AGE OF ENGAGEMENT BY ROBERT PHILLIPS
AGE OF ENGAGEMENT PART ONE
WHAT IS OUR AGE? Just as literature is punctuated by visions of utopia and dystopia, so the history of social progress is littered with the effluent of the productive tensions between conflicting and emerging ideologies. Hegel famously explored contradictions and called synthesis from two polarities, while the Social Contract – which finds equilibrium between the state and the individual in order to help better define ‘authority’ – emerged at the leading edge of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Two centuries later, and new tensions, new contradictions and new polarities should lead us to ask what is the Age of today – and where to next? The Enlightenment of course became spoken of as the Age of Reason. Its urge towards social reformation based on rational and scientific thought, rather than on mystery, revelation and faith, was more than a mere philosophical indulgence – it became the cornerstone of a new political order that spawned the citizen-centric constitutions of France and America. Reason was indeed revolutionary. Our modern history is captured beautifully by the Marxist writer Eric Hobsbawm in a series of ages: from the Age of Revolution to the Age of Extremes, by way of the Age of Capital and the Age of Empire. All are simple titles that conceal the socio-economic tumult beneath, not least the conflicts between communities, nations and classes: heavy, ugly prices paid for social, economic and political progress; horrific deaths in order to spark new lives; tensions with often hideous undercurrents but ultimately progressive results. There are truism in here about the world of work. It is not just about the nation state. I would like to think we have now entered the Age of Citizenship, but I am not so sure. Four years on from the election of the United States’ first African-American President – the Man of Hope who spoke of ‘a new age of citizenship and responsibility’ at his own inauguration – we remain a world in crisis: from a shaky and dysfunctional capitalism and corrosive behaviours in business, to burning issues of food, energy and water security. Despite our algorithmic, binary reason, we continue to frequently sleep-walk towards disaster
in politics, economics and the environment. Extremes persist. Two hundred years after Thomas Malthus, we are still figuring out how to feed an exponentially growing planet, and how to do so equitably. Generations and nations remain trapped in poverty and therefore in states of economic and political servitude. Moribund and bureaucratic structures of authority imperil the advancement of humankind and question the social contract on a grander scale, while global businesses are now able to adopt the (better) behaviours of states, whose GDP they can comfortably outstrip. The optimist in me believes that we can break through – that a new class of citizen influencers is emerging, challenging the historic dominance of those moribund elites but not yet fully ‘bottom-up’ in nature. This is not the Marxist class struggle of old. Instead, dramatic societal change is being driven by (access to) technology and by the behaviours that a more social world is shaping. Peer-to-peer trust is increasing, just as trust in traditional authorities (whether in government or in business) continues to fragment and decline. Those at the vanguard of today’s revolution understand that information needs to be likeable, shareable and atomic – and that ‘business’ now sits properly within the contract between the individual and society. Reason alone is not enough to drive change, nor is it any longer a linear relationship between citizen and state. Those at the leading edge of this change are in effect witnessing the re-distribution of trust and influence, rather than wealth. Here, values are being re-appraised: making money is no longer the primary driver of reputation or benefit, as societal and social factors become more central to the story. Transparency is the default position of today’s leaders and new, fully accountable expectations are rightly being placed on those nominally in control. Smart governments and smart corporations recognise the shifts and are embracing them with re-imagined approaches that look to regular people (employees, mums, citizen journalists) to build new relationships; new paradigms of trust; different channels of communication; and refreshed values that speak to the more enduring truths of citizenship: wisdom, fortitude, prudence and justice. The Age of Engagement might yet build a fairer society.
Technology is the great enabler. Clouds see no borders. Solving the big issues of our time can become a collaborative, crowd-sourced effort. New networks of shared values and shared interests can determine the better path forward. ’People power’ is therefore no longer a threatening, revolutionary concept, but rather the axiomatic thrust of the Social Digital society. The wisdom of the crowd should usher in a new accountability – to people and to planet. And, I would argue, it would of course be madness to ignore it. Utopianism might soon be proclaimed as properly shared and social, rather than abstract or paternalistic. This is the optimistic view. But not everything always runs to plan. The crowd may be as wise as Plato’s (with some license; the guy was an intellectual elitist) but it could equally be as frenzied and as atavistic as Hobbes’. Trust in Citizenship remains something of an Anglo-centric, even selfish, view. ‘Autocratic’ governments can still enable society by enhancing the economic and social welfare of citizens, who therefore may mind less that there are no pesky, democratic elections to get in the way. A perversity prevails: the autocrats wield a very specific brand of trust and influence (centralised and controlled) but still build confidence and material well-being through wealthcreation. Only corruption tends to be their undoing. These governments are essentially behaving like business states – earning their license through a combination of economic and social reform – and their citizenship is of a very particular flavour. Paradoxically, ‘democratic’ leadership (in government and in business) can fall quickly: penalised by citizen-stakeholders when seen to be not caring, not listening or not delivering. Here trust erodes fast and the License to Influence is quickly removed. The middle way might simply be classified as an era of proper collaboration and better behaviour, within a new, tri-partite contract between Government, Business and Civic Society. This has echoes of the first draft of Citizen Renaissance, published in 2008. Engagement will sit at the intersection of regular people, governments, business and the Third Sector. Citizen values will radiate outwards and will ultimately endure as we learn to do ‘what is right’. Here perhaps starts the transition from the Age of Engagement to the Age of Citizenship. Today’s Age of Engagement will bring inevitable challenges. The twentieth century imperial model – whether of nation states or globalised corporations – is no longer enough. A social, networked world is unlikely to want to drive forward its new model army of twenty-first century citizens on a
redundant chassis. The inconvenient truth for leaders, whether in government or in business, is that the pursuit of sustainable growth through an expansive, dominating geographical footprint based on exhausted structures is probably not consistent with a networked society that sees instead communities and people: real people with real values and real empathy to connect them. As Charles Leadbeater has argued, systems alone are not enough: human empathy is the key to social progress. And existing systems continue to fail us anyway. In the Eurozone, the mismatch between political structure and economic resolution is all too evident. In global politics, the 1950s expansionist model needs urgent re-appraisal. It cannot be mapped onto a 21st century globalised and networked economy. In business, organisational systems designed on power-based silos (from the Board of Directors ‘downwards’) will most likely eventually fall victim to employee, supply-chain, stakeholder and customer networks that rightly choose to see no false boundaries. The Age of Engagement is properly horizontal because shared interests defy hierarchy; shared values deliver better ideas; and mobility increases connectivity, speed and dispersion of influence and response. Those who care about what social progress needs to look like should start thinking with a new honesty based on these new realities – and use this honesty to reform from within. Powerful city states – the hallmark of the Renaissance – may well supplant Nation States (think London or Frankfurt, Singapore or Shanghai), just as global corporations could form de facto states of their own. Their scale already speaks volumes in this direction; their systems are well-crafted and their people properly recruited; capitalism has made them efficient. Their challenges are to engage with their constituencies and to ensure a rectitude of conscience that legitimises their assumed positions of leadership and influence. Engaged corporations within The Age of Engagement need to be transparent, bottom-up, values-led and rooted-in-action. They need to walk the walk. The Age of Citizenship, to paraphrase Obama, may yet properly emerge from today’s Age of Engagement. But engagement is the first imperative. Tensions and polarities persist. Ideologies are not aligned. The world is neither balanced, nor fair; neither top-down, nor bottom-up. Technology is driving real social change, and at speed. Just as Marx saw an impending struggle between the owners and the workers, and the Enlightenment saw the battle between reason and faith, so we now have to confront the polarities and extremities of our times in a constructive, open and honest way. From thesis and antithesis, we can find synthesis. This search from within deserves and demands an engaged society.
AGE OF ENGAGEMENT PART TWO
COMMUNICATIONS AND THE CHIEF CITIZENSHIP OFFICER We live in a world of constant tension. The obvious and increasing tensions are now imprinted on the minds of world leaders, in government and business alike. The water, energy, food nexus is disturbed by a population that continues to boom while natural resources tend towards bust. Polarities persist: global north versus global south; east versus west; fundamentalism versus moderation; obese versus under-nourished; extreme faith versus extreme reason; emotional democracy versus institutional hierarchy. Yet these tensions and polarities can create an energy and an impetus for reform: from thesis and antithesis comes synthesis. What, then, for the synthesis of a communications world that is, itself, increasingly bi-polar? Deep Science perches on the edge of a continuum where, at the opposite end, Deep Humanity lurks. Ours is a society increasingly driven by maths (with binary reason), our lives ‘optimised’ by search, and semantically steered through networks, often unseen. Yet networks only work because they are connected by people as much as by algorithms – by human understanding and by empathy. They are otherwise only vacant systems. This is not new news: stories were transmitted by word-of-mouth long before the telegraph, the telephone or the world wide web. Networks of old persist. Communications professionals today must therefore connect and immerse themselves with both Deep Science and Deep Humanity. They must be both mathematician and storyteller; architect and philosopher; able to find as much comfort and commonality with the Chief Technology Officer as with the Chief Communications Officer or CEO. In a business sector that has always held chameleon tendencies, so future-proofed communicators need to wear two skins at once.
This social schizophrenia oddly demands cohesion and coherence, not contradiction. This will, in turn, ease tensions and help us deal better with the extremities of north and south, abundance and restraint, privilege and denial. We can no longer afford this to be a remote intellectual challenge: it is a social imperative and indeed the central calling for the communications profession today. Those who can advise on policy as well as on articulation, who can shape the agenda as well as speak to it, are those who can help tackle the tension-wracked, prevailing issues of our times – and build trust across both networks and hierarchies, with citizens. In this Age of Engagement, where we have the ability to connect deep science and deep humanity, businesses must re-focus on the societal factors that will restore, build and retain citizen trust. Enter the Chief Citizenship Officer – there to ensure that every major business plays its own part in addressing global issues of water, energy and food, climate and faith. The Chief Citizenship Officer will understand the challenges of demography, just as (s) he will understand both the push and pull of democracy, with all its anomalies. Operating models must be agile enough to adapt to radically different evolutionary speeds – and must equally be adaptable to surprising, technological change, which will never be this slow again. Talent and knowledge now become permanent strategies, not ephemeral options. Properly combining the analytical drive of deep science with the empathy of deep humanity will thus help deliver a society of better good, if not the utopian ideal.
AGE OF ENGAGEMENT PART THREE
PR FIRMS NEED TO RE-TOOL TO TAKE ON THE AD GUYS It might yet become the agency equivalent of the Battle of Endor. A struggle is now underway for the shape and the soul of the communications firm of the future. Returning to one of the original themes of Citizen Renaissance – how the communications profession can help build a better world of common good and reverse the endemic decline in happiness and wellbeing brought on by an over-consumptive society. However, there is still much to play for in what the communications firm of the future will really look like. The Age of Engagement demands a re-construction of the traditional agency model but, as everything converges, tensions persist between old and new, advertising and PR, science and humanity. PR, having rightly championed the stakeholder society for the past half-decade, is now in danger losing ground to those who can certainly offer the maths, but maybe not the humanity. Ad agencies, wrong-footed initially by the digital revolution, have started the inevitable fightback. Digital is now seen as hygiene while ‘social’ is being mischievously hijacked for commercial gain. The classic 30-second film has re-surfaced as Short Form Content and User Generated Content has satisfactorily professionalised to become acceptably mainstream. Early advantage is back to deuce. Meanwhile, radical transparency (never in the advertising lexicon) has become the default setting for today’s Age of Engagement – with the enjoyable, maybe unintended, consequence of fuller accountability of business and government to the citizen and civic society. Even in countries still enveloped by nominal controls, secrets are rarely safe. Julian Assange and others have put paid to that.
