This week's perspective from Joe Chidley: Untold thousands around the world reacted with shock and horror to news that the world did not come to a terrible end this month. But for those followers of Harold Camping, there is still, er, hope – at least according to 89-year-old Camping, the ersatz American religious leader who got a lot of play out of predicting the Rapture to occur at around 6 pm on May 21. (The May 2-4 weekend, no less!) True believers, by Camping’s way of thinking, would get an express ticket to heaven, while the rest of us would be damned to apocalyptic meltdown. (We’re presuming that we here at TD&F are exempt from salvation, having toiled for so long amid the infernal machines and mephitic vapours of the media.) When the Earth somehow managed to survive the fated day, Camping apologized for not having “worked out as accurately as I could have” the date. Now, you’d think that for a matter of this importance, you might double-check your math. But from a communications perspective, the lesson here is that on matters pertaining to future events, you should try to avoid being too declarative – it’s one thing to say the world is going to end someday soon, or that you expect increased profits next year, or that you’re against tax increases, and quite another to say doomsday starts at 6 p.m., or you’re going to earn 10 bucks more a share in 2012, or that people should read your lips when you say “No new taxes.” Guidance, in other words, is a difficult game, best practiced with care if it’s practiced at all. That said, Camping did get one thing right: when his guidance proved inaccurate, he rolled with the punches and adapted to the new situation quickly. The end of the world is now officially delayed six months, to October 21, 2011.
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