Reconciliation: An important aspect of public relations’ contribution to high level decision-making

It has been striking how public relations has emerged over recent years as a significant contributor to decision-making on some of the major issues of the day.

These have included pandemic management, the challenges around trying to manage and mitigate the effects of climate change, the consequences of international relations and conflict and their effects on economic development around the world.

Some examples:

• A report for the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations prepared by Stephen Waddington showed how public relations had been called to assist pandemic management and had grown in importance as the pandemic progressed
• In a keynote speech to the 30th annual meeting of the BledCom international public relations research symposium in July this year, CIPR president Steve Shepperson-Smith outlined the importance of public relations in helping to meet the UN Sustainable Development goals, going on to describe the role of public relations in contributing to environmental, social and governance requirements bearing on modern businesses, including his own company, Vodafone
• Current political practises and international conflict have raised the issues of disinformation and misinformation in public debate and understanding.  These issues call into question the role of public relations, as a positive and possibly negative practice in the management of public information.
   

As with cliches about the constancy of change, we have also learned to live with expressions that express the uncertainties of the modern world, ‘radical uncertainty’ or an environment for decision-making which is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

The uncertainty facing decision-makers is the territory of public relations.  Its interests are in the social environment in which organisations and clients served operate. And one of the attractions of working in public relations is that the practice develops as the challenges faced evolve in complexity.

Recent discussions at conferences such as this year’s International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication and the BledCom meeting have reemphasised that public relations has been too much focused on output, rather than on impact and value, and that there is a need to become much more audience centric – where this involves more listening and more attention to relations with stakeholders.

In dealing with issues, too much emphasis now is placed on what needs to be done to stakeholders to manage through to solutions to complex problems.

Some examples of this are found in the current communication plan presented recently as a guide to the workings of the UK Government Communications Service.

In the plan for 2023 and 2024, the activities of the service are tied closely to government priorities, which take on the big issues of the day such as inflation and cost of living pressures, demands on health services and immigration.

Measurement of progress towards meeting communication objectives will, in the plan, be in terms of the extent to which people have been encouraged to think differently, intend to act differently, or act differently.

While not dismissing the importance of these measures, there is a part of the picture which is missing, and which public relations practitioners can add to decision-making and planning processes.

Broadening consideration of stakeholders and their interests

What is missing is a consideration of stakeholder interests.

A recent development in business practice is an explicit commitment to meeting the interests – as far as this is possible – of a broad range of stakeholders.

In 2019, a large group of CEOs with some of the United States’ largest corporations making up the Business Roundtable committed themselves to a new statement of priorities.  Where previously they had been committed to realising value for shareholders, their new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation stated that ‘companies should serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate.”

It’s a clear commitment to recognize and respond to the interests of the groups with which a corporation deals.  It echoes earlier work done in the UK by the Tomorrow’s Company business think tank.  With that, it’s an important signpost to a significant area of work for public relations practice.

In public relations practice, there is a perspective on the social environment in which an organisation or client operates. Concerns are for relationships with important groups, internal and external, their thinking, attitudes, and behaviour.

More and more sophisticated approaches to understanding their behaviour and what might influence behaviour are becoming available to practitioners, aided by technological innovations, and developing skills in data analysis.

Several questions asked of a map of stakeholder relations have to do with the current state of relationships, how they need to develop over time if objectives are to be realised, what might disrupt relationships and what relationships ought to be.

Research techniques, communication, horizon-scanning and ethical analyses are some of the approaches that can be used to help decide on and implement practical courses of action.
 

Reconciliation of interests

To these techniques can be added an analysis of interests at work and consideration of how interests can be reconciled – where possible, and where they cannot how conflicts of interest can be managed, or interests can be disregarded.

Some years ago, a group of MBA students at City University in London worked on a case study examining the current situation of one of the UK’s leading banks.  Then, as now, the banks were questioned on their business practices such as charging high interest rates to borrowers, while not allowing savers to benefit from more generous interest rates on savings.

The bank in the study had a poor reputation partly because of these practices and for other reasons.  At the time of the case study, they were contemplating closure of many branches in smaller centres, depriving people in those areas of easily accessible banking services.

Reconciling interests was impossible.  The bank believed its commercial interests would be met through the cost savings that would follow closing the branches.  The communities’ interests in accessible banking services would not be met, despite protests raised by local political representatives, whose interests also lay in helping the local communities and economies with access to facilities.

In this case, the bank could not reconcile the interests at work, and had to live with the further reputational damage that followed their decision to go ahead with the branch closures.

The case serves to illustrate what will be likely to show up in any analysis of interests at work around an issue or set of organisational or other plans – that interests can only be reconciled up to a point.  Where they cannot be, careful arguments or explanations need to be developed as to why they cannot be reconciled.

Early analysis of the impact of the Business Roundtable’s new statement of corporate purpose suggests that where organisations are paying closer attention to meeting the interests of a wider range of stakeholders, they show better results than organisation not following the same guidelines.

The practical implications of looking explicitly at the reconciliation of interests mean that advice given – to clients and employing organisations – will be more thorough and will add to risk assessments by suggesting where arguments need to be prepared where interests are not being met.

In issues management, assessments will be made of the likely progress of dealing with the consequences of the emergence of issues into public debate.  Preparation is made for these through the preparation of positions on issues.  An analysis of interests at work and how they might be reconciled (or not) is an obvious complement to this preparation.

Looking beyond issues management, the development of any objectives might be accompanied by an analysis of the interests that stakeholders might have in the objectives and plans to meet them, and how far these might be reconciled around the objectives and plans.

There are several important possibilities for public relations practitioners in what is being discussed here:

First, it extends the analytical techniques they can bring to bear on the problems they are presented with in practice.

Second, it expands the advice that can be given to decision-makers and increases the value of their advice. 

Third, it requires deeper understanding of groups of importance, taking understanding beyond seeing groups as audiences to be talked to and brought around to ways of behaving, to seeing them as having interests to be heard and responded to.

Finally, it suggests ways in which practitioners and the professional associations they are part of can develop approaches to significant social issues, problems and developments which add to understanding of the interests involved and how they may be reconciled.  Practitioners can move on from being facilitators of and in relationships, to reconciling interests at work in those relationships.