Take Your Time…And Listen
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12196 |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
| Author | Toni Muzi Falconi |
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
Take Your Time...And Listen
Toni Muzi Falconi
Methodos, Milan and Libera Universit
a Maria SS. Assunta, Rome
By deciding to listen to and interpret specific stakeholder
expectations before any relevant decision is taken, while
it is being implemented, and after its execution, each
public, social and private organization may accelerate its
time of execution as well as significantly improve its
value and performance.
From a management perspective the concept of time
(seconds, minutes, days, months, years...) is an essen-
tial ‘qualitative’variable. In fact, consolidated, repeated
and structural delays often end up in deteriorated
quality of decisions. We are sometimes biased when
we attribute this deterioration mostly to public sector
and service organizations while we are fully aware
that this happens equally in the private and the social
sectors.
If management knows what to expect, and when,
from its key stakeholders on a certain and specific
issue before taking a decision, it is likely that this infor-
mation may influence the company’s strategic direction
(if not its actual substance) and allow it to anticipate
and prepare for stakeholder actions, reactions and
behaviors, thus avoiding the permanent crisis manage-
ment mode about which so many organizations com-
plain today.
I suggest that the public relations function of an
organization is better positioned than other departments
to facilitate and govern this segment of the decision-
making process because they are best placed to
practice and disseminate the ethos and approach of
communicating-with-stakeholders. This can improve the
quality of the relationship by:
•guiding organizations in their transition from the leg-
endary ‘one company one voice’practice to a more
productive and realistic practice of ‘one company with
many coherent voices’; and
•by shifting the traditional and consolidated approach
of the organization’scommunicating-to-publics, into
the coordination and implementation of a continued,
integrated, multichannel and multi stakeholder
communicating-with process as the core and most
valuable attribute of an effective value-creating
proposition. This is particularly important in an organi-
zational scenario where the value created by intangi-
ble assets has greatly overtaken that of material
assets.
Take your time...
Many disciplines –from anthropology to sociology, psy-
chology, neuroscience, economics, management and
communication –have tried to fathom the paradigm of
time.
The ‘now’and ‘always-on’syndromes have today
become part of our daily vocabulary in what appears
to be a tacit coalition that sees our professional commu-
nity acritically entrenched with the technology, connec-
tivity and communication. This coalition of today’s
Robber Barons who are, by definition, reluctant to submit
to any sort of global governance, exacerbates the value
of ‘now’in the global public discourse, to the point that
we even have come to believe in our own hype.
My argument instead is that this chronic, consubstan-
tial perception of shortage of time and the inevitably
consequential failure in understanding the concepts of
yesterday and tomorrow, more often than not leads to
poor decision-making processes.
One recent example: I gave a group of Masters stu-
dents the task of selecting 20 entries from the Institute
for Public Relation’s databank which they believed to be
the most attractive when summarized into Tweets (140
character messages) with a link to the original articles.
The idea was to demonstrate that research is essential to
effective public relations practice. When the students had
agreed on the selection and presented it to me, I noticed
that all 20 papers related to contents of the last six
months. I thought initially that this was simply because
students had been lazy. But when I asked for the reason,
they gave me a much more disturbing reply: ‘but profes-
sor, old contents are not valid any more’. This ‘now’and
‘always on’society becomes the negation of yesterday,
but consequentially also of tomorrow. This is damaging
for all of us, including organizations which are naturally
oriented towards the future. However we prefer to inter-
pret this, there is little doubt that this perception has the
potential to inhibit the quality of the decision-making
processes within the organization.
I believe that an increased effort to listen to key stake-
holder expectations on a relevant issue before making
any relevant decision, improves the quality of the
decision. Some object to this approach, arguing that this
increased listening effort delays the decision as well as
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12196
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 4 . November 2015
504
Practitioners’ Special Section
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