📜 The best policy influencing strategy is...

The best influencing strategy? Americans

I have yet to find a better influencing strategy than bringing excited American policy or political types to talk to the government. It's very specifically Americans as well. They don’t have that ‘everything has to be miserable’ vibe – they're just confident and optimistic. You can introduce them and say ‘actually, here are some people who have done it, you could learn from them’... it’s really helpful. Yes, there’s the practical advice on whatever policy area it is, but it’s also the confidence building, that excitement about what they have done and how the UK could do it too. Ministers, advisers, and civil servants are so often told about what they are doing badly or wrong, instead of giving them that inspiration – that they can do good things and find solutions. It’s helpful on a deeply personal level, and builds up to the state doing good stuff too.

Good consultants tell clients when they are living in a bubble

One of the things that people think you can do, and bad consultancies do, is just add politics at the end. It doesn’t work - it has to be embedded from the start. You have to have that political judgement, to understand how the issue fits into the government’s narrative and the level of prioritisation they are giving it, and therefore how you are going to frame that issue or who you’re going to get to advocate for it. Businesses struggle with it - they often think very specifically about small regulatory issues, without being able to put the issue into the wider political picture. They live in a bubble.

Be clear on what you want

Let’s pick a random example: ‘We should invest in our creative industries.’ There are a couple of issues with that. First of all, ‘invest’ is an unbelievably broad term. Do you mean time? Do you mean resource? Do you mean loans? Do you mean guarantees? Do you mean grants? The second is that ‘creative industries’ is very broad. Is it video game development? Is it opera? If you can't get to that specificity of what you want the government to do , then you're not going to win. Obviously you care about your thing, but it’s important to situate that in what the government cares about and how you’re helping them achieve their objectives.

Where academia falls down

The worst meetings are when I've brought academics into the policy process and the academic speaks at the policy maker like they would speak at an academic conference. There is no willingness to treat them like human beings, or to understand that they only have 15 minutes, or even just to ask ‘What are you interested in?’ Instead, it’s ‘Here’s my thing’. Without those soft skills, nothing moves forward.

And on the subject of skills…

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Sanitised messaging will miss the mark

Policy people often push out these sanitised messages. They’re pushed out because they are the only messages you can get a lot of people to agree with. But they don’t really mean anything to the people they’re meant to target. They’ve become diplomatic texts, not pieces of communication. So for example, why does government communications talk about retrofitting. Who says “I want to retrofit my home”? No-one. We talk about home improvements or upgrades. And then we wonder why messages don’t resonate with people.

That sanitisation is a process and a research problem

People do a lot of focus groups and there are a couple of ways you can run them. The first is putting an issue to a group, and get people to talk about how they feel about it: what values they associate with it, and what they would like to see happen on that issue. The other is putting a message in and asking people what they think of it. And that relies on you to come up with that stimulus in the first place. A lot of message testing is refining what comms people already think that they want to say. Part of that is because the comms machines are massive. So many people will see and refine that one message, and it gets incubated in this closed space. The focus group is just one of the inputs, but should not be the final say. Instead we should try developing messages in a live space by having the conversation, rather than this sanitised message that you’re just going to tell people about.

Be the best read person in the room

That’s not just knowing the details, the ins and outs of how the energy market works, for example, but it’s knowing what has happened in other countries, what happened 40 years ago, what has happened on the welfare state etc. Unless you’re able to balance lessons from abroad, the past, and other policy areas, you’re constantly going to be reinventing the wheel and that is just not helpful. You will get caught out when you think you are suggesting something new that has been tried before, or hasn’t worked, or even worse, is already happening.

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