Prioritization: The Foundation for Successful Public Affairs
By Dr. Alan Hardacre & Dr. Paul Shotton
Prioritization is the first step of our 7-step method and it is foundational to everything you do. Get this right and you will set yourself up for success. Get this wrong, and you are setting yourself up for failure from the very beginning. As a Japanese company with global operations are you capturing and prioritizing all the risks and opportunities in your policy environment? As a foreign company looking to expand into Japan, are you analyzing and selectively choosing your engagements into this new market? Are you then building strategies and reporting aligned to what is most commercially important to you? Let’s look at this in more detail.
Most Public Affairs practitioners have issues with prioritization. Often, we have too many issues and too many competing priorities, and invariably insufficient time or resources to deal with even half of them. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Identifying, analyzing, and selecting priority issues is akin to building your home on solid foundations; the campaigns you build require strong foundations in the form of a limited list of carefully selected priorities. In short, you cannot succeed in advocacy without being able to identify and manage a targeted list of priorities. If you have a global, or even regional, footprint this becomes even more important.
Prioritization is first and foremost a critical thinking process that optimizes your advocacy strategy. It focuses you on the right things at the right time so you can make the biggest impact for your organization. It sets up your monitoring, reporting and campaigns. It is your foundation. It also ensures that you are adaptable to feedback. An often overlooked, but critical, element of prioritizing is that it requires hard choices, notably on what you will not do and/or what you will delegate to others. Prioritization develops strategic understanding around what are the impacts, what are the actions, what are the activities, and how much resource to allocate to what. Last but, far from least, prioritization ensures you are able establish a clear link between your organization and advocacy priorities. Building such a process requires you to meaningfully engage with your organization to understand what really matters and makes a difference. The prioritization process should deliver priorities, but also SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives with measurable KPIs.
Impact Analysis of Priorities
First, we have priorities. Priorities require rigorous impact analysis covering, at a minimum, potential impacts on your organization’s revenue and regulatory environment from external developments. This starts with a monitoring-mapping exercise to understand what is happening and what could impact your organization (positively and negatively). You need to know what a policy could mean for your organization so you can then rank it. Impact analysis only works if you have carefully selected indicators and an effective means of measuring them. We will come to this in a second. Alongside indicators, you will need to find a process for robust dialogue within your organization. Some companies create dedicated committees to do this and others run this in their executive committee. This dialogue should seek to balance commercially ranked policy issues with the likelihood each will happen and your ability to influence them (which in turn can depend on your resources). This allows you to define aligned strategies behind common priorities that allocate resources effectively in relation to the commercial importance of what you are facing. Dialogue builds support from within your organization which is crucial to longer-term success.
So, what steps should you take when prioritizing?
You need to have a format or tool to gather and organize key information from your business. This can simple when looking at one country – and obviously more complex if you are covering many markets. In gathering information for each identified issue, you should measure at least the three following indicators:
Impact: What will be the commercial / regulatory impact of an issue?
Likelihood-Time: What is the likelihood it will happen? / When is it likely to happen?
Influence: What are our chances of influencing it?
The impact analysis data should then be mapped out visually. For example, using our Excel template prioritization map we can generate the matrices below:
Use our free tool to make your own prioritization visual: https://www.advocacystrategy.com/approach/step-1-prioritise/
If you take this one step further – as we have here – you get a real feel for the potential impact of different issues for your organization. Your prioritization delivers a clear overview for you;
Undertaking such a rigorous impact analysis of your key issues and creating accompanying visuals will strengthen discussions within your organization and ensure they are more fact-based and more aligned to commercial needs. Whether you are managing a global footprint from Tokyo or looking to enter Japan, it will allow you to focus on what is most important – and what needs to be included in your reporting. It will also facilitate decision-making on where to invest resources and energy as well as help you decide which issues you want to drive and which ones you feel can be managed locally by, for example, Trade Associations.
Prioritization analysis must often consider factors specific to the local environment. In Japan, for example, public affairs practitioners should anticipate longer timelines, different forms of stakeholder engagement, and more severe consequences associated with reputational risk. In a highly codified society like Japan, understanding when to lean in and when to let things simmer is a key aspect in prioritization. In cases where these unique factors are particularly significant, the expertise of public affairs actors experienced in working in these environments can be invaluable to successful prioritization. Gemini Group provides precisely this kind of know-how when it comes to Japan.
