🪤 The trap many comms people fall into

“There are just some kind of men,” Miss Maudie tells Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, “who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”

If anything, the problem is the other way around in communications. We are so busy worrying about what happens today—Stephen talks about our yearning for the ‘adrenaline hit’ of ‘shiny’ media hits—that we ignore the ‘next world’, the longer-term ramifications of those actions. Bell Pottinger comes to mind.

Arguably Bell Pottinger are the exception: more often than not, it isn’t that our work has negative long-term ramifications, but that it has none. We chased the shiny, got the shiny, and everyone promptly forgot about it.

Why do we have this short-term, tactical focus? Stephen’s contention is that it starts with how we get into the communications industry: we are thrown into the job and do not take the time to study the theoretical underpinnings of what we are doing.

Stephen’s argument is that we all should. And as someone who has built and sold two communications businesses, been a President of the CIPR, and currently advises the leadership of several others, maybe we should listen.

Tom

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Strategic communications as a corruption of the public sphere

If you abstract Habermas’ argument to its limit, absolutely, the stratcomms practice is a corruption of the public sphere. His argument is a call to action to think about and consider your own position within society and the organisation that you are working with and the power you have.

Ultimately, he is describing a power imbalance between the organisation and the public. In this sense he views communication as a mercenary force used by an organisation to flood a sphere with its own perspective to win an argument. 

Nonprofits are not immune to power dynamics and individual bias

Well, everyone thinks they’re on the side of good, don't they? It’s a bias built in the human psyche. So of course you're going to make the argument that what you’re doing has an economic or social purpose. 

If you are a nonprofit or charity driving for change to improve society, I don’t think that’s too far from where Habermas was talking about communicative action as a means of engaging with the public: listening, responding to its needs, and then developing a position.

But there are charities that take extreme positions and disruptive approaches to communication in the public sphere. Some, like Greenpeace, are literally disruptive. So yeah, it’s a range. Of course it is. But what Habermas asks us to do is think about that and sit with that discomfort.

Comms practitioners lack academic reflexivity

The problem is that I don’t think many communications practitioners think about this stuff at all.

If they do, it’s usually from a dismissive or hostile point of view. Always politely of course, but it’s: ‘We're busy people. We’re doing a job. And academia doesn’t have a perspective that fits with the practical day-to-day of what we do.’

But actually it does. It’s about legitimacy. It’s about power.

Practitioners fall into public affairs and public relations. They usually come from an arts background, and they’re not formally prepared for communications or trained in any way as you might be for law or for finance. When they get into the comms role, the role is all about doing, so the intellectual components are never examined.

If that’s you, go and do a professional qualification. I recently created the Communications Management and Leadership course as a bridge between contemporary communications and management theory and practice for that purpose.

It’s not just practitioners…

The divide between practice and academic theory is on both sides, by the way. It’s really bizarre how there are a whole bunch of scholars who seldom engage with practitioners.

Betteke van Ruler wrote a great essay 25 years ago arguing that practitioners are from Mars, scholars are from Venus. We are different people. We look different. We don’t operate in the same spaces. We don’t have the same media. We don’t have shared events. It’s two completely separate worlds.

The anti-intellectual pragmatism of communications, and its downside

Practitioners are practical, busy people. We are solution-focused. This is partly why we’ve been labeled as a tactical function, because typically as a practitioner you don’t unpick the issue and think about how you might solve it strategically–you go straight to the answer instead.

And there lies the problem: lots of practitioners don’t understand the strategy, because they haven’t done the hard work. Some of us are making this real effort to push into management at the moment, and that starts with doing the thinking to get the credibility so you can.

Understand the role that communications plays within an organisation’s strategic objectives. Do that deep, strategic thinking. And then go and have the conversation. Don’t turn up with tactics to a strategy fight.

Clients are part of the problem

Organisations are driven by quarterly goals, sometimes shorter. Clients respond to this and often want you to focus on the here and now, getting the five media hits or especially that one that will get under the minister’s nose... it’s shiny and you can show what you’re doing.

But that’s often not where change happens. Investing in relationships over a long-period of time… yes, it takes forever, is nowhere near as exciting to do and you don’t get the adrenaline hit, but that is how you get most structural things done.

Communicative action in practice

That long-term thinking requires you to do the reading and keep your ideas sharp.

One of the things I've tried to do as part of my study [Stephen is in the midst of a PhD] is find the gold hidden behind academic paywalls and bring it into practice. Because even if you can get your hands on it, half of it is so dense and so ideas just don’t flow when you read it.

I turn up every week on Substack; I analyse something and try to take a critical perspective of it. Part of it is just the discipline of reading more and engaging with ideas. Part of it is keeping my literature fresh.

Substack has brought me an academic and research audience who push out their ideas through it, and comms people who want to operate at management level and see the value of knowledge moving back and forth.

It’s Habermas’ theory of communicative action in play.

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