Translating complex messages into clarity.
Melissa Tizon, chief communications officer at Providence Health & Services, received a phone call at 11 p.m.
She ignored it the first time.
“I thought it was a butt dial,” she said. “But then (they) called again, so I knew that I should probably pick this up.”
On the other end was a member of her IT team, calling from a grounded plane as a global outage tied to CrowdStrike and Microsoft systems disruptions began to ripple across industries. Within minutes, Tizon was up, assessing the situation and starting to mobilize her team.
When communicators find themselves in the midst of a crisis like this, the best thing to do is translate information in a way that’s easily understandable to the greater public, Tizon said. It’s not to have an immediate solution.
Tizon will join PR Daily Conference in June to discuss how her team managed the situation in real time. This is what she said about the importance of translating complex information first during crises.
Break it down to the facts
“Ascertaining the situation is really critical,” Tizon said. “Understanding what’s going on, what the impacts are, what, you know, how we’re planning to address it.”
That meant staying in close contact with IT leaders through the night, asking questions and translating technical details into plain language. For communicators, she said, this is often the hardest and the most important part of crisis response.
“You do have to take a pause and just say, ‘OK, subject matter expert, you need to tell me what’s happening,’” she said. “And just get them to explain it in plain English.”
The takeaway for comms teams is to resist the urge to move too fast before understanding all the pieces of it. Speed matters, but clarity matters more. If you don’t understand the issue yourself, your audience won’t either, Tizon said.
Communicators as translators
Tizon relayed information to her team. Then she scheduled a virtual meeting with leadership and others the next morning, explaining via email the basics of what was happening.
“As a communicator, you’re not the person that’s going to be fixing the problem,” she said.
Instead, the job is to bridge the gap between technical teams and the people affected, from employees to patients to media, so that they understand how they’ll be affected, what the company is doing and what the next steps are, she said.
“You just need to stay in constant contact with your operators and leaders so that you know what’s being done to address it so you can then push those updates,” she said.
This keeps communicators focused on what they control, which is clarity, consistency and flow of information. It also gives them permission to push internally when answers aren’t clear.
“If you have to advocate for something to be fixed, then you need to do that as a communicator,” she said.
Thinking like your audience
Tizon said her role during a crisis is one of constant perspective-taking.
“It’s always putting on the hat of the public and your internal audiences,” she said. “Just making sure that you’re prepared and helping to answer the questions that they’re going to have.”
At Providence, that meant equipping frontline staff with scripts so they could explain delays and rescheduled appointments. They weren’t providing tons of technical details, but they were explaining the immediate disruptions, Tizon said. It also meant reassuring patients that core systems were still operating.
Providence issued a statement to the media and on social media that said: “Providence, like other organizations across the world, is impacted by the CrowdStrike outage. Our IT teams have been working overnight to respond to the issue and have restored key functionality in the Epic electronic health system so that nurses, physicians and other caregivers can access patient records and perform clinical documentation.”
It went on to say that Providence would provide updates as soon as they had more information. Tizon had direct access to IT leaders throughout the incident who filled her in. She trusted them to explain the issue so she could, in turn, provide clear updates.
These plain-language explanations didn’t solve all the issues, but they let people know that the organization was aware, working on it and ready to provide updates.
Why it matters for comms teams
The CrowdStrike outage was a technical failure outside of Providence’s control, but their communications response was human and easily understood.
In practice, she said that means:
- Get clear, plain-language explanations from subject matter experts before drafting anything
- Stay embedded with operators so updates reflect what’s actually happening
- Advocate internally when key audience questions aren’t being answered
- Focus on how information lands with real people, not just how it reads on paper
The pressure to respond quickly isn’t going away. But as Tizon’s experience shows, the teams that handle it best are those who understand the situation well enough to explain it simply.
“At the end of the day, it’s about helping answer the questions people are going to have,” Tizon said.
Courtney Blackann is a communications reporter. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at courtneyb@ragan.com.
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