SJK Communications Inc.

Fellow CCM member, Stephen Kasser Ph.D., talks to The LEAN Communicator about re-engineenng the communications process.

In particular, he describes the communications-driven issues management system he and an associate designed, installed and managed several years ago at an electric utility.

Over time, the system has evolved, including becoming software driven. It is now used for PR and marketing too.

Stephen explains the system's origins.

"While the company did an excellent job in communications, new management in Corporate Communications believed they still needed a single issues management system to tie everything together.

Not finding one in the marketplace, we were asked to invent one. This meant defining and mapping the relationships between inputs, processes, procedures and outputs."

The systems approach helped solve "the binder gathering dust on the shelf" problem.

Communicators in the corporate office and the field had been developing many stand-alone linear communication plans for specific events and campaigns.

The plans were effective for their specific purpose. However, they not always refiected the organization's complete communications situation. Management believed the roll-up to the macro level wasn't adequate.

The challenges were numerous, especially on the stakeholder front. The company had many departments with a variety of stakeholders and publics.

Furthermore, the relationships between employee and public communications were becoming more complex. In many ways, employees of a utility are one of the many publics the organization services.Yet, employees are also ambassadors to various stakeholder groups.

Stephen and his associates mapped all of these relationships as part of their model. They also included a planning tool and a dashboard to assess results.

They developed procedures for updating the model on an ongoing basis too. This allowed them to incorporate new inputs. They made revisions based on results.

These elements encouraged a "Ieam as you go" mindset, which supports the continual improvement process philosophy of LEAN.

The regular updating kept the model current. The updating also helped keep the planning process alive for implementations and feedback.

Immediately, they started experiencing these expected benefits:

• No surprises from emerging issues because individuals and stakeholder groups were asked to weigh in on all potential situations.
• The regular scheduled feedback from representatives of employee and public groups caused emolovees and communitv groups to feel listened to and empowered.
• More coherent, unified and stronger messaging to all audiences. The system helped the communicators be better prepared, using more organized research results.
• Clearer, more concise guidelines for the organization's professional communicators. This helped them develop more consistent intemal and extemal communications.

In addition, they enjoyed some unexpected and important benefits:

• Engineering, finance and other departments that were used to thinking in systems terms gained a greater respect for the company's communicators.
• Employees who were included in the earty stages of communication and policy planning developed a greater sense of participation and ownership in the company's communications.

As with many systems, spending time up front structuring the communication processes paid off repeatedly later,

Stephen commented. "We saw more efficiency and less redundancy. Individuals had more dialogue. Our messages were more powerful with fewer false starts."

Even better, the system orientation did not "dehumanize" the communication process. Quite the contrary. The systematization of routine matters made room for more creativity.

Like many systems, this one involved the deployment of significant resources up front, resulting in significant ongoing benefits later. 

However, just thinking about your overall communications in systems terms can be extremely helpful, Stephen counsels.

The LEAN Communicator agrees. In fact, the first step of The 5-Step LEAN Communications System is to adopt a new way of thinking, a LEAN mindset.

For more information about Stephen's work, email him at skasser@sjkcommunications.com.

The communications profession has a standard method when it comes to planning processes and determining what messages and media work best for clients or organizations in terms of communicating with, and listening to employees, customers, shareholders, and the public and other stakeholders.

Current View

Generally, whether communication planning is portrayed as a four-step or a nine-step process or something in-between, it involves researching existing opinions, setting goals, writing a communication plan to achieve the goals, implementing the plan, and then assessing the results.

Any important event or circumstance – such as a merger or acquisition, or a series of layoffs – generally deserves its own communication plan.

Because of today’s emphasis on proving the bottom-line value of communications, the research and assessment phases may have taken on more importance recently; meaning more employee, customer and public opinion surveys; more focus panels, and a search for new ways to listen to employee opinion - all good things.

While this linear process, complete with more research, works well for individual campaigns, it sometimes falters when the plan is required to reflect an organization’s complete employee communications situation – particularly in a company with many divisions and departments, some of which might exist in foreign cultures. This is further complicated when the relationships between employee and public communications become more complex; in many ways, employees are a part of the public’s an organization serves.

Sometimes, it is simply a matter of there being too much information for such a linear planning process to handle. In these cases, often several plans are generated. But with limited staffing to handle all of them, the plans that are not absolutely top priority may not get the ongoing attention they require. Also, the relationships between the various plans are not always clear, so organizational communication is not always consistent.

