To the victor go the spoils, and we often just don’t take the time to analyze what went wrong — or what went right — with losing campaigns.
— Joseph Lavoie
Parliament is on break, so this week Allie and Joseph are talking about their favourite podcasts and why they love them so much.
This article appeared in Lexpert on October 12, 2016.
Today, a PR disaster can sink a company faster than a lawsuit. That requires cross-disciplinary teamwork
WHEN AN ORGANIZATION FACES a crisis, it nearly always faces two kinds of jeopardy: legal and reputational. In the crisis-management field, these two jeopardies have long been dealt with consecutively. The legal issues would take precedence, and once those were sorted, we’d move on to fix the reputational problems.
Times have changed. Today, with the prevalence of Google and social media, reputation is not something that exists only on a newspaper’s front page for a few days. A quick online search can dredge up hundreds of articles detailing every minor aspect of an organization’s activities for years. Because of this unending flow of information, we now live in a world where both jeopardies must be dealt with contemporaneously. We now have to think about jeopardy in a different way. Instead of silos of risk, where one comes before the other, we must think of a crisis situation as an enterprise-wide threat.
One of the best ways of thinking about competing jeopardies is the way we think about competing rights. You don’t need to be a constitutional lawyer to understand that tensions exist between competing rights. The right to free speech occasionally comes into conflict with the right to security of a person being maligned. The right against unreasonable search and seizure often abuts the need for national security.
We have come to expect that, when it comes to rights, we balance them, or we reconcile them. We assess proportionality of effect. In Western democracies, top courts often repeat the maxim that no right is absolute — that they must be balanced and reconciled.
Similarly, the pressure clients face in times of crisis requires us to weigh and balance their competing priorities. This new approach to risk is not to convince lawyers to put aside legal risk. Rather, consider this example: our firm often advises international companies hoping to invest in Canada or the United Kingdom. And, as in most countries, these multinationals are subject to rules and procedures governing foreign ownership. Many parties will weigh in: courts, regulators, politicians, investors, customers and competitors. The transactions can take months to complete.
In the past, the financial team would put together the deal, and then lawyers would worry about getting approvals, managing claims, and so on. Then, when everything was completed, the corporate-reputation firms like ours would ensure that investors, shareholders and customers saw the advantages of the new company.
But today, these events happen at once. If media report that legal processes are going badly, investors get nervous. Loss of investor confidence drives down share prices, and this gives licence to politicians and competitors to criticize the deal, making it seem less likely to succeed. This, in turn, makes regulators nervous and makes it more difficult for the legal team to obtain approvals. A vicious cycle of failure can ensue if these steps aren’t handled effectively. But a well handled transaction can generate positive financial coverage and support an easier road to the legal and regulatory objectives.
The problem is that the legal team fears legal risk, and the communications team fears a reputational risk that will lead to loss of market capitalization and future investment. But it comes down to this: if organizations wait for pleadings and discovery before addressing the reputational issues, there may be nothing left to fight over in court. As Mark Twain once remarked, ‘A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth can put its pants on.’
It is difficult to strike the right balance between the two jeopardies. The old days were easier, to be sure. But we don’t live in those days anymore. Lawyers and communications professionals no longer have the choice of separately handling each type of risk. We must work together and find the cross-disciplinary solution that balances the realities and jeopardies our clients face.
Jaime Watt is the Executive Chairman of Navigator Ltd. He specializes in complex public-strategy issues, serving both domestic and international clients.
The Internet is an art project. So says Virginia Heffernan in Magic and Loss — a treatise on Internet culture that likens the World Wide Web to a communal humanist effort. This kind of thinking is useful to explain, in part, why we never seem to be able to stop trying to explain the web and what it is doing to us. The Internet reflects us more than we would like to believe and we have organized our platforms, and our associated judgements of those spaces, with aesthetics and feelings that are not web-specific, but specific to the way create, and have always created, a collective consciousness.
The magic of the web, as we think of it in everyday terms — the communicating, the efficiency, the ease — is a practical and often lifeless way to explain the Internet, that drains it of its personality and excitement. Heffernan delights in the low and high culture that exists simultaneously online, from retro or hectic designs and interfaces of chatrooms to the coolly minimalistic and decidedly luxe graphics of new apps. The loss part is a rumination on what we’ve given up as we’ve left the analog world. But Heffernan frames this as an inevitability of technological shift, something to be expected as we move from one era to another. Things are always lost in the fire, but that loss doesn’t necessarily detract from the magic that replaces it. Also, we haven’t lost as much as we think: we’ve just moved it to another arena.
