Skill and luck in Public Affairs - pt I
You gotta have both - but what are PA functions optimizing for?
When I am asked to assess and score Public Affairs functions, we always first discuss what motivated this interest. Typically the interest is sparked by one of two things:
Something has gone wrong in the PA team or objectives have been missed, and the leader of the PA function has an idea of what the problem is, but wants to get outside assessment or validation (as a leverage) to implement changes
Things seems to be working, but there is a slight feeling that it is perhaps more luck than skill, and fear that the current status is too fragile
Once we have had this discussion, I perform the performance test and typically it reveals that the PA function is not optimizing for skills (or expertise) - and thus often confirming the initial hunch that something was off on the organizational side.
A general observation is that many PA functions behave in the same way, and thus make the same mistakes, over and over again (this could also be linked to the lack of education in Public Affairs, which I wrote about in a previous blog). And basically it reduces the likelihood of success to chance, or luck. Imitating behaviour from others might be good for the individual PA pros career, but bad for the organization (and cause).
I find this discussion about skill and luck fascinating because it is typically brutally honest and reveals some of the core challenges of our profession.
Process and outcomes in Public Affairs
Distinguishing between process and outcomes in Public Affairs is a relevant exercise. Fields like investing, sports or politics for instance all involve components of luck. Think about it, in politics the behaviour and feelings of a single person, not science or numbers, can change the future of an entire industry over night. Think of Trumps battery of executive orders, if you want a recent example. Thus, the challenge in Public Affairs is that you often cannot point to the exact variable, that caused the outcome of a political process.
To compensate or hedge for this, many Public Affairs professionals have weighted and prioritized the size of their network as the most important currency or KPI in assessing their own performance. The logic seems to be, that being close to power increases influence and thus no matter if something goes good or bad, it would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for their network. I am, however, pretty sure, that if we replicated many of these typical PA war-stories, they would have ended differently 9 out of 10 times.
Over time strong processes will outperform your network
This is why the distinction between process and outcomes has become important in Public Affairs as the discipline has components of both skill and luck. When this is the case, and you are looking at a single specific challenge, then it makes sense to look at outcomes. Outcomes don’t lie. They are objective and to an extent quantifiable. And they are probabilistic. But here is the problem. There are situations in Public Affairs where you might have a good decision-making process, but it is going to lead to a negative outcome simply because of the role of bad luck. On the other hand, you can also have a bad process that leads to a great outcome.
But over longer periods of time, organisations that have good decision-making processes end up doing well, ultimately, in outcomes. In Public Affairs this means that you shouldn’t worry (or celebrate) too much about outcomes short-term because you might just be looking at noise or bad luck.
Btw, organisations that have a short-term approach usually default to the network-driven approach and therefore fill their Public Affairs function with team members that are mostly networkers(or what I call firefighters).
But instead - if you want to change how Public Affairs is integrated in the organisation - you should focus on creating the right processes, because you can be assured that in the long term, organisations with good processes are ultimately going to do well and better than those with bad processes.
In pt II of this blog I will dive more in to how PA teams typically evaluate themselves as well as the pitfalls to avoid.