I’d like to make a pitch for bringing communications into the room when your company or government department is developing new programs or policies.
Some leaders do this religiously. Many don’t.
Those who don’t have likely rolled out a brilliant new product or program to the public and watched it fizzle. These are often condemned under the epitaph of a ‘solution looking for a problem.’ Other initiatives are even received with criticism and hostility, prompting an eleventh-hour SOS call to their head of communications. One of my old editors had an unvarnished expression for trying to fix a bad story once it is already written: polishing turds.
Incorporating communications planners earlier into policy or program development goes much deeper than simply preventing the proverbial turd from ever hitting the fan (last potty pun for today, I promise). How any initiative is presented is critical to its success. Consider Canada’s five-year-old consumer carbon tax. Even though there is a broad consensus among experts that carbon pricing is the lowest cost way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Canadians may well vote to “Axe the Tax” in the next Federal election.
Once you accept that properly positioning a new idea is crucial, it’s not a long walk to find that communications can improve the development of your big idea.
Don’t take it from a comms guy though. Two guys actually won the Nobel Prize for saying this. Okay, their psychology findings were a little more complex and foundational to the idea of behavioural economics, but Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman made groundbreaking insights into how we make decisions. Kahneman expanded on that work in various books accessible to non-academics like me, including, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” Kahneman shows in thunder striking clarity how much of our decision making is influenced by the way things are presented. Spoiler alert: we are not rational beings. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein exemplify this idea in their own book, “Nudge,” and the idea of what they call, ‘choice architecture’. In many ways, these books are decoders into the messages and the public responses we are seeing play out in present-day political discourse.
Here’s a simple example from Nudge: shopping bags. Many places initially tried to incent people to use reusable bags vs. plastics, and it simply didn’t take off. So then we all had to pay a nickel or so if we needed a plastic bag. The cost/benefit was the same, but most of us started to carry reusables in the back of our car and hardly shrugged when bans were later implemented. Why the different response? Because the bright minds like those mentioned above have shown that losses loom larger in our minds than gains.
Behavioural economics, choice architecture, nudge theory… aren’t communications concepts, but they clearly show how policy/program development and their presentation to the public are deeply intertwined. If you have a communications team in your organization, bring them into the strategy and development conversations. Don’t leave them outside the room until you’re putting lipstick on the finished product. If you don’t have a comms team, it’s worth bringing in that voice from elsewhere.
Please let me know if I can help your own navigational needs.
-Alan Findlay
findlayetal.ca
For your reference: