The traffic light monitoring system as a risk indicator in a crisis

Can you imagine a city anywhere in the world, no matter how small, without traffic lights? What chaos it would be! No one would know where to go, where to pass, when to stop or when to go on their way. Nobody would know what is allowed, what is risky, or prohibited. Worse still, accidents would increase dramatically. We would all be at risk!

In 1860, John Peake Knight, created the first traffic light in London, as a traffic control signal for the railway system, which was later applied to automobiles. Today it is an international benchmark for traffic in any city in the world.

The traffic light monitoring system is a simple and clear warning system, and it is not only used to control vehicle traffic. In Mexico, and in other countries, for example, during the pandemic, governments installed a risk traffic light monitoring system as a communication tool to alert the level of epidemiological threat and guide the population about the economic and social activities allowed.

The meaning of the traffic light colors is universally known to all. It is a powerful communication tool to alert the population to several dangers.

Their colors are not a coincidence nor were they chosen randomly. Green, yellow, and red have a high visibility spectrum and can be recognized from afar without being confused with other colors.

Red is the color with the longest wavelength, it means total stop, it is a bright color that we associate with “danger”. Yellow was chosen a transition color; it is a warning. Finally, green means free transit.

With this same chromatic logic, the semaphore is widely used in crisis management practice to establish risk indicators and qualify the degree of threat posed by a crisis. Its visual and iconographic format is easy to understand and very effective in informing the population when going through a situation of high uncertainty.

At a strategic level, it is used to assess the severity of a crisis, monitor its evolution, and anticipate possible scenarios to design and activate response actions.

The traffic light monitoring system must be accompanied by a communication strategy, in two aspects:

1. Conceptualization

The traffic light monitoring system must be supported by the semantics of the meaning of each of the colors, according to the criteria used to qualify the severity of a crisis, these vary according to the crisis and the parameters defined by each organization.

The criteria and parameters once defined are immovable.

2. Diffusion

The criteria and parameters that correspond to each color must be known by the public of interest, that is why it is very important that all risk traffic lights monitoring systems are accompanied by awareness campaigns.

Sometimes, when the crisis is prolonged in time and a slow recovery or gradual return to normality is expected, the color gradient is also used to further nuance the level of risk and the severity of the emergency.

In the crisis of an organization, the traffic light monitoring system will not only be a guide for the development and application of the communication strategy, it will also be a tool that allows to identify the evolution of the crisis itself, and based on this, evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the actions undertaken.

The traffic light monitoring system is an irreplaceable warning system. And it came to stay.

Has your organization used it? As part of a crisis management program, at Ventura Comunicaciones we carry out the following traffic light monitoring system to guide organizations to rate the degree of vulnerability they may face when a crisis occurs. It is for internal use and strategies can be designed on it to deal with the emergency.