- Newton’s Third law of Motion: “For every action there will always be an equal and opposite reaction.”
If you pick up a cat by its tail it is going to try and scratch you. If you start swinging it around by its tail, its going to try and scratch your eyes out.
If you do something disagreeable to a government or politician, they are going to disagreeable to you. If, by accident or design, you go out of your way to annoy, and even piss off, a government or politician, they’ll bite back.
Instead, if you are agreeable, they’ll likely mirror nice behavior.
Too many interests that picking a fight with the very people drafting the proposals and making the decisions is a smart thing. It’s akin to trying to swing a cat over a garden fence.
Over my many years in sunny Brussels, I’ve seen some weird ads in the Politico and FT, or the recent spate of weird tweets by Tech giants, re directed to regulators and politicians that depicted being in bed with the anti-Christ. Each and every time, all it has managed to do is piss the very people off whose support you needed. The law of reciprocity states you’ll get back with equal force what you put in.
Your best bet is to be liked and trusted, and do that consistently for a long time. It helps to do this because, in Europe at least, you are not the negotiating table. You don’t set the rules. Your best hope is that you are seen as agreeable, and the people who are at the negotiating table choose to back you. If you have pissed any one of them off, the chances that anyone is going to annoy their peers is limited to nil.
2. ” To understand is to know what to do” Ludwig Wittgenstein.
You don’t tend to make mistakes when you do something you understand. You tend to make mistakes when you encounter your blind spots. When you are dealing with law and policy making, politicians and officials, most people encounter their blind spot. You likely know lots about your spatiality, your line of work, but if you don’t know about how laws and policies are really made, know the politicians and officials you are dealing with, you are going to make mistakes.
3. Simple not genius
Albert Einstein listed the 5 ascending levels of cognitive prowess. He thought that Simple beats genius.
You can put a genius forward to make your case in writing or in a meeting, but too often nobody is going to understand anything they say.
Instead try simple, communicate in layman’s English, and be understood.
4. Compound Interest
The most powerful force is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame – compound interest.
In lobbying it brings amazing returns over the long term. Over time, the people who matter respect and trust you, will give you the benefit of the doubt. I worked with the late Tony Long, who set up WWF’s European Policy Office. There was not a door to a Commissioner’s office that was not open. He was trusted across by all political parties.
A high degree of political trust is a daily effort. It needs to be genuine, built on reality, not sound bites and tweets. It can’t be intermittent. You can’t get bored, pull back, and then think you can return with your trust in tact weeks, months, or years later.
The challenge is people get bored easily and when they think people are not noticing, stop the hard work, and even worse, do something out of sync with what they way saying. If you choose to do this, the trust people have you will evaporate very fast. It will take a long time to get back to where you were.
5. How you can easily create trust
It is easy to create and maintain trust.
All you need to do to get their support is to pay attention, listen to your key communities, show them respect, give them meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment. Show that they matter to you. And, you have to go first.
You will be get back whatever you put out there. If you go in with a smile and a good morning, it is likely you are going to the same back. If you go out with disdain, you are going to disdain thrown back at you. And, if you go in with nothingness, that’s what you are likely going to get back.
6. Don’t go in fighting
A lot of people think it makes sense to spend your time fighting the Commission, the Member States and the European Parliament. They think they’ll win.
I don’t think this works, and have never seen it work. It’s not just because I come from N.Ireland.
There is an alternative. Go in positive, go in first, and go in with a real solution that can be co-opted, and be patient and constant. As a rule of thumb, this takes 6-12 months of constant testing by others to see if there are any holes in what you are putting forward, any weak spots.
Most people think investing 6-12 months of their lives to be trusted is too long and too much effort. The alternative is that you are going to spend all your timing fighting people, and knowing that you are not going to win.
7. How to get win-wins
What you want to work to is high political returns, with low risk, over a long duration. You are working for a long term win-win relationship. Few are there, it is a great place to be.
It is easy to get there. To get there all you have to do is understand the way someone’s behaving, you just need to see the world as they see it. And, to get them to change, all you have to do is change how they see the world.
The secret to long term success is to see through the eyes of other important counterparty groups and make sure that everything you do is structured in a such a way to be win-with them. That’s likely going to be regulators, politicians, your community, customers and NGOs.
When you can see through their eyes of all the groups, and understand their needs, their aspirations, their insecurities and their time horizons, you’ll have no blind spots. And, with no blind spots, you are not going to have any blind spots.