One of the most dangerous assumptions an organisation can make is that an issue it has lived with for years is an issue it understands and controls.
It may be neither.
While management becomes increasingly comfortable with a familiar problem, others may be accumulating the evidence that will turn it into a crisis. An organisation's greatest vulnerability may not be what it doesn't know, but what it knows and has learned to live with.
In my last column, I wrote about the danger of allowing questionable operational practices to become business as usual. The same danger arises when organisations become accustomed to persistent criticism, particularly from activists whose concerns have been heard, answered, and perhaps dismissed for years.
The absence of a crisis is not evidence that an issue is under control.
In October 2019, I was advising racing interests in Victoria when the ABC's 7.30 programme aired The Final Race, an investigation into the fate of retired racehorses.
The animal welfare concerns were hardly new. Protesters had been a familiar presence at major race meetings for years. The Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses had campaigned publicly and persistently, while the racing industry had introduced welfare initiatives and committed substantial resources to improving outcomes.
Yet on 17 October, the issue changed dramatically.
The ABC's investigation brought together evidence gathered over two years, including confronting hidden-camera footage from a Queensland abattoir. The investigation identified approximately 300 racehorses at the facility during 22 days of visits.
What had previously been a longstanding dispute between racing authorities and animal welfare campaigners became a national controversy.
Within five days, the Queensland Government announced an independent inquiry. Eleven days after the broadcast, Racing Victoria committed $25 million over three years to accelerate and expand its existing equine welfare program.
The industry had not suddenly discovered horse welfare. Racing Victoria had released a three-year Equine Welfare Strategic Plan earlier that year, identifying more than 40 priority projects for its first year.
But the investigation raised serious questions about what happened to horses after they left racing and whether existing safeguards were adequate.
The distinction matters. The crisis was not created by the television programme. The underlying welfare concerns already existed. What the program did was assemble evidence, expose the issue to a much wider audience and demand accountability on an entirely different scale.
This is where organisations can make a serious mistake.
When an issue has been around for years, management can become conditioned to it. The critics are familiar. Their arguments have been heard before. Responses have been prepared, positions defended, and improvements made.
Over time, the organisation may begin to measure the seriousness of an issue by the attention it is currently attracting rather than the possible consequences if critics prove their case.
That judgement is often reinforced by the organisation's own reporting. A decline in complaints, fewer headlines, or an uneventful annual meeting may be presented as evidence of progress. Yet none necessarily establishes that the underlying conduct has improved or that the most serious allegations have been resolved.
There is also a human tendency to defend decisions already made. Once management has invested money, reputation, and effort in a response, acknowledging that it is insufficient becomes harder. The question quietly shifts from whether the organisation is doing enough to whether it can justify what it has already done.
Meanwhile, its critics may be doing something quite different.
A determined activist group can devote years to a single issue, gathering evidence, building relationships, identifying weaknesses, and finding ways to bring its case to a wider audience.
An organisation, by contrast, must balance many competing priorities. What is one issue among many for management may be the sole focus of an activist campaign.
That imbalance deserves attention. It does not make every activist claim correct. Evidence must be tested and allegations challenged where they are wrong. But dismissing a critic because their campaign is familiar, repetitive, or unpopular is no substitute for examining the substance of the case.
The racing example illustrates a more fundamental point. The industry's vulnerability was not simply that activists and journalists had assembled compelling evidence. It was that the evidence raised questions about whether welfare commitments were being delivered in practice.
No communication response could resolve that contradiction. It required action. Organisations need to distinguish between managing criticism and addressing the conduct that gives rise to it. The two are not interchangeable.
For communicators, the lesson extends well beyond media monitoring and responding to criticism.
The more important intelligence is whether credible evidence is accumulating, whether apparently isolated incidents are beginning to form a pattern, and whether a journalist, regulator, whistleblower, or other credible third party could bring those elements together. Knowing that AI use is now a staple for many, what points of evidence could it help draw together, in the click of a button, for these parties?
And, critically, what would happen if they did?
A useful discipline is to examine an established issue from outside the organisation. Put aside the approved talking points and the history of previous responses. Identify the strongest evidence against the organisation's position, not merely the easiest allegations to rebut. Ask what an independent observer would conclude from the facts available.
Then take that assessment to the people who can change the underlying practice. Communications advisers should not be expected to fix operational failures, but they have a responsibility to recognise when those failures threaten trust and to say so plainly.
That can be uncomfortable advice, especially when management believes an issue has already been dealt with. But the value of experienced counsel lies partly in challenging that belief before circumstances force the organisation to reconsider it in public.
This also requires a willingness to acknowledge that an organisation may have made genuine progress without having adequately addressed the underlying problem.
The fact that improvements have been made does not mean the responsibility has been discharged.
The event that appears to create a crisis is often only its point of ignition. A television investigation, leaked document, whistleblower, or court case may bring an issue into public view, but the underlying circumstances can have existed for years.
By then, the opportunity to address the problem on the organisation's own terms may have passed. Decisions that could once have been made thoughtfully and systematically may instead be taken under intense scrutiny, with less time, less trust, and fewer options.
The lesson from the racing controversy is not that every persistent criticism will become a crisis. It is that familiarity can replace judgement. Organisations can become so accustomed to managing an issue that they stop asking whether their response remains adequate.
There is a simple test worth applying to any longstanding controversy.
If everything currently known about the issue were independently verified and presented convincingly to the public tomorrow, would the organisation still be comfortable defending its position?
If the answer is no, then what needs to change before somebody else joins the dots?
The crisis may already be hiding in plain sight.
Douglas Wright is Chief Executive Officer of Wrights, providing strategic counsel to boards and executives navigating complex reputational, stakeholder, governance and public policy challenges.
With more than four decades experience, he has advised leading corporations, industry bodies, government agencies and not-for-profit organisations across Australia and internationally. Prior to establishing Wrights, he founded and led Ogilvy PR Australia.
Douglas is Deputy Chair and a Fellow of Communication and Public Relations Australia (CPRA), a Chartered Public Relations Practitioner (UK), a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a Certified Practising Marketer.
He combines commercial judgement, strategic insight and an ability to shape outcomes in complex environments.
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