Most organisations, both NGOs and corporate, think that issue expertise is key to success in campaigning and lobbying. They hire for it. It seems if you have a PhD in the matter, you’ll be a persuasive advocate
It helps explain why most campaign and lobby efforts fail. Few experts are good at teaching. Anyone who has gone to university will know that many of the best research academics are not the best at explaining the subject.
I’ve worked with 3 people over the last 25 years who have mastered lobbying. These 3 people had what few people had. They brought together a combination of skills and expertise that made them powerful and persuasive advocates for the causes they represented.
Formula
Process Expertise + Political Expertise + Hard Skills + Soft Skills + Experience + Relevant Issue Expertise = Mastery
A Deeper Dive
- Process Expertise (PrE)
You need to know the law or policy-making process you are dealing with. You need to know the windows of opportunity where you can step in to advance your interests.
If you don’t, the chances are that you will walk past in broad daylight light the best chances you have to advance your interests.
2. Political Expertise (PE)
If you are working on the adoption of a new law, you are engaged in a political process. A lot of people find this unsavoury. Their hope is that they are working in a technical or scientific process. It is not. It is pure-play political. If you don’t like it, it is best not to get involved.
It helps to have worked in the world of politics for several years to understand it. It is not something you learn from a book or movie. It teaches you valuable skills. You can understand when someone is giving you a polite brush off. You can sense in a room who people will defer to when voting or deciding on.
If you don’t have a good political antenna, you are going in blindfolded.
3. Hard Skills (HS)
There are some key skills that will make your working life easier.
- Learn- re-learn. You are going to spend a lot of your time learning new things. You’ve got to pick up the skill of teaching yourself. School and University did not deliberately do this. It is an important skill because are going to have to digest and u understand new information. If your knowledge base stands still from what you learned at University, your knowledge base will become irrelevant within 18 – 24 months.
- Communicate clearly in writing and speaking. You need to be able to communicate crisply and clearly in the written and spoken word. If you can only communicate for a sell select group of experts, your knowledge will be of little to no use. You need to be able to switch the depth you take at a moments notice depending on the audience.
- Analyse soberly. You need to take your emotions out of the game. You need to need to embrace political reality. If you can’t, you’ll be little more than a Party hack working in the propaganda department.
- Tell a story. If you can’t use analogies and metaphors, you won’t be able to tell a story. And, humans learn from stories.
The list is longer.
4. Soft Skills (SS)
You need some valuable soft skills. These include:
- Like people, especially politicians and civil servants
- Show empathy
- Hold effective meetings
- Manage people
If you don’t like politicians and civil servants, and can’t empathise with the constraints they work under, you best not go out on the front line.
5. Experience (E)
Book learning gets you only so far, and it is not that far.
You learn the really important things only after doing them many times. It is best to learn by working for someone who has a track record of success in the area. There is not much point in learning from someone who has a track record of defeat. This used to be called an apprenticeship.
I’d be circumspect going under the scalpel of a surgeon who has never operated on a patient before. I’d want my advocate to have real-world experience, not just book learning from a graduate school.
It is easy to pick up useful experience. Canvassing an election for a political party is a great learning experience. There are always elections, so you have lots of time to practice.
Working as a volunteer for a politician or civil society will teach you how to hone a message, deliver a message, and organise a campaign. All valuable skills.
6. Relevant Issue Expertise (RIE)
The 3 people I know have worked on many issues. when you speak with them, they’ll sound like an expert on the issue at hand.
To hold an opinion requires a lot of work. It means you can argue against yourself better than others can. You have to speak to competent people and understand their arguments. You need to understand the positions that are against yours. You need to see the issue from many perspectives. You need to get rid of weak ideas.
This requires work. Writing down the case against you is a good way to start. Getting cross-examined in a dry run will help expose any weak thinking. Sure, you are unlikely going to like the extra work or getting your position ridiculed and torn apart, but it is better it happens in private than getting steamrolled in a public hearing.
A lot of people are brought on board to lead on the issue because of their PhD on the issue. This makes me nervous. It is a great experience for the post of Chief Scientific Adviser. But, as they are prone to send a letter to Commissioners with equations in, they’ll lose the audience. And, if you think the issue is a technical or scientific issue, and forget that the issue is a political one, you are likely going to land up a beautiful loser. Pure and untainted by the compromise of winning.
Can you teach this?
Recently I spoke with a very successful organisation with a track record of bringing about public policy change in the EU.
They have set up a programme that comes out of the pages of NLP.
They are modelling their best advocates and training trainers to teach their staff to become better advocates. It means that soon a very effective organisation is going to become a lot more successful. It is something the US military has been using for a long time to train snipers.
Success in a formula
PrE + PE + HS + SS + E + RIE = Success
Another very thought-provoking post. Any thoughts on why lobbying pros are so few and far between?
Yes, it’s hard to develop such a range of skills, but not impossibly so.
Perhaps there’s little incentive, as many lobbyists aren’t accountable for achieving measurable results and can enjoy a comfortable career without doing anything meaningful for the people they are supposed to represent. Indeed, every meeting and position paper can be justified as part of a long-term awareness building exercise.
I want to think that this isn’t the case, but I fear it is. What do you think?