For successful issue prioritization we propose three golden rules:
Get the right internal process with key stakeholders to ensure you have full alignment firstly on what the impacts would be and secondly on where the focus should go;
When you complete the process try to focus your resources on no more than three to five big proactive must-win battles (depending on your resources). You can obviously monitor and react to much more – but be mindful of not focusing on too much at once;
Review your priorities every three to six months to, amongst others, make sure they are still aligned with your commercial needs and organizational priorities.
Turning Priorities into Objectives
Now, secondly, a prioritization process should then translate priorities into objectives. This is all about HOW you will deliver the objective that you have aligned with your organization. The HOW focuses on the tactics and activities to influence and deliver the priorities you have agreed. The HOW is often less important to your business (who are focused on the WHAT). You need to break this down into solid Public Affairs objectives that show how you intend to deliver the outcome you have focused on – and many critical aspects of your work can be measured, followed, evaluated and reported on as you look to demonstrate that you are delivering in your work. It is about understanding where you are succeeding and where you need to improve (for the future).
All advocacy activity and campaigns require well-thought-out, stress-tested, internally aligned, and externally realistic objectives. Setting objectives is a planning process. There are two cornerstones to defining objectives for advocacy success. Firstly, you must translate priorities into SMART objectives with accompanying KPIs. Secondly, you must ensure these are aligned and cascaded so everyone knows what they are doing and when they are doing it.
Like prioritization, setting objectives, as well as outcomes and outputs, is sensitive to context – in other words, the setting in which you are acting matters. Expectations for outcomes will differ based on the environment, as will the efficacy of outputs. Meetings in Japan, for example, can be a double-edged sword: meeting with the right stakeholders is critical to advancing an issue, but meetings can also result in institutionalized proceduralism that bogs down progress. Navigating through the facets of honne and tatemae (i.e. inner held beliefs and outward facing perspectives) and parsing through polite conversation to comprehend what is truly being discussed, comes from on-the-ground experience. Knowing which outputs will effectively work toward realizing outcomes is crucial to setting realistic objectives. If you are working across, say the APAC region, you will need to build in this sensitivity to your local objectives because what works as an objective in one country may not work in another.
We strongly believe that Japanese companies can deliver more successful advocacy, from Japan and across their global footprint, with these robust foundations: priorities, objectives and KPIs. The same can be said for firms looking to expand into the Japanese market. Setting and agreeing clear priorities (with mechanisms to adapt) will give a clearer commercial view of risk and opportunity and allow for better focus on reporting on what matters the most. Building realistic yet challenging SMART objectives will then help you manage expectations and maintain clarity on pathways to success. We all have limited resources so we need to use them wisely on priorities that will have the greatest impact for our organization.
For Japanese companies and new entrants into the Japanese market our main recommendations for prioritization are:
Make sure you have a robust process to identify, analyze and order your priorities. Try our free tools and exercises on priority mapping including our excellent heat map. You will need a good internal dialogue to do this.
Look to visualize your priorities. This is crucial to communicating them to your team and organization. Visualizations keep you focused and make it easier to explain to others.
Consider how you delegate, or deliver, your priorities through trade associations, consultants, or other partners you work with. Resources are limited, focus is essential, and there is strength in numbers.
Use your priorities and objectives as a basis for your Public Affairs planning process – linking strongly to the reporting processes you have in place. Consider using a scoreboard or some form of dashboard to ensure you have a shared overview of the strategy and progress.
In future posts we’ll be exploring each of the subsequent 7 steps to outline how this structured approach can help Japanese companies and firms exploring the Japanese market get more value from their local and global Public Affairs.
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About the Authors
Dr. Alan Hardacre is a renowned expert in Advocacy and Public Affairs, specializing in crafting and delivering top-tier public affairs strategies. With a background as Director of Group Corporate Affairs at Imperial Brands, he brings extensive consulting experience to clients like CropLife Africa & Middle East and the European Tyre and Rubber Manufacturers Association. Alan holds a PhD in International Economic and Political Relations from Loughborough University.
Dr. Paul Shotton is co-founder of Advocacy Strategy and Advocacy Academy in Brussels and is dedicated to advancing the professionalization of advocacy practice through innovation and bridging research with practice. With over two decades of experience in Brussels, London, and The Hague, Paul has worked across media, trade associations, companies, NGOs, and academia. His passion for exploring advocacy with professionals and students has driven his work in structuring the advocacy process and gathering best practices. He holds a PhD in Information and communication science from the University of Nancy II in France.