are we prepared to say while we’re still trying to figure it out?

That’s the part of the communications plan I think deserves more attention.

Write the statements you hope you never need

If I were building the communications plan for an event like this, I’d have statements written for things I hoped would never happen.

A significant delay. A medical emergency. An unexpected operational problem. A decision to pause or stop the operation altogether.

Not because I expected any of them to happen, but because if one did, I wouldn’t want the communications team writing its first words from scratch while the rest of the organization was trying to figure out what went wrong.

Those statements don’t need much.

Something unexpected has occurred. We’re gathering information. Here is what we can confirm right now. Here is where we’ll provide additional information. Here’s when you can expect to hear from us again.

That’s enough to get started.

You don’t need names, times and every detail filled in beforehand. Those can be added as they’re confirmed.

I’ve seen communications plans with pages and pages devoted to what happens when everything works. I think we need to spend more time writing the page we hope we never have to open.

Because when something goes wrong, that’s probably the page we’re going to need most.

The information environment doesn’t wait for us

TDOC posted a media advisory at 11:15 p.m. confirming that Pike had been transported to an off-site medical facility. The department also said it had followed every step of the state’s established execution protocol.

By then, though, the story was already moving.

Media witnesses were talking about what they had observed. Pike’s attorneys were speaking publicly and pursuing additional legal action. Advocacy organizations were weighing in. Reporters were piecing together information from the sources available to them.

That’s what they’re supposed to do.

I don’t fault reporters for reporting. I don’t fault attorneys for advocating for their client. I don’t fault advocacy organizations for offering their perspective. And I certainly don’t fault witnesses for describing what they saw.

The problem for the agency is that the information environment doesn’t stop while you’re figuring things out.

I’ve talked about information vacuums for years. They don’t stay empty for very long.

If the organization at the center of the incident isn’t providing information, somebody else will. And pretty quickly, the agency can find itself responding to a story that has already taken shape.

Now you’re answering questions based on someone else’s information. You’re trying to correct things that may not be accurate. You’re responding to allegations. You’re trying to add context to a narrative that’s already several hours ahead of you.

That’s a very different position than being the authoritative source from the beginning.

None of this means an agency should rush information out the door before it’s verified. That’s not what I’m suggesting. There may be legal issues, privacy concerns, medical information or operational reasons why something can’t immediately be released.

Accuracy still matters.

But silence has consequences, too.

By the time TDOC issued its advisory that night, the story of what happened was already being told.

And that’s where this case becomes about more than what happened inside an execution chamber.

What happens when an operational crisis becomes a communications crisis — and then a reputational crisis of public trust?

That’s where I’ll pick this up in Part II.

Part II will examine what happened after Sept. 30, including the resignation of Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada, the role of executive leadership during a crisis and whether silence can ultimately become a greater reputational threat than the incident that started it.