6 Communication Lessons Utilities Have Learned from Major Events
By Russ Henderson, Director of Research
Major events aren’t just “bigger outages.” They change what information exists, how fast it changes, and who is watching – customers, executives, media, and emergency partners all at once. In five consecutive years of Outage Communications Leadership Council discussions, utilities kept returning to the same truth: communications built for steady-state operations won’t scale cleanly under stress. The best performers didn’t chase perfect precision; they shifted into a different operating posture built for uncertainty.
👉 Members can access Guideline No. 1 – Lessons Learned from Major Events
What consistently works when everything is changing:
- Declare the shift point. Move intentionally from normal cadence to “major-event mode” (governance, roles, approvals, and update rhythm) instead of drifting into it.
- Govern automation – don’t just scale it. Automated triggers can amplify bad estimates; plan override paths and graceful degradation before the event.
- Fix internal alignment first. Conflicting info between operations, maps, call centers, and social channels is the fastest way to lose credibility externally.
- ETRs should be timely, transparent, and tiered. Customers tolerate uncertainty better than silence – explain what you know, what you don’t, and why it may change.
- Show the work. Field-based updates and visuals help customers understand damage, progress, and restoration complexity far better than press releases alone.
- Plan for non-traditional disruptions. Rolling blackouts, voltage reductions, platform/vendor outages, and even physical attacks can become communications events themselves.
Ultimately, major events are recurring stress tests – not anomalies. Teams that improve year over year institutionalize learning: they capture lessons quickly, update playbooks and governance, train for ambiguity (including system degradation), and broaden what counts as a “major event.” If you do one thing before the next disruption, make it this: define your major-event communications mode in advance, then practice switching into it – because in the moment, adaptability beats automation, and coordination beats certainty.
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