If you are serious about influencing public policy decisions, you need to plant some acorns.
You’ll copy the forester. You’ll plant a few ideas, or as we will call them, acorns, that can be harvested at the right time to influence decisions in the right direction.
If you plant an idea, the seed needs to land on fertile ground.
The ground needs to be nourished. The growth of the acorn checked on from time to time.
It can’t be planted where there is too little or too much light. I can’t be planted in poor soil. I can’t be planted with too many other saplings. They’ll just divert nourishment and light away and kill it off.
When you plant the acorn well, the idea will be harvested at just the right moment by the right people.
As a lobbyist, you need a long time horizon. Good ideas are not taken up immediately. You need to have patience to plan an idea and see it growth before it is harvested.
You need a travel budget to visit the places and people who make the decisions you are looking to influence. If you plant good ideas where decision makers and influencers never visit, you are missing an opportunity.
You need a budget to plant the seeds. A well nourished idea needs evidence and studies to support it. The best nutrition is evidence from world-leading academic experts. A clear paper from experts from a world class university is more valuable than any internal musings.
You need to plant the ideas ahead of time. An acorn does not grow into a sturdy oak tree in a day. You need to work back from when the oak is best to be harvested before planting the acorn.
You need to let political decision-makers and influencers that the idea and solution exists. This needs to be on the record. If you don’t, they can’t use it.
In Brussels, this is a rare. Most throw down many acorns on barren soil, late in the day, with little nourishment. The hope that a jolt of nitrogen from 2 lines in politico or euractiv will provide the needed ‘idea’ and ‘solution’ never works. Often, the stunted tree is chopped down after the political decision has been made, and the presence of the forest of solutions never brought to the people making decisions.
As usual Aaron, thanks for your wisdom!
So things do not change?
You may have written it already but I would be interested in your thoughts on why this is not happening. Why so many organisations do not understand that lobbying is a long-term endeavor? Or worse, why, even when they understand it, they don’t act accordingly.
Thanks!
I think it is because our natural default preference is “status quo” or “stasis”. This being the case, the idea of spending the next 5 to 10 years, putting in the time and resources to help the idea flourish and grow, and get taken up, is alien. I’ve been fortunate to work for or paid by some who thought it was a good idea, had the money to finance it, and had a preference for the risks involved.