The pendulum of anxiety for the web swings from worrying about ephemerality to worrying about its permanence. Things disappear quickly — like on Twitter, where Heffernan points out, we obsessively read content that is oftentimes poignant and precise. Or, things stay forever — like your search results, which will never be truly scrubbed of the embarrassing thing about you that you wish didn’t exist. Moving through the building blocks of the internet — design, text, images, videos, and music — Heffernan talks about each as they exist within our lives, as much as how they exist online.
Outside of Heffernan, there’s an easy example of this: Minimalism has progressed from a design aesthetic to a life aesthetic, with people eschewing clutter in favour of the right possessions. As Mirelle Bernstein wrote in the Atlantic in March, being able to embrace a minimalistic approach is a privilege of its own kind. Detailing Marie Kondo’s (Japanese author whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up started a minimalist movement) advice to rid yourself of nostalgia, Bernstein notes that minimalism ignores a lot of the sentimentality we attach to items, especially when those items were hard to come by. She relates it to her and her parents’ experiences as immigrants: being able to throw out things you haven’t used in a while means you feel confident that you’ll be able to purchase and/or acquire those things when the time comes.
We can apply this to the Internet. In a world driven by search engine optimization, keywords, and advertising, your web efforts to make money need to be hidden. Anything conspicuous screams of desperation: click-baity content intended to drive traffic rather than quality. This too is a privilege. Existing on the web simply to exist is, in part, a luxury, signifying that you don’t need the attendant marketing push that so many others do. From a design perspective, the minimalist and ‘clean’ look aspires for a kind of simple elegance that aesthetics loaded with information, text, and animation,make tacky and complicated. Minimalism is a feeling — one of restraint and discipline — with an inherent judgement of superiority.
Social media functions in a similar way. Describing Beyonce’s social media presence, writer Jenna Wortham notes that Beyonce has been able to use social media to become more mysterious rather than less, an idea that is counterintuitive to the constant life-casting that many participate in online. However, this kind of self-restraint is particular to those who have an established personality and star power. People have to want to know about you for them to feel a lack of knowledge; absence only makes the heart grow fonder if the heart was hungry in the first place.
Since the web was created there have been anxieties about the anonymity of online interaction. People hide behind usernames and avatars. In the early days of AOL chat rooms and the more R-rated Chatroulette, such anonymizing aspects were suspected of covering a whole matter of sins. Today, existing online with such secrecy is a privilege, reserved for those unnaturally adept at concealing their tracks or completely abstaining from online activity. On October 3, a post on The New York Review of Books’ blog revealed the – allegedly – true identity of Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer who has managed to keep her identity a secret while becoming a beloved author. Most of her fan base does not want to know who Ferrante ‘really is’ and reacted with anger to the ‘outing.’ Ferrante had created a personal and deep connection with her readers that didn’t need to be bolstered by her identity or details of her life. In a crossover of a pre-digital age and the now wholly digital age, Ferrante kept her pen name in place by responding to (some) interview requests via email. As she stated in a 2014 interview, ‘I didn’t choose anonymity; the books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago I felt the burden of exposing myself in public. I wanted to detach myself from the finished story.’
Wortham echoes the sentiment behind this statement in her aforementioned piece on Beyonce. In thinking about online personalities, she sees the selective representation that Beyonce projects as an ‘illusion that feels intimate and real, a hologram self for us to interact with that, in theory, provides the actual Beyonce space to exist away from our prying eyes.’ Wortham notes that hierarchies and biases exist online, they’ve just been coded a different way. Social media has given room to create other selves, and perhaps, paradoxically, a way to preserve a sense of our true identity. It can be its own version of the pen name. While there have always been worries about the meretricious nature of social media as it applies to our personal lives, both Wortham and Heffernan seem to suggest that embracing, rather than fighting, this aspect can be more fulfilling. For Heffernan, it’s part of the delight — the mix of high and low — and the way we construct our culture and consciousness. For Wortham, it’s self-preservation: ‘We could instead use social media as a prism through which we can project only what we want others to see. We can save the rest for ourselves — our actual selves.’
Perhaps this is why we have worked to make certain online spaces look and feel a certain way. Lacking the physical markers we’ve come to associate with the experience we should expect, we’ve aestheticized spaces to evoke a first impression. Design serves a deeper purpose than just surface looks. From the classic air of the digital New York Times to the back-web of 4chan and Reddit, we have categorized the ‘type’ of people and conversations that happen online by the way these space look. While the mainstream revels in clean typeface, negative space, and intuitive navigation, those familiar with the web’s behind-the-scenes are comfortable delving into the messy threads filled with obvious bounding boxes, splashes of courier new, and self-direction.
