The story today that ICASA will hold a postmortem after the regulator admitted that it made a “mistake” in trying to block Vodacom ’s R80bn listing, is a lesson in Reputation Risk management.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=73764

To think that they could have prevented this negative publicity.

How?

By ensuring that senior management were trained in the strategic management of reputation and stakeholder relationships. If they were, they would have understood the interplay of contextual factors and issues, and they would have thought twice, before they made decisions, that left them embarrassed.

Now they have to go and do reputation risk root cause analysis, which is a technique that I taught last week in my Reputation Defence Master Class. Interestingly, most reputation damage incidents in companies can be prevented through training and simulation exposure.

The patterns of decision making at meeting time can have a material impact on an organization’s reputation. If you study the Ford-Firestone Tire withdrawal case, there seems to be an uncanny similarity between these two events.

In both meetings, key people were not there. This in itself should be a lesson. Who attends or does not attend a meeting should be a point of concern!

I just hope that the Regulator will address the root causes and not just superficial symptoms.