Lobbyists need to embrace reality

Ray Dalio has shared the principles that made him a successful businessman.

A lobbyist will learn a lot from this book or this one.

“Good decision will reward you with good outcomes and bad decisions will hurt you’.

Those bad decisions are easy to spot. They are like sugar. They give you a short term hit and make you feel good. In the medium and long term, they came back to bite you.

You are going to make a lot of mistakes. That’s a good thing. You just need to learn from those mistakes. If being rude and lacking details does not work, try the alternative, and see if civility and being prepared works.

It helps to know how (political) reality works. You need to be a hyperrealist.

Dreaming that political parties who have never backed you are just about to vote for you tends to be wishful thinking.

Imagining that you have a majority on your side, when you are just listening to your clique of allies, is going to lead to political failure.

It’s likely that you are not going to like the truth, but that does not matter.  Not winning is worse.

Dalio lays out a 5 – step process.

Step 1: Goals – “Know your goals and run after them …You can’t have everything you want, so you need to make some decisions about your priorities”.

The hard truth is that you can’t have it all. You can’t run a pan-European communications campaign with advertisements in the FT and the Economist on €25K annual budget.

You can’t fight on all fronts at the same time. It has a track record of leading to defeat. So focus.

Be very clear about what you want. Don’t set goals that are tantamount to walking on water.

When you have reached the goal, don’t change your mind.

You need to be realistic about how many votes you can win. If three quarters of the Member States and European Parliament have voted against you on a similar issue, don’t think that’s going to change the second time around.

Step 2: Problems – “To evolve, you need to identify them and not tolerate them”

You need to know what the problems really are.

Not winning a vote often reveals you have deeper problems than you thought you had. It can mean that not only did politicians not back you on that vote, but they just don’t trust you at all, and are unlikely to back you on anything.

That’s useful to learn. It means you can focus on getting support from politicians who may be swayed. Or, you can work on the core problem, politicians not trusting you.

Step 3: Diagnosis – “… diagnose these problems to get at their roots causes”

Getting to the root causes is not easy. You’ll often block yourself from dealing with reality.

You need to be honest about the root causes. If you think the cause of the problem is ‘x’ and the people who decide know it is ‘y’, you are going to spend a small fortune chasing after something that’s never going to happen.

For example, if the original legislation does allow for what you want, you won’t be able to get it pushed through the back door of secondary legislation. That door is shut.

You need to be realistic about how many votes you can win. If three quarters of the Member States and European Parliament have voted against you on a similar issue, don’t think that’s going to change the second time around.

Step 4: Design – “design plans to get around the problem that is standing in the way of your progress”.

You have worked out steps 1, 2, and 3, you need to work out a plan to get around the problem.

Unless you have perfect memory recall, write it down. There is something about putting your thoughts down on paper that expose the strengths and weakness.

Most lobbyists skip this part. They think a powerpoint a is a well-designed plan. It is not.

Step 5: Do it – “ execute those designs, pushing yourself to do what’s needed”.

Here is the hard part.  You need to execute. These are internal meetings, a modern form of belly-button gazing. Twiddling with belly button fluff is not action.

Your biggest challenge is your ego and your many blind spots.

Keep away from giving advice beyond a very few issues. Bring in experts who can fill in your many blind spots.  It’s good to have your assumptions tested by experts,  and see if your assumptions are wrong or right.

Work with the ‘most thoughtful people who disagree with you … to see through their eyes and have them see through mine  … so that we could together find what’s true and how to deal with it”.

Meetings dominated by self-confirmation bias are signals that your chances of success are low.  Bring in people who don’t agree with you to find out how to deal with the real problem.