A portion of this harkens back to the loss aspect that Heffernan explores. There’s something nostalgic in design that reminds us of Web 1.0 (pre social media). Heffernan weaves this throughout her narrative, revelling in the newness and excitement of the web and the sentimentally of what we’ve discarded, recalling hours-long phone conversations that were physically grounded by a telephone cord. But besides being able to move freely between the joys and yearnings that digitization creates in equal measure, the most impressive aspect of her book is that she so firmly conceives of the Internet as a cultural construct. Of course the web has aesthetic periods. It reflects any other time of our collective consciousness. Things move into and out of fashion within the web like anywhere else, and perhaps we are now finding different ways to express the things we mislaid with digitization. There’s a lot to be gained in conceding that the Internet is as much a humanist endeavour as a technological one — and much of what is gained mitigates the loss.
Many challenges threaten to upend the peace that has descended on the Canadian political scene since Trudeau’s election, and with it, the narrative of a sunny and consultative government the Liberals so confidently promised.
This article appeared in the Toronto Star on October 9, 2016.
One of the first things we are taught about literature is the narrative arc; the underpinning of all stories. Without narrative direction, you end up with a rudderless tale that the reader can’t follow.
The same rule applies to communicating in politics.
Take back control for Britain. Make America great again. Sunny ways for Canada.
All three are formative slogans and statements used by politicians and political movements that have shaken political establishments in the Western world. While each drastically different, each spoke to, and captured, nascent desires in electorates better and more effectively than any other campaign.
During the campaign on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union, there was near-unanimous support for staying among the elites of civil society. But a restlessness existed among Britons who felt left behind by London’s economic success. The sinking economic performance in rural England and a significant uptick in immigration coincided with the increase of European Union regulatory control. The result? Many, too many, average Britons were left feeling powerless.
The call by Nigel Farage and his ragged band of outsiders to ‘take back control’ spoke to these disaffected voters. Three simple words encapsulated what so many voters felt, but had been unable to articulate.
An equally simple statement has defined a political movement in the United States. ‘Make America great again’ is almost absurdly uncomplicated. And yet its clarity addresses the worries and frustrations of so many Americans who fear America’s superpower status has evaporated, and that the likes of China and Russia have superseded America’s natural position in the global world order.
Rising anxiety has led to the triumph of Donald Trump among many Republicans and independent voters despite not having the support of most of America’s business and political leaders.
Although the actual phrase was not used by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau until his victory speech following the Oct. 19, 2015, election, the Liberals were swept into power by preaching the virtue of ‘sunny ways’ to an electorate that had experienced 10 years of tough economic circumstances, and with a Prime Minister’s Office, and a government, in near constant conflict with the media, other levels of government and the Supreme Court.
When Trudeau spoke of the possibility of an open government that worked collaboratively with others, he spoke to people who had grown weary of the previous government’s approach. They rallied to his cause: young voters turned out in numbers not seen for decades, urban voters abandoned a sinking NDP, and significant numbers of suburban voters responded to the siren call of optimism and our better selves.
Sunny ways had securely captured the Canadian political imagination.
And, for the last year, the federal government has worked to deliver on that sunny approach. Since the election, it has completed more than 300 consultations. Polls show the Liberals are still riding high and Canadians are satisfied with the country’s direction. And Trudeau remains astronomically popular among young Canadians.
However, as this week has demonstrated, it may not be all blue skies ahead.
Inevitably, governments must make difficult policy choices and decisions. That a government’s best day is its first day is not a clich’ by accident. Each day that follows means actions that will inevitably alienate supporters and embolden opponents.
Two such decisions, recently made, threaten to interrupt the Liberal’s narrative of a sunny, open government.
Cabinet’s approval of the LNG pipeline in British Columbia was met with protest by both the indigenous community and environmentalists.
And after the government announced a plan for a carbon tax, three provincial environment ministers walked out of a consultative meeting, with Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said ‘the level of disrespect’ shown by the government was ‘stunning.’
Only time will tell if there is consequential fallout from these decisions. While Canadians know well the government must make difficult decisions, their willingness to embrace these decisions is not universal.
What’s more, many more challenges threaten to upend the peace that has descended on the Canadian political scene since the election, and with it, the narrative of a sunny and consultative government Justin Trudeau and the Liberals so confidently promised.
Either that or the Liberal government could be fashioning a new narrative — one of a government boldly unafraid to act on items related to its core ideology, whether or not it provokes the usual hue and cry of protests all governments face.
Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.
If you were to ask me who won the debate on the levy or tax on carbon, I would say both the Conservatives and Liberals won. They achieved what they need to achieve on these issues.
—Travis Kann
On deck this week: The Liberal government’s carbon pricing scheme, the new BC LNG project, and provincial health care transfers.
