Communicating When Stuff Is Going Wrong

Your team successfully rolled out a new product feature. Great! A project was completed on time, within budget. Awesome! You've built something really cool and it works! Your boss is impressed.

But what happens when things go wrong? How and when do you inform your stakeholders? Who should you include in that communication? How should you word it? How technical in nature should it be? What do you do when a successful professional relationship begins to deteriorate? What happens when things go really, really wrong? Like an application becomes unavailable or worse, there is a full on outage?

In the midst of these stressful moments we have stress hormones running through our bodies, making communicating all the more challenging.

Drawing from my experience in Emergency Management and working in Web Operations, I will share best practices (and failures) I have learned along the way. Topics including: 1. A brief overview of the science behind what's going on in our brains during stressful moments 2. Steps to take before communicating 3. Communicating when you're in the middle of things going wrong 4. Following up with a communication after the thing that has gone wrong is resolved.

Come to share what you've learned from success and failures while communicating under stress!

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