Thanks for this article, Michael. It helped me see new things and to consolidate several observations of mine in recent years. I've tried to articulate these below. Hope I have not been too defensive or muddied the waters too much. And hope this is useful to arguments to keep CGIAR communications integrated.
To proponents of ‘KM’ (and detractors of ‘PR’)
In the rush to dismiss the more public-relations (PR) kinds of communications work in our CGIAR enterprise, often now deemed obsolete, in favour of newer forms such as knowledge management (KM), we might profit from looking at a short history of public awareness (or PA, as PR came to be called throughout CGIAR) and the more recent KM and its allied disciplines (knowledge sharing, organizational learning, and so on) in CGIAR. Do these functions really serve different ends? Does separating these functions and reporting lines, as the CGIAR Consortium and some centres have recently done, have anything but organizational novelty and some ‘repositioning’ to recommend it?
Let’s start with the older function and term (I hesitate, given the prevailing ethos, to say ‘discipline’): PA. This is what I do and know best. In my (long but limited) understanding, PA work in CGIAR centres grew out of straightforward science editing and writing in the late 1980s, when ‘core funding’ (funding not tied to any particular research project or program) began to become scarce. It was no longer enough to document the science conducted for our knowledgeable, and accommodating, partners and donors. We now had to translate that science for lay publics, showing its relevance for development-focused decision-makers and their constituencies. We had to show value for money to people new to the worlds of developing-country agriculture. This mostly externally focused ‘corporate communications’ work involved science writing (now more ambitious to emulate Scientific American than Science, New Scientist rather than Nature), media relations, photography and videography production. It demanded skills in basic story telling; in framing topics, summarizing progress, and targeting messages; and in designing information (flyers, posters, photofilms) and branding corporate materials (annual reports, calendars, newsletters). PA work of late is expanding in, and through, ever-evolving diverse social media platforms. Distinguished from science editing and information services and other kinds of communications work ‘back in the day’, this kind of communications work might be characterized as that which originated content, as well as new ways of presenting content, so as to help raise the profile, repute and interest in a CGIAR institute or program or initiative or achievement. Writers and designers worked together to create products that would ‘make a difference’, with a large part of that difference being the ability to attract and keep the attention of people and institutions that mattered most to CGIAR, and yes, with donor organizations and key research partners always near the top of the list.
I was first introduced to KM work in CGIAR by the ICT-KM Program of the early 2000s, run out of WorldFish and then Bioversity by CGIAR CIO Enrica Porcari. Peter Ballantyne’s arrival at my institute, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in September 2009 as head of knowledge management and information services gave me my first practical understanding of what this field was about. We revamped our website within the first month and developed and followed new workflows to ensure that our communications were posted online and recycled efficiently and effectively. We developed an online repository of all our communications materials and began tagging our communications religiously. We made use of the whole of the Worldwide Web to do all this, shunning in-house built programs in favour of the most popular and functional sites and software. We grew our readership enormously in the following years. We hired new kinds of communications staff and gained a reputation for facilitating meeting in ways that made a profound difference in the ‘engagement’ and future collaboration of all the meeting goers, and even those who attended virtually. We began working ‘out loud’ on Yammer and wikis. We hired and embedded communications officers of diverse kinds in our programs and regions. We transformed our libraries into infocentres and our training programs into capacity development programs that involve everything from fellowships to e-learning to mobile telephone projects to advocacy work to innovation platforms. We moved service up front and centre in our IT agenda.
ILRI’s PA work has profited enormously from all the new KM-related kinds of communications work. We ‘corporate writers’ can now dream up and publish materials online within hours, and can quickly get our hands on the best and most appropriate images and slide presentations and other materials among diverse and rich institutional online collections maintained by many, many people. We can reach many, many more people with our materials through posting on key social media platforms, where we can actually engage our readers in conversations. We live and breath now in the online universe, pleasantly surprised at how much we have widened our reach and how much we have enriched our listening to others.
Of course, everywhere we look, there is lots and lots more to do, but that’s not so much a sign of our backwardness as it is of our driving ambition to keep moving forwards, finding better ways to communicate ¬— to engage with and influence and listen to and learn from others.
Those of us in corporate communications want to add ‘messy stories from life’ to our ‘impact narratives’. We want to get really, really good at capturing an idea and engaging an audience in under two minutes flat. We want to experiment with some ‘lyric essays’ and start series of long-form articles that dig deep into the everyday (ambivalent) research experience. We want to get more science in our communications (rather than talk about science). We want to eradicate faddish development clichés and tired, contrived formats from our speaking and portfolios. In short, we want to live up to our diverse collective communications potential and ambitions.
