Getting Your Policy Issues Prioritized and Aligned
With Your Business Can Save You Millions
While every company or industry may be dealing with different public policy issues, these issues tend to fall into three primary categories: Emerging, Current and Resolved.
There can be some overlap between the three areas, but generally speaking, how you prioritize your Issues Management – in terms of how you allocate human, financial and reputational resources – can cost you millions if not billions of dollars.
Let’s briefly review the meaning of these three issues categories and why it’s so important to have an active process for prioritizing a company’s issues in the public policy arena.
Emerging
These are issues that have just come into the policy sphere.
If you are doing proper issues scanning you will begin to see trends in blogging and increased activity on the part of either friendly or unfriendly policy advocates, stakeholders and other watchdogs and activists.
With emerging issues, the question always becomes when should a company or industry become involved?
Engage in an emerging issue too soon – start talking about it in the public domain and with key opinion leaders and public officials – and you may stir up a hornet’s nest that you don’t want. You may actually cause an issue to get bootstrapped from the “Emerging” phase directly into the “Current” phase BEFORE you are ready to address it.
On the other hand, there are opportunities to get ahead of an “Emerging” issue – essentially put it to bed – by changing company or industry behavior so that detractors have no traction to move the issue forward in the policy arena with legislators, regulators or members of the judiciary.
Primary
These are issues that have transcended the “Emerging” side of the bell curve of and are being actively addressed in the policy, regulatory or judicial arenas – or all three.
This is where a company should be spending the bulk of its time and resources, either mitigating issues that pose a threat to the company’s financial viability or advancing issues that represent significant opportunities for financial growth. In reality no company or industry has just one issue that falls into the “Current” area of the curve – with some companies or industries there can be dozens of issues in play.
Consequently, it becomes critical that organization and industry executives are fully aligned with Corporate Affairs and other business functions.
It is critical to achieve consensus annually on which issues should receive the highest level of prioritization and as a result, the highest level of human, financial and reputational resources. If your Corporate Affairs’ issues priorities are out of sync with your business functions, or with the CEO’s and/or Board of Director’s priorities, you run the risk of wasting considerable resources, squandering opportunities and even doing reputational damage to your company.
We have seen this play out recently with the pharmaceutical industry’s handling of childhood medications, with BP’s handling of the Deep Horizon oil spill and certainly with the tobacco industry’s response to nicotine and addiction.
Resolved
Ever heard the term, the “horse hasn’t just bolted the barn, it’s bolted the county”?
Whether you like it or believe it, there are issues that have simply moved beyond your ability to influence. Here again, if you aren’t doing effective environmental scanning and engaging with key stakeholders and opinion leaders you may be totally out of touch with the realities of an issue that you deem colossally important to your business but the reality is that you have no chance of changing the outcome.
Every industry has these issues.
The automotive industry had catalytic converters and fleet fuel standards. The alcohol industry had minimum age and blood alcohol levels. The tobacco industry had public health and nicotine.
Typically lack of synchronization between societal, policy and company (or industry) beliefs occur when large companies talk primarily to themselves, ignore what opinion leaders have to say and do not acknowledge what the bulk of society already believes. If you are spending a lot of time, money and team on these types of issues you are doing a disservice to your shareholders, your employees and ultimately to your reputational standing.
This is not to say that in the realities of the issues bell curve that an issue cannot be revitalized or that it doesn’t need to be continuously managed.
A major change in technology, the marketplace or societal views can totally change the paradigm for an issue. A dormant issue can suddenly move back into the “Current” range of the bell curve as a result. Here again synchronization within the business, ongoing issues scanning, opinion research and other tools are critical to determining whether an issue in the Resolved phase can be shifted.
This is why corporations and trade associations must have a robust Issues Management process that includes ongoing monitoring of key stakeholders, opinion leaders and public officials; legislative tracking at all levels of government; trend analysis and opinion research that is directly tied to business priorities; and a direct link to C-level executives who meet with Corporate Affairs personnel on a regular basis to review business imperatives.
How Effective is Your Issues Scanning Process?
Are you spending a lot of money on an issue and getting little or no results?
Concurrently, if there is significant internal disagreement among your Corporate, Regulatory, Legal Affairs functions and other business units, there’s a strong likelihood that your Issues Management process is not particularly effective.
I have built three separate Issues Management Systems and was instrumental in helping to synchronize another existing Issues Management process with corporate priorities.
To discover a proven approach on how to develop and sustain a robust and cohesive Issues Management process, simply give me a call (203.727.7868) or send me an email and we can set up a time to discuss your needs.
I welcome the opportunity to meet with you to conduct an evaluation of the way your company or industry is managing its issues.
