In pitches a lot of potential clients want you to be an expert in their area. Many want you to know as much, if not more, about their issue than they do.
I always found this strange. After all, you only need to use a lobbyist if you want to get a piece of law on/off the statute books and persuade others to back a certain policy outcome. You are not brought them into design a new product or something useful.
The Half Life of Knowledge
The real question a client really should ask, but few hardly ever do, is the ability of the lobbyist to learn a new issue quickly. As the half life of knowledge gets shorter, what you learned in your degree becomes outdated quickly. Even if you could remember perfectly everything you were taught – and you can’t – much of what you learned when you at university becomes outdated and often wrong quickly. So even if your lobbyist has a degree in an area linked to the client’s issue, what they really know is going to be out of date very quickly.
If you are serious about your area you need to keep up to date. That takes about 10-20 hours a week. It’s a tall order for many.
How to keep up to date
There are ways for anyone to get to understand an area quickly and easily.
Step 1 – Reading the essentials
First, there are core books in any area that explain the area.
In my day to day life, I work across three fields: fisheries, chemicals, and regulation. I did not start off in any of them. Fisheries is more a vocation
Chemical policy
For anyone working on chemicals policy, you can learn a lot about what you need to know from 3 books:
- Edith Efron:Apocalyptics
- Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
- Rafael Cayuela Valencia: The Future of the Chemical Industry by 2050
From these books you’ll learn the history and possible future of industry. You will understand dose response curves, half life, and that the dose does not always make the poison.
Fisheries
For fisheries, you can get up to speed by reading:
- Charles Clover: The End of the Line
- Callum Roberts: The Unnatural History of the Sea
- Ragnar Arnason: Sunken Billions
Regulation
For Regulation, I recommend:
- Cass Sunstein: Risk and Reason – Safety, Law and the Environment
- John W.Kingdon: Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies
To be fair, just read anything by Cass Sunstein.
Step 2: How to learn what you read
2nd, you need a mental technique to learn and retain this.
The Feynman technique is good. This video explains it.
A lobbyist does not have to be an expert in the area they are advising on. The good lobbyist needs to be a master of the legislative, policy and political process. All they have to do is understand the issues up to the level that is needed and a way to learn things quickly. They need to be able to communicate the issue clearly to the people making and influencing the decision. It is likely that they have been called in because the experts find that hard to do.