Solutions & Benefits

A solution we found useful at a major utility was to regard the organization’s complete communications situation as a system, which meant attempting to define and map out the relationships between inputs, processes, procedures and outputs.

To help define these relationships we created a model of the system to be used as a planning tool and dashboard to assess results. We developed procedures for updating the model weekly as new inputs arrived and new results occurred - to keep it current, and to keep the planning process alive during the implementation and feedback processes.

Expected benefits from the start were:

1. No surprises from emerging issues, since all potential situations were explored with the people concerned with them on a regular basis.
2. Feedback from employee and public groups was scheduled and expected, so employees felt "listened to" and empowered.
3. Messages to all audiences, including employees, became more coherent and unified and therefore more powerful because the research results are more highly organized.
4. The approach enabled employees to speak with one voice; and to know when they could go public and when they should defer to communications professionals. In this era of social media, well-informed employees are more important than ever.
5. Communicators received better and more concise guidance in terms of developing employee communications as well as external communications; therefore more consistency and fewer false starts and off-target campaign proposals.

Some unexpected but important benefits were:

1. Other departments which have been used to thinking in systems methodology gained a greater respect for the company's communicators.
2. Employee and public stakeholder groups felt included in the early stages of communication planning and, eventually, even policy planning; they developed a greater sense of participation and ownership in the company.
3. Even external stakeholder groups were given an opportunity to participate in constructive dialog and they, too, develop a greater knowledge and understanding of the company and its operations, and something of a sense of ownership. Improved attitudes on the part of external groups became helpful to employees in their day-to-day communications outside the company.

Conclusion

As with many systems approaches, time spent up front in structuring the communication processes paid off repeatedly. Things simply worked better: more efficiency with less redundancy, more dialog and less confrontation, more power in terms of messages and fewer false starts.

This higher level of organizational planning does not "dehumanize" the communication process. Quite the contrary. The systematization of routine matters made room for more creativity.

The approach has since been applied to a variety of communication situations, always with success. It has evolved, and now resides in a user-friendly software program.

It took us about a year to achieve our initial design and several additional months to transit the system to a software package, so we recommend, as with any system, allowing sufficient time to build your system.

However, just thinking about your overall communications in systems terms can be extremely helpful. The key is to think in terms of flow of information, similar to the way an accounting system regulates the flow of resources. Whether you apply specific methods such as those we have discussed to facilitate this kind of planning, or simply change your thinking, the power of the results may surprise you.

Stephen J. Kasser, PhD., Designed, installed and managed the nation’s first communications driven issues management system at a major utility. He has since used this technology to generate systems-based communication programs for a variety of organizations, from SMBs to Fortune 100s. For more information, please call 908-797-6880 or email skasser@sjkcommunications.com.

by Stephen J. Kasser, Ph.D.

(The four keys were, rightly so, Interaction, Integrity, Integration and Innovation. The section on innovation featured a call for "new technologies" in management, particularly management communications, by Gary Hamel, director of the Management Lab, in an article in the Harvard Business Review. Hamel states that while managers today face a new set of problems, we're still mostly structured in a way that was meant to address the old ones! This is Dr. Kasser's repsonse.)

1. While these sentiments [about interaction, integrity, integration and innovation] are admirable and timely, it’s interesting to see [as Gary Hamel implies] that mainstream PR management appears just now to be dealing with what behavioral scientists and systems thinkers involved in PR discovered years ago — that a highly organized, systematic approach to content management was the key to success.

2. These methods worked in a slower world but were surprisingly not widely used because slow turnaround times and the domination of traditional media offered a situation more tolerant of mistakes.

3. Such approaches will probably be more universally adapted now that the communication turnaround has sped up and the formation of stakeholder groups is more rapid and more flexible.

4. But having the strategy driven by the current media technology is still letting the tail wag the dog. It is still in the organization and formation of content / messages where organization and agencies succeed or fail regardless of the central or dispersed control of media and the quickness of message turnaround.

5. The quicker turnaround makes it even more important than ever to be organized and systematic in this area. But it seems that, while the social media situation is making people pay more attention to stakeholder input, it has also sustained the ready-fire-aim approach that didn’t work in the past, and doesn’t work now. -- SK, Ph.D.