See the hill. Take the hill.

In the midst of particularly brutal jargon-and-posturing project planning sessions, one especially talented public involvement expert I know (tip of the hat to Betty Burry) is prone to utter: “See the hill.  Take the hill.”

In six simple words, she manages to summarize the importance and the power of simple, direct actions and strategies.

She also underlines the rapidly increasing importance in a Web 2.0 world of taking a “Saving Private Ryan” approach to any kind of communication planning, whether public involvement, public relations or public anything.

Traditional communications planning in many organizations is being rendered obsolete by the speed and complexity of the environments in which most of us operate. Long, complex planning processes followed by lots of top-down direction and second-guessing is no longer sustainable when 24 hours may be all you have to win the hearts and minds of a skeptical audience or constituency.

Better to maximize the time, thought and resources spent in developing clear goals and performance measures (“we will not risk all her sons”/”bring Private Ryan back alive”). Then trust your best-qualified people to achieve the goal as they see fit and conditions dictate. (This approach has the added benefit of helping successful organizations engage and motivate staff when smaller, flatter hierarchies limit title/pay/resource rewards.)

Admittedly,  it’s a scarier approach to take as a manager and as someone who has to report to others who may not be so comfortable with speed and ambiguity as a communications initiative unfolds. But it is an approach that seems to reflect today’s realities and produces better results.

Who ordered pie? Here’s your spinach.

Please don’t ask me what I want if you’ve already made up your mind what you’re going to do.

It just makes me mad. And I’m reasonable.

Not so a lot of the people who are going to come to your public meeting because you asked for their input.  

They’re going to be hot when they get there and discover that you’ve made up your mind and the meeting is just to make sure no meaningful group is so outraged that they spontaneously combust.

And what’s been accomplished? You’ve got a bunch of people who know they’ve been tricked.  And they’ll tell you – perhaps loudly – what they think about that. Then they’ll tell their neighbors, your stakeholders and our elected officials, over and over.

It seems so obvious that such maneuvering saps the goodwill an organization has built with its stakeholders. Yet here I am watching another local agency announce public meetings to get stakeholder input regarding a proposed – i.e. “gonna happen hell or high water”  – fee increase.

So please, I beg you, absent a regulatory requirement, don’t offer me gravy if you’re really going to serve granola.

Do you win control – by losing control – of the conversation?

Consumers trust each other more than they do the various organizations that turn the communications firehose on them every day, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.

The piece, about Web 2.0 marketing, has an important implication for public involvement, community relations and other coalition- and network-building professionals.

One potential remedy for the persistent and often widespread mistrust of government and other large organizations may be to unchain (let alone allow) full public discussion of motives, actions and results on those organizations’ own blogs and websites.

The vast majority of such official sites do not allow public comment (except in narrow, heavily moderated instances), outbound links to special interest group sites or other mechanisms that promote unfettered dialog. The fear is that doing so will expose people to “crazies” who will muddle the discussion with erroneous information about public policy, large-scale projects or other initiatives.

Such fears may be beside the point.  No highway project, for example, was a great success because people were able to accurately cite the basic facts about it.  Such projects are a success when people are confident that the sponsoring agency is truthful and trustworthy.

How does a non-technical stakeholder make that assessment?  By personal experience with the agency.  By witnessing how – and how effectively – the agency responds to the questions and criticisms of others.  And by evaluating how others assess the performance of that agency.

These avenues to to trust, confidence and support, however, are blocked by a non-existent or highly controlled Web 2.0 dialog between large organizations and their stakeholder.  In fact, such a dialog may force stakeholders to detour into information exchanges with the very “crazies” that policy makers fear most.

On the other hand, the fastest route for winning stakeholder confidence may simply be to throw open completely the conversation mechanisms you control. Doing so will be scary and uncomfortable at times; that’s guaranteed. 

But empowering stakeholders to air any question or concern, no matter how unlikely or unreasonable, provides you and your organization a continuous showcase for proving that you are open, honest and constituent focused.  And in the end, the result will be that those whose support you need most, the broad middle of the spectrum interested in the right decision above all else, will trust you to make that decision even if they don’t understand every technical detail.

The Coalitionist manifesto

All the simple problems have long since been solved.  

Now we have to deal with the personally, professionally, culturally, politically and all the other complex “lee” challenges that no one person or group can solve.  And in that kind of environment, the person most likely to succeed is the person who can effectively identify, engage and motivate people and organizations to band together, share resources and stay focused on meeting a common challenge.

That’s the theory, anyway, behind The Coalitionist. It’s intended to be a useful and sometimes irreverent soapbox for communicators, public involvement professionals and the occasional crackpot to share ideas, insights and tools for creating networks and coalitions united behind achieving common goals.