Your Minimum Viable Strategy
I suspect that in most cases it’s best to optimize public affairs strategy development to be executed as quickly as possible, even if that means baking in a few errors and racking up a few setbacks along the way; to devise a semi-complete strategy, roll it out ASAP, and re-iterate it as you go based on the feedback you get from the real world.
I suspect this for several reasons:
Section I: Strategy development
Your map is not the territory. Your strategy is a working hypothesis: A lot of strategy development begins by mapping the political forces and actors you will encounter, then charting a course through them to success. But no one possesses perfect information. We all make assumptions. We over-weigh certain forces and under-weigh others.
Spending weeks building an elaborate strategy on imperfect foundations just loses time and leads down dead ends.
Instead, it’s better to think of a strategy as a test of a working hypothesis you know is probably wrong; a hypothesis that you’re actively setting out to disprove and refine. A strategy is a back-of-the-envelope way to test your assumptions, see what happens, and revise your approach (and your worldview) as you gather more information. In any case, by the time you roll the strategy out, the external environment will have changed anyway.
Built-in errors compound: Software engineers talk about technical debt: faulty code that accumulates and compounds over time. The longer an error is left to fester, the deeper it takes root, the harder it is to dig out. On average, a 10% increase in technical debt reduces gross profits by 16%. The best way to weed out technical debt is to run the code quickly and often and find the bugs as they emerge. The best way to weed out errors in public affairs is to implement your next iteration of the strategy quickly and often, and find its weaknesses.
Power laws and opportunity costs: Power law distribution suggests a small percentage of any given effort give a disproportionately large return. So pretty quickly, you’re going to cross the threshold in your strategy development process where mapping that extra MEP, or conducting that extra social media listening exercise, becomes a sub-optimal use of your time. Pretty soon, it is going to make sense, no matter how underprepared it feels, to go out there and implement what you’ve developed so far, instead of adding another layer of analytical depth to your strategic consideration deck.
Section II: Strategy implementation
A truth universally acknowledged in Brussels: The easiest way to get your position in a legislative text is to get in early. It is easier to defend something already in a Commission proposal than insert from scratch it in a Parliament report. It is easier to sherpa your position through a plenary vote than to parachute it into trilogues. The later in the process you share your internally-approved stance, the less likely it is to be adopted. The utility of your amendment drops every additional day it takes to develop and sign off internally. Get it out there: if someone has follow up questions, they will ask you.
Another bite of the cherry: One will never be able to enter the fray with perfect information, and the policy landscape around under one’s feet is dynamic, always shifting. The more you are out there sharing your messages, the more you are gathering feedback on how they are resonating, the tighter your feedback loops get, and the more honed and effective your advocacy becomes. You may not get everything right straight away, but the likelihood is, if you are out there early, you will be able to cycle through more feedback loops, have more bites of the cherry, learn more from each one, and eventually hit your mark every time.
Speed is an edge when everyone moves slowly: There is a misconception in Brussels (partly intentionally spread because everyone loves an underdog) that massive, well-funded corporate lobbies always win the day. This is not always true. These are groups that require enormous internal buy-in, face protracted compliance processes and often cannot pivot without first slicing through layers of approvals. If you are an outlier, or up against a behemoth, you may not have their resources or allies, but you are far more agile. You should do everything you can to use that to your advantage. If you are a behemoth, you need to make your approval process as lean as possible.
Section III: Resourcing your strategy
Keeping morale high: Public affairs campaigns are long slogs. Evidence you spent months generating cab be discarded without being read. Your beautifully-crafted compromise amendment may be dropped in trilogues to save a rapporteur’s pet project. It can be demoralizing, but sometimes, just doing something can counter that. Number of meetings is a terrible metric for measuring the impact of your campaign, but it has the useful benefit of making us at least feel like we are achieving something.
Retaining talent in a tight labour market: I can only talk for consulting, where the labour market feels much tighter than it did 10 years ago. There is a constant stream of job ads looking for candidates, and rotation between companies. As you’d expect, agencies tend to attract people with high levels of … well … agency. Giving people who like to get out from behind their desk and get stuff done the chance to get stuff done will keep them happy. Let them feel like they are moving the needle, rather than moving paper, and you’re likely to keep hold of them – and their institutional knowledge – much longer.
There’s always next time: The power law distribution analogy suggests that the majority of strategic plays are likely to fail, but when they succeed, they are successful in a big way. If this is true, we want to cycle through bad approaches quickly to arrive upon the winning formula ASAP. Not just because it leads us to the right outcome, but because it does so quickly. The quicker we fail, the less money, time and energy we spend that could have been dedicated to successful things. All of that is important, because the likelihood is, if you’re already on the regulator’s radar, they will come for you again … There’s always next time.
Conclusion
Your Minimum Viable Strategy: I hope I have made the case for something we probably all know intuitively: at a certain point, we just have to go out and try stuff.
In Silicon Valley, people talk about Minimum Viable Products for start-ups: a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. This can be applied to PA strategy development too. Getting an early version of your product (your strategy) out to your market (policymakers) and getting their feedback (or getting ghosted) is the best way to see if you have a product/market fit.
If your product doesn’t fit, great! You’ve failed quickly and saved time and money and have the chance to come back with something new.
If it kind of fits, great! Take on board your customers’ feedback and bring them something they like even more.
If it fits perfectly, great! Perhaps it’s time to ask for that pay rise?