While I confess that I share what seems to be Michael Victor’s dissatisfaction with conventional PR—and I too like the innovative ways CGIAR communications is moving—I think he has homed in on the wrong target. PA/PR isn’t the reason so much of today’s development communications is uninspired and lacking impact. For that, we have many other causes we can consider, such as an emphasis on documenting for documenting’s sake, a tendency to lean on secondhand development ideas as a cover for incomprehension or lack of confidence, insufficient understanding of the science we are communicating, a corrosive fix on donor interests and pots of money, conventional university communications programs, and so on.
What I think I hear in Michael Victor’s article above, and what I have experienced in recent years at my institute, is that rather than go for something truly collective, we are being tempted to split up our diverse and innovative communications work so as to privilege one or more kinds over others. For example, I see hints of us jockeying to position ourselves, and our disciplines, for the very fashionable ‘strategic communications’ domain. As though only one kind of communications can be truly ‘strategic’. (See, for example, this comment by Michael Victor in response to this question by ILRI’s Ewen Le Borgne in an interview: ‘What trends are you observing in comms/KM in the development world [or any closer arena]?’ Answer: ‘Moving from service orientation [corporate] to much more outcome-oriented focus. Also moving from a support/administrative function to a strategic one.’ https://km4meu.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/communication-for-development-km-...)
Where I used to have to convince scientists that ‘corporate communications’ plans should be integrated in projects from their start, I’m now having to make the same argument to my communications colleagues on the KM side, who tend to think that my kind of communications work can come in at the end of the project, ‘when the project has a result to announce’. (Sigh.)
The indictment of PA’s obsolete conventions are well taken—the well-worn, familiar and comfortable production of self-serving annual reports and newsletters, the spurious authority of impact assessments. Indeed, it’s no wonder that good communicators like Victor are dismissive of PA. But I also think Victor is saying that rather than separate out PA from other communications functions, we ought to be revelling in our new-found communications breadth. I agree. I think we ought to be relying on and using each other’s diverse expertise to be more experimental, more confident, more inclusive of different realities and perspectives. More effective!
Rather than discount PA because we associate it with mundane-to-trivial prettily decorated materials, we should work together to explode those formats, those predictable plots and dilemmas, manipulated quotes, neat endings, ideologically correct goals, received [and unquestioned] wisdom. We should go after (co-create) narrative drive, newsy news, nuanced arguments, subtle characterization, original (odd) ideas, recommendations that matter, dramatizations that approximate lived experience . . . .
Good science communications of all kinds baffle our desire for easy explanation. They give us not what we want but what we suspect is more meaningful, more accurately reflecting life and life’s complexity. Maintaining (and valuing) what Victor calls, in the interview quoted above, the ‘blurred boundaries’ of our institutional communications expertise in a single coherent program is, I think, a good start to achieving that.
***
Note 1: It has not escaped my notice that the title and substance of my ‘ruminations on communications’ employ not one but two abbreviations (more precisely termed ‘initialisms’) — PA and KM — the use of which of course outgrew its welcome in the 20th century and is now deemed an egregious form of jargon by all right-minded language teachers, communications pundits and style guides. I myself have spent much of my professional life painstakingly excising such forms from literature of one kind or another and, where that was forbidden, making endless lists of the ugly little words for study by myself and hapless readers. But in this little description of what might be perceived as a fight for hegemony among different kinds of CGIAR communications, reference to ‘PR’/’PA’ and ‘KM’, as well as other jargon, seems apt, as it seems we have a tendency (to be disrupted!) to continue to obfuscate our communications even as we argue for its ever-expanding role in CGIAR work.
Note 2: In the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food PASEO think piece that Michael Victor describes and links to in his blog article above (https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/51589/PASEO%20thinkpiec...), there is more dismissal of PA communications. This statement may serve as an example: ‘Corporate communications will always put a “positive spin” on any unfavorable news and will always present a “unified” image of the organization.’ I recognize in this description neither myself nor any of the CGIAR ‘heads of corporate communications’ I have worked with over the last several decades. Indeed, part of my ‘corporate’ communications responsibilities has always been to provide nuances missing in most public discourse, to articulate diverse points of view and why they deserve our attention, and to name research failures as failures, most importantly including those of my institute. Just saying.
Thanks for this article, Michael. It helped me see new things and to consolidate several observations of mine in recent years. I've tried to articulate these below. Hope I have not been too defensive or muddied the waters too much. And hope this is useful to arguments to keep CGIAