Fall — the leaves are falling, Q3 just closed and you’re getting the first E-mails about…… planning for next year!

The simple ask to put together a plan, strategy or even (sic!) goals for the year to come can sometimes lead to existential questions for GR functions. Given the political volatility who knows what the world looks like even 2 weeks from now? The business doesn’t even have a clear plan why should we have one? Why do we exist in the first place?

These are good questions and we think GR and Public Policy teams don’t often enough fundamentally rethink how they can be most impactful for the institution that employs them.

Below we offer a few pointed takes on patterns and ideas around how GR teams can approach planning season.

It might just allow us to answer the question de jour in a better way next year:

What did you get done this week?

Even more importantly making sure that the answer doesn’t lead to a “this is a waste of time” thought by your leadership…

Internal Tech Emails on Twitter: "Parag Agrawal texts Elon MuskApril 9, 2022 pic.twitter.com/40bP9RDCSA / Twitter"

Parag Agrawal texts Elon MuskApril 9, 2022 pic.twitter.com/40bP9RDCSA

4 questions to start with

We are fans of simple structures (the world is complicated enough as it is) so 4 steps to think through in that order are:

What → Get clear on what work needs to happen.

How → What capabilities do you need to get that work done.

Where → Where in the org that work is most effectively placed.

Who → Who is best positioned to lead the work.

Common traps in planning

We’ve already got some articles on the blog about the where [0] and who [1] so we’re going to focus on the what and how in this post.

There are some common traps in how to arrive at the what that are worth bearing in mind:

• Outside-in — Have your plan be dictated almost exclusively by the outside world (legislative proposals, policy & political trends, regulatory decisions). These are of course important factors and will in many ways be central to what you do as a team but they shouldn’t be the first prism through which you derive at the core of what you want to achieve. Start with the inside. How does the world look like through the lens of the institution you work for now and how will the world (the small or big part that matters) look like if they achieve their vision and goals?
• Cater to “who” to get to “what” — We are fans of not doing your hiring or planning based on regional structures but focus instead on skills, capabilities and curiosity and then think about the regions. A common mistake is to look at where you have people on your team and which geographies and markets they know best to then think about what they should be doing. This leads at best to incremental strategy changes (i.e. I can’t have my Brazil lead think through this new product we are launching) and at worst being out of touch with the business and spending resources on things that don’t really matter.
• Policy first, company second — We’ve seen policy teams draw up their plans in isolation and not backed in the reality of the business. It makes it harder to then go back to leadership to build your policy positions and what you want to influence if you didn’t get the buy-in and derive it from their priorities in the first place. We thus think the company (whether that is your corporate strategy function, regional leadership, product leads or the C-suite) should draw first when it comes to putting down a plan of what they want to achieve and get done in a given time-frame.

Pointers on how it could be done better?

Fundamentally GR is a cost centre and doesn’t build products, does R&D or is in charge of the strategic direction of the company in the first place. It is a team that helps those that do these things make better informed decisions based on an understanding of the changing legislative, regulatory and political landscape they operate in. We’re not steering the ship but can help navigate it through choppy waters (or occasionally argue to change course).

Hence, a plan of a GR function needs to be deeply rooted in the plan of the business in the first place. What is it trying to achieve (mission), what is the current idea of how to bring the change about (strategy) and which specific actions is it taking to do so (tactics).

You might get by with “building relationships”, “monitoring legislation” or “stakeholder management” for a while or with pure crisis management when things are on fire but it’ll catch up with you sooner or later if you’ve build a plan for the GR function itself rather than the GR function as an enabler for the business it serves.

What — so what?

Ok so what should be the way to get to the what then? Are you telling me we shouldn’t care or think about public policy when drafting our strategy?

Well — kind of.

Read through (if you don’t get the documents in the first place that’s a bigger problem) the company strategy, product and sales priorities and ask questions — lots of questions!

Only then should you think about your own plan and arrive at the what of the work of your team. Ideally you can do that as part of a conversation with those who drafted the overall business plan. Suggest and talk through levers your team could pull that can increase the likelihood of achieving the company’s long-term vision as well as short-term goals and tactics.

Remind me to write a blog post in the future about the ability of policy professionals to read (and understand) business plans and product roadmaps not just legislative proposals…

GR and Public Policy comes in!

Once you have a good sense of the direction of travel and goals of the business you should reflect on the role of your team and your understanding of the upcoming legislative, regulatory and political changes and how they impact the plans of the business.

Some questions to ask could be:

• Which legislative changes have the highest impact on the existing and upcoming products and services?
• How well are our competitors and peers able to utilize their agenda-setting power to put stones in our way?
• Where will a shift in political and policy trends and behavior impact the ability of the business to operate?
• Where would a change in regulatory practices or legislative texts allow us to move quicker and faster on our roadmap?
• What opportunities and risks will the company run into as it moves forward with its mission and plan assuming success?
• Which strategic questions is the company grappling with that we can help answer?

These are some of the must fun and rewarding conversations to have as a Public Policy function but they are hard! They really get to that existential question of the raison d'être of the team in the first place.

How? build capabilities to drive change

Once you have 4–5 (there shouldn’t be more then that) crisp answers to the what and you feel confident they are rooted within the core of the business it’s time to then think about the how, where and the who.

A neat way to think through the how is a capability tree (hat tip to nicklaslundblad for that one) of the things your team should be able to do routinely and well in order for you to have the impact needed. Capabilities can be things like foresight, political agency, strategic advice, networks of influence, etc.

Then it will get to the more usual practice of setting OKRs. The objectives should be the what questions so that if executives see them they translate to the way they think about the business and its goals.

Transparency — not numbers

Ultimately this is also a reflection of the fact that we don’t think GR is best managed by tracking numbers but by being transparent about what you are trying to achieve for the business.

Manage by numbers? Why quantification doesn’t work for GR

Causation and correlation is a tricky one for GR functions and trying to quantify how well you have achieved your plan can lead you down paths that we don’t think are healthy nor effective.

Summing up:

We think that a GR plan is credible if it can show what your team is doing that closely connects to the goals of the business, how you are building the capabilities you need to do so, where in the organization (cross-functionally) the work is best placed and who on your team is going to lead on which parts of the work based on their skills and interest.

How many people in your C-suite have a good answer to the question “what has the policy team done for me lately?” The closer you attach your work to their pain points, opportunities and plans the more likely they are vetted in the success of your team and your work.

These might be fairly obvious points to make but getting them right is really hard but rewarding work.

How have you approached planning for GR functions in the past? Agree or disagree with our take? Have a great template or structure for a plan that you want to share?

We are eager to hear about it!

[0]

Org charts: Form follows function?

[1]

Introducing the GR-X Team

Planning as a GR function — the good, the bad & the ugly was originally published in GR_Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Technological progress exponentially shapes our economies, societies and ways to live (indeed maybe even on which planet we will live). New products, business models and technological solutions to the big (and seemingly small) problems of our time have always forced humanity to strike a delicate balance. Allowing for and actively pushing for that progress on the one hand and the needed legislative, regulatory and political guardrails for these technologies on the other given that they often challenge and change our existing norms and behaviors.

The purpose of most Public Policy teams in technology companies is to translate between the worlds of technology “the builders”, politics “the rule-setters” and regulation “the enforcers”.

It’s time Venture Capital firms start to build Public Policy functions to engage more directly in the debate between technological progress and the political and legislative reactions to it. The discussion goes to the core of their raison d’etre — pushing and backing entrepreneurs who are building cutting edge technologies and companies with the ability to ensure “powerful, positive change that endures”.

Both the firm and their portfolio companies would benefit from having the capacity to engage in a dialogue and building a base-level of understanding of the current and future legislative environment their technologies and products will have to operate in.

Entrepreneurs? Investors!

Venture Capital provides a unique vantage point as it places bets on new technologies and business models from BioTech, ClimateTech, HealthTech and FinTech to the Gig Economy to Autonomous Vehicles and Robotics to Crypto and Artificial Intelligence. VCs work with, support and get ROI from successfully injecting capital into companies that are at the forefront of a new trend, solution and technology that will scale rapidly and often re-define the way we live, work, interact, eat and consume for decades to come.

They have become incredible progress machines and unapologetically demand others to jointly imagine and then help bring about a different future. Change is the only constant or as Marc Andreesen argued in his much debated essay “It’s time to build”:

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. And we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building.

Indeed the biggest problems of our time — if we use the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a yardstick as done by Atomico in their State of European Tech Report — are being tackled by the builders Marc describes and fueled by VC firms who help them to build better and quicker. Good Health, Clean Water, Affordable Energy, Sustainable Cities, and Climate Action are just a few of the SDGs which are being addressed by VC-backed technology companies.

Where Public Policy Teams (should) come in!

Elected officials and the public policy machinery are grappling with those very problems too, albeit from a different vantage point. Governments are deliberating about the right policy and legislative approaches to advance against their while the role of technology in helping to address these challenges has become increasingly clear. It has also opened up a whole range of discussions between government and tech companies. Indeed, we’ve come to understand over the past 10 years that there is a critical need for better and more interaction between technology companies and policy-makers.

Public Policy professionals focus on finding and building the mechanisms and processes to exchange information and knowledge about the technologies and business models on the one hand and the political goals and legislative trends they will bump into on the other.

If VCs are thinking long-term — placing bets in decades — then they ought to take into account and ideally actively shape the discourse and political thinking about the very technologies that are going to define our future.

So yes, do continue to build and focus on that! However, if you understand where the legislative puck is going early or bring societies and their elected officials along when a new technology is developed, you will become a trusted and responsible actor and member of the political discourse. In turn, it helps you guide your portfolio companies who will inevitably find themselves in these debates and issues when they scale.

So what exactly would a Policy team at a VC do?

There are 3 obvious areas of focus but I’d be curious for additional thoughts and ideas!

1 — Due Diligence on their investments — Does the founding team have a grasp of the legislative and political environment their product will interface with? What are plausible political and policy reactions to their product scaling quickly and does that reaction determine in part the long-term success and TAM of the business?

2 — Help portfolio companies spot & navigate legislative changes — Provide a “policy as a service” and keep an eye out on legislative trends and activities that will impact the ability of your portfolio companies to scale, expand and launch new products. Across the portfolio invest in building a political network on the verticals that are most likely to be affected by legislative changes.

3 — Build a policy-brand for the VC firm itself — Position the firm on a select number of policy debates that are connected to the verticals you are investing in and thus build the capability to advocate on these in the future. In today’s world there is arguably a moral imperative to speak up on certain political issues.

What did I miss? Do you think these would add value?

Have VCs not started to do this already?

Yes — to a certain extent.

Notable mentions here are

Atomico and their fantastic work on the State of European Tech report (Tom Wehmeier), Index Ventures and their highly influential campaign on Stock Options reform Not Optional (Vojtech Horna), as well as Sequoia who have created and hired Public Policy positions in India and the US. There are of course also VC associations like the NVCA which I think could be more powerful if their members had their own policy teams.

Many of these initiatives however are driven by the communications, research or marketing partners and teams in these firm — what stops them from creating a Partner-level position for a Public Policy professional or at least building out a small Public Policy group within the firm?

No better time than now!

From the future regulation of Crypto-assets to the definition of Gig-Workers and their social protections to providing health-care services over the Internet on-demand to the move towards renewable energy through new technologies — the political and policy debates about the balance between innovation and regulation are happening at this very moment.

In addition to building and backing new technologies to tackle the problems of our time I think it’s time VC firms build the institutional muscle and capabilities on Public Policy.

To go back to Marc Andreesen’s point — yes — regulatory capture is real and incumbents across all industries quite naturally have the ear of policy-makers because the rules they set were written with the current set of technologies and business models in mind, not those of the future. It should be in the interest of VCs to make sure that starts to change.

What are your thoughts and opinions on this? Are there notable examples of VCs who are engaged on this that I have missed? I’d love to be challenged on my thinking here!

Why Venture Capital needs Public Policy Teams was originally published in GR_Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Government Relations and Public Policy teams are most often associated with their role in helping their companies monitor and influence legislation in markets they are already present in and to build the needed relationship to do so successfully.

There is a lot less discussion, deliberation and clarity (as far as we can see) about the involvement of GR teams in the elusive yet critical business of entering new markets for the first time. We would love to change that and are eager to hear from you about how GR teams should think about their role and what lessons learned are out there.

A few thoughts and observations to get us started.

Market expansion matters and has become (more) political

While product-market fit and the right GTM strategy should determine the ambitions and goals for entering new markets for any business, we believe there is a critical role to play for GR teams along every step of the way.

Whether it is because your business model is heavily regulated, whether you are dealing with entrenched incumbents with political clout who don’t want you to succeed, or you just need to have a holistic understanding of the market environment given road-blocks the business is hitting, we see varied reasons for why GR teams end up working on market expansion.

Particularly in the world of technology we’ve seen ample examples of how the ability to launch your software almost instantly in markets across the world without much of a local presence has meant policy teams needed to play catch-up and where in many cases not part of the process in the first place (or the company might not have had a policy team when they expanded).

With more and more technology scale-ups having business models in more regulated industries (health, finance, transportation) and the political discussion about the impact of technology on societies and the economy, that has changed fundamentally. Being able to expand globally is critical yet has never been more political.

A colleague of mine (you know who you are) succinctly calls it the “need to obtain a social license to operate”.

Be clear about which “phase” of market entry you are supporting

As a starting point its helpful to realize which “phase” of market entry you engage on, a way of defining these could be:

> Scoping: Should we enter this market? What would it take?

> Planning: We should enter this market! How do we do it?

> Executing: Let’s enter this market! Who’s coming along?

> Maintaining: We’ve entered this market! How do we stay here?

In each of these phases the role, work-streams and -products of the GR team is going to look and feel very different. Being deliberate about that is key because mission-creep and unclear expectations are almost guaranteed if not.

As we argued previously it is important to productize this process in order to make it less opaque and random. Be very clear about what concrete products your team will be delivering in each of these phases, what goals they aim to achieve, the resources required to do so and the expectations you have in terms of support from the rest of the organization.

Set of questions on market entry the GR team answers that remain the same and create clarity

While the role and scope of product, marketing, comms, partnerships and legal teams tend to be fairly clearly defined around market entry, we often see GR teams go back and forth and swirl around on what exactly their role is and which answers on market entry they should answer for the business.

We think standardizing a set of questions you help answer can be a good starting point.

A non-exhaustive list to get you started:

• Short political, economic and social introduction to the market (think Economist Intelligence Unit)
• How is policy and legislation formulated and implemented?
• Are there upcoming legislative changes affecting our business that we should be aware of?
• Who are the main political and regulatory stakeholders with influence over our market entry and what is their role specifically?
• What is the political influence of incumbents and competitors and their local partners?
• Will their influence present an impediment to our ability to succeed?
• What expectation will there be from the government to have us make visible demonstrations of commitment to the market?
• What reputational risks should we consider and mitigate?
• Does our mission and product align with the political goals of the government?

It often is the area of GR where your impact (or lack thereof) becomes very real

Building relationships with key stakeholders, being one of 26 companies to write a white paper on a new piece of legislation or securing that meeting for your CEO… these things all matter but proving their direct impact on the bottom line of the business is often difficult (if not dangerous as we argued previously).

Market entry though is the place where the impact of GR teams all of a sudden becomes very binary. Have we enabled our products to be sold and used in this market or not? There is not really a lot of grey or a lot of nuance when you put it like that.

This is both an opportunity and a threat for GR teams. It can be cathartic in a good way though because it brings your team very close to the business and if you are able to “unblock” entire markets or regions the discussion about GR as a cost centre can change very quickly.

What skill-sets are required within the GR team to be good at this?

Interestingly we think market expansion is where it all comes together and you need to have the Swiss Army Knife of GR professionals to navigate the uncertainty and unknowns (both internally and externally).

A few things that come to mind, but curious what others think:

→ Local knowledge: Not just about the policy-making process but about the unwritten cultural and societal norms and empowering other teams to move effectively and achieve their goals within them.

→ Business acumen: There is absolutely no substitute for really understanding your business strategy and products in figuring out a good market entry strategy.

→ Decisions-making: There are so many unknowns that you need someone that has a problem-solving attitude and is willing to act and take ownership.

→ Project management: Usually market expansion teams are scrappy and under-resourced, GR teams often can add value by being great project managers given they have visibility across teams.

There are many more of course but in our experience it is here where we’ve seen some of the best examples of GR professionals excel and continuously re-define what their role is as part of the process of market entry.

The above are really just a few conversation starters and ground-rules we think can help GR teams be effective partners for market expansion.

We are really curious to hear from you though, what other aspects of market expansion are relevant? What kind of GR teams are impactful here and why? Or is this a case of over-reach and trying to find a role for GR where there really is none?

GR’s role in Market Expansion — Art or Science? was originally published in GR_Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A core responsibility of any GR professional is to engage with and influence stakeholders. It is central to representing your organisation’s interests to policy makers, politicians and the public. To do that well, you need a clear understanding of who your stakeholders are. You also often need to narrow down and define the nebulous “stakeholder” concept in the first place. We thought we’d write on how to think about mapping your relevant stakeholders for GR work and would be curious about comments and feedback — what are some best practices that you’ve seen work well here?

What are you trying to influence?

The first thing you need to define when mapping your stakeholders is what you are trying to achieve. The GR Blog has written previously on different kinds of GR work, and it is worth reading while you consider your objectives.

Are you trying to build or protect a brand for your organisation? Or are you trying to influence the development of a specific, technical piece of policy? Or perhaps you’re planning a campaign to ensure support for your organisation’s sector during a crisis. Even if all these tasks were being undertaken for the same organisation, they would require different approaches, and the most important stakeholders will shift accordingly.

That will mean that you will likely have different stakeholder maps for different parts of your GR work. That is a good thing.This is in line with what Ansgar wrote about Simple Rules — don’t overcomplicate things by going overboard, but being specific about what part or specific goal the stakeholder map is for will actually make it simpler in our opinion.

So before you start mapping your stakeholders, define explicitly your target outcomes.

Who holds the levers for these outcomes?

The next step in mapping your stakeholders is to identify who holds the decision making power that will get the results you need. This stakeholder group will be very small. Often it will be one person, and it will rarely be more than five.

It’s important to be strict with yourself here: effective engagement and influence requires laser focus on the right stakeholders. Again, there is the curse of knowledge. Too often we’ve seen stakeholder maps which are more detailed than the org chart of any given Ministry itself — this is not the place to prove how many people you know or your team has connections with — it’s about bringing focus to your actions and executions.

Who influences the lever holders?

After you’ve established your small group of decision makers, it’s time to widen your net and look at who influences these decision makers, and how they do it. You will not always be able to have a direct conversation with the crucial stakeholders, so this stage allows you to engage with and influence individuals and groups who will advise and change the minds of your lever holders.

It’s important to never underestimate a potential stakeholder or influencer. Seniority and title don’t necessarily make a great target. A minister may well not be the person who cares, or who advises their boss. Sometimes a junior official can offer excellent value.

This group will often be broad, and that’s not a bad thing: it pays to be creative when compiling this stakeholder group. But try to be specific. Political advisers will often be relevant, but which ones? The public will also often be an influencer, but your stakeholder map can and should be more targeted than that. Is there a demographic that is particularly relevant? Could you specifically target the constituents of your lever holders? The sharper your target list, the more likely you are to cut through.

Don’t forget to include your peers and competitors

GR professionals are used to thinking about supporting their organisation or client specifically. You want wins for them, and rightly so. This can lead to the mistake of working in silo while ignoring your peers and your competitors.

Governments and supranational bodies very rarely make policy for or about a single business. It is only slightly more common for this to happen for a small group of business. But it is relatively common for policy to be made for industries and sectors.

Every good GR stakeholder map considers the peers, competitors and trade associations that can be allies in achieving your objectives. You’re used to competing on price, on new features and much more. But you might both benefit from a particular policy or regulatory change. Great GR work is often like great politics: it involves working across the aisle.

Involve your colleagues

Good stakeholder mapping requires working closely not only with your GR colleagues, but with the wider organisation. This is especially true in larger organisations: it will often be the case that a colleague in another part of the business will have connections and insights that you do not.

Now that you’ve got your stakeholder map, it’s time to start planning your engagement.

Weight your stakeholders

After you have your comprehensive list of stakeholders, you need to prioritise them. GR professionals are great, but they are (just about) bound by the laws of space and time. Sometimes you will have to make trade offs. So it’s important to have a solid understanding of the order of priority in which you should engage your stakeholders.

There are three key elements to assign weightings to:

1. Their power to help you achieve your desired outcome (either themselves, or through their ability to influence a lever holder);
2. Their attitude to your organisation and sector (on a spectrum from positively to negatively); and
3. Your (and your organisation’s) access to them.

This lets you get to the actual mapping of your stakeholders. We like to map to four quadrants, along the axes of power and attitude. Your sweet spot is the top right. Top left and bottom right are candidates for prioritisation by access. Typically you should only engage with your bottom left quadrant if it requires very little additional effort.

Now you have your stakeholder map, it’s time to start engaging with them.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on stakeholder engagement. What are you and your team’s favourite methods?

Ben Greenstone, Director at Taso Advisory

Ben is an experienced public affairs and policy advisor. At Taso Advisory he works with clients from listed businesses through to start ups to help them manage political and regulatory risk and opportunity.

Before founding Taso Advisory Ben was a principal advisor to UK Government Ministers on technology, the digital economy and the creative industries.

Map those Stakeholders! was originally published in GR_Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Impactful GR functions are close to the core of the business or NGO they are supporting — they inhale the mission statement and overarching strategic goals. Their focus areas, skills on the team and achievements directly relate to them. What should the relationship and integration be with product development? A question that we think deserves more attention and thought. When was the last team a GR function was mentioned in a [shipped] E-mail from a product lead?

“Developers, Developers, Developers”

Whether it’s a piece of software, a service or a physical product most often the goals and mission of a company are best expressed and often defined through its products. Moreover, the part of the org actually designing and building these products are usually the most coveted resource and a bit of a holy grail.

Rightly so — in the world of technology the valuations of companies are often not based on the existing products only but on the ability for the organization to continue to push out innovative solutions into the market. A saying goes “if Aliens were to invade Silicon Valley and they give a CEO the choice to take away all their engineers or all their user data — they would certainly pick to keep the engineers”.

Making the case for a role of GR and Public Policy in product development

We’ve often found that GR teams are having trouble defining their role and value add vis a vis the most important stakeholders internally — developers, product managers and business leads of particular product lines.

From the vantage point of these orgs, the world of “non-eng” looks simple:

• ⚖️Legal — there to tell them what they can and cannot do and find creative ways to ship new products, usually hold strong veto power
• 📣Comms — there to tell the world how great the product is, build a compelling narrative and “land” the story connecting the product to overall company strategy
• 💈Marketing — there to bring the product to the customer and distill its USPs for the public at large and get the word out in a scalable way
• 💸Sales — there to sell the product to the customer and drive revenue

What about Government Relations?

“Surely relationships with policy-makers and an analysis of upcoming legislation and broader regional trends don’t and shouldn’t matter for product development? Yet another team that is going to stand in my way to ship my product? I need to listen to our customers needs, not to bureaucrats and lawmakers to build the best possible product.”

We beg to differ and want to make the case that in today’s economy the long-term success of your product strategy no longer just depends on whether you have product-market-fit and the right business development and sales team to bring it to your customers — dare we say it for certain companies you need to prove that your product has a net-positive impact on the economy and society at large. A “move fast and break things” culture and a tendency to “ship first, iterate later” provides ample room for GR professionals to be involved.

Below a few first ideas on what specific tasks and actions a GR team could help with during product development. These are by no means complete, we would love to hear about your experiences and ideas, what are we missing? Are these compelling enough reasons for PMs and product owners to check in with the GR team and see you as a critical piece in the puzzle of product development?

1. 💡Ideation and Prototyping: Be involved early, not as a blocker but providing guidance on how products will be perceived and any political reactions to be expected. You can be seen as the “feedback loop for society”. In many cases a political backlash against a product launch can be just as harmful as no product-market fit or legal issues — think about the reaction to self-driving cars or the recent discussion around Zoom’s privacy and security practices. Google X has someone with the job title “Head of getting moonshots ready for contact with the real world” — think about that.
2. 🆕Legislation as a driver for product development: Particularly in more regulated industries understanding and highlighting upcoming legislative changes in key markets can actually kick-start the development of an entirely new product line. Rather than seeing regulation as limiting your product options, we think they can expand and inspire them in many cases.
3. 🤓Educate policy-makers about new products early: While official approvals by regulators are of course needed in some cases, seldom do GR teams “pitch” new products to policy-makers ahead of or shortly after a launch. Should we be doing more of that? Particularly if it is connected to your policy narrative and brand you are building, product demos can be an effective way to build trust.
4. 🧨Integrated crisis communication: When your institution is in the public spotlight (positive or negative) it is very often related to a product or service you are offering and something having gone very well or very wrong… Having the right relationships to the product organisation will prove to be key in handling these situations well.
5. 🧩Policy work “through” products: Picking certain products and turning it into a policy campaign can be effective in shifting perception and “walking the walk” on previous commitments. Whether these are principles expressed through a specific design of a product feature or showing the strategic relevance of a certain region or sector launching products makes this more real than any story or promise will do.

“Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics”

We believe that the way you structure your GR team and where it sits within the broader org is absolutely critical and creates plenty of path-dependencies (watch out for an upcoming blog post about the subject). Given that as far as we know most GR teams do not report into product orgs and often do not have a strong link at the executive level with product owners, how do we best solve for this? What are some best practices both in terms of structure but individual tactics that can help?

• Having a dedicated “product policy” team or if not feasible clear owners and DRIs within the GR team for major product initiatives is a good start, but that’s only going to work if you have a clear value proposition and if it’s a two-way-street.
• Finding the right “product person” that has an interest in the realm of GR can unlock such a relationship. Rather than just looking at org charts, maybe there’s an engineer or a PM with a degree in political science (yup, they exist).
• If there is a formalized on-boarding experience for engineers and PMs, how about including a 45min session with someone from the GR team to educate them about your role and scope of your work?
• If your organization has formal “product review” processes and documentation, think about a light-touch way GR can be involved. Maybe through the legal side by teaming up with Product Counsels?

This certainly is a topic with more questions than answers for now but we think that if GR does not manage to build a connection and provide value-add to such an essential part of any organization it will struggle to play a strategic role. What are your thoughts and experiences on this subject? We’d love to hear them!

“It’s complicated” — the relationship between Product Development and GR was originally published in GR_Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s GR in the first place?

Before we start blogging about specific aspects of GR management, we want to spend some ink on the boundaries and substance of Government Relations. In fact, we found that one of the main challenges of GR management practice is a rather fuzzy understanding of what GR really is about. It starts with the term itself: Is it Government Relations? Or Public Affairs? External relations? Public Policy? We also see a rich variety with regard to the scale of GR operations: While some companies focus on risk management and try to maximize impact of very limited resources, others are happy to spend considerable resources and have the ambition to shape the regulatory environment.

We do not argue that GR should be exclusively defined as one type or the other. However, it definitely makes sense to discuss GR with a common framework of understanding — so here is our proposal: GR should be understood as a practice that could incorporate (1) brand- as well as policy-oriented activities, and (2) stretch from risk-oriented minimal efforts to more ambitious thought leadership strategies. We would suggest to define “Public Affairs” as the GR type that pivots more towards brand building and protection, while “Public Policy” focuses more on policy-influencing. There are no hard borders here — it is rather a very rough system to describe tendencies.

The graph below maps these types in a two-dimensional matrix (as you will find out in our blog, we love a good two-dimensional matrix from time to time).

What moves the needle for your company?

Clarifying terms is one thing, providing added value to your company another. In our experience, many GR functions actually struggle to identify the value added. This might sound odd, but is rather typical for large organizations. Research suggests that the overall corporate goals are far less well-known that the top management usually assumes. GR is no different, leading to a lack of alignment on what really matters. Such a lack of alignment might not be obvious. We have seen plenty of cases where this gap has been plastered over with generic GR goals like “manage government stakeholder relations” (why is this actually important?) or “develop policy positions” (again: Why does this matter to the company, how does it connect to your product roadmap or market expansion?). Do a quick test with your team and ask them the question of which goals GR prioritizes and why — we are pretty sure what you will find pretty incoherent answers in most organizations.

So what to do? We find it very helpful to start strategy exercises with GR functions with this very basic question: What moves the needle for the company? And what can GR contribute?

Here is an example of how to start such a conversation: GR might move the needle in three specific areas: (1) protecting the ability to develop the best possible version of a product and sell them (market access — cf non-tariff barriers) or opening the ability in the first place (market expansion), (2) Increase willingness to pay premium prices for products (e.g. by explaining USPs to public sector customers, and (3) protect the brand (e.g. by managing societal relationships).

These goals apparently could differ, depending on your company’s set-up. However, once you have created alignment on the fundamentals, it is much easier to add strategies, tactical goals, and resource plans accordingly.

Where are you?

Importantly, we do not argue that there is a right or a wrong understanding of GR. However, once you have identified what kind of GR function you need to be in order to drive your company’s success, it is important to align on structure (be part of Comms? Or rather Legal? Or Corporate Strategy?), people (which skill-sets do I need in the team?), and products (am I in the campaigning business? Or should I focus more on enterprise risk management?)

If GR can be very different things — where does your GR function sit today? More importantly: Where should it ideally sit to have maximum impact and be fully synced with your company’s priorities? We will provide some further thoughts on the GR sweet spot in a later blog post — stay tuned!

How to think about GR was originally published in GR_Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.