Such transparency has thankfully killed the age of spin – although the headline writers and cheap-shot commentators have yet to awaken to this truth. It is a mercy killing. Public Relations – historically, never at the top of the most trusted or most transparent of professions – can now emerge from the darker shadow of its past, haunted then by the ghosts of Bernays/ and Packard. Transparency can restore trust. Advantage PR. In those now redundant years of spin, PR had much to answer for – but it was always the bigger beast of advertising that inverted and perverted the relationship between Wants and Needs, and drove the post-war consumption overload with such selfish frenzy. As argued in the original chapters of Citizen Renaissance the super-consumption of everything – from soap suds to politics – ignored and imperilled both the finite limitations of planetary resource and genuine social responsibility, thereby accelerating the decline into climactic recession and exacerbating the global North-South divide. Herein lies the responsibility of the PR firm of the future – returning a better balance to global citizenship; ensuring the License to Lead; and helping business and government alike address the major societal issues of our time. Yet, on the road to recovery and in a truly convergent world, the deep and uncomfortable irony is that parts of tomorrow’s PR business will need to look more like the traditional constructs of advertising than ever before. This is especially so given advertising’s polished understanding of content and the increasingly fundamental role of research, data, planning and analytics in the modern communications mix. The convergent, globalised world
is one of scale and specialisms, networks and empathy. The territory once dominated by the advertising agencies knows all about scale and the (occasionally phoney) science that validates it. In order to dominate, PR firms must therefore rapidly hone its approach to content and acquire more data-driven skills, while pushing forward relentlessly with its empathy agenda: profound and progressive interpretations of the stakeholder society and the complex world that surrounds it. Where the ad guys seek to luxuriate in reductive thinking, the PR firms of tomorrow need to celebrate complexity which will, in turn, only increase by geography and by community. Inevitably, communities of shared interests will eventually push the geographical need to the margins. This very complexity is what makes both trust and reputation so fragile but is also what can secure the future dominance of re-modelled PR companies. Doubters rightly abound. PR still has much to do to secure the ascendancy of its own discipline. PR consultancies, including Edelman for whom I work, will of course first need to fight to win the argument for the centrality of their role within the Age of Engagement. But, for sure, PR firms will not win the intellectual or financial arguments based on historic models – despite continuing to out-score the advertisers on understanding stakeholders (and policy), as well as being altogether more agile and immediate with issues and social information flow in this hyper-connected and inter-dependent world. Marketers have always demanded data and proof-points – hard evidence at the heart of every argument – and, in this regard, nothing has changed. And today, the data is called for in real time, all the time, social or otherwise. Deuce.
For PR professionals, once enriched by data knowledge and capability, there is much to savour in this new way forward. Traditional Public Affairs will inevitably move more central to brand PR – as big, societal factors place real pressure on what, how and in what quantities ‘stuff’ is sold to consumers, who themselves will thankfully assume a new citizen-centricity, as the wants/needs relationship is re-calibrated. Policy knowledge becomes everything: brand agencies of the future must be able to best serve Chief Communications and Marketing Officers by being able to offer expertise, experience and specialisms in the societal imperatives of Water, Food, Energy, Climate and Faith – as well as become fine-tuned to understand, interpret and deliver both deep science and deep humanity (see blog posts passim). This remains way beyond the comfort zone of advertising. PR therefore is right-placed to play a key role in better shaping our society of tomorrow. And transactional media relations – the amplified voice – is just not enough. CCOs, CMOs and their Consultancies will ultimately need a radically different talent strategy. These changes need to start now, and be accomplished within a five year horizon, as the axis shifts. Smart agencies of today will guide clients to work with HR teams to abolish the false lines between external (marketing) and internal comms – as employees (regular people) become the first line of corporate and brand attack and defence. This is what will build the communication outreach of the future. This is a higher ground that PR firms can happily occupy in order to best face the challenges brought on by the new world order, in which Social Advocists, Employee Activists and Citizen Consumers will drive the reforming agenda.
THREE SHORT ESSAYS THAT WERE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON CITIZENRENAISSANCE.COM WHICH DISCUSS WHAT BUSINESSES CAN DO IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX, FRAGILE AND POLARISED WORLD. 7TH NOVEMBER 2012 | @citizenrobert | robert.phillips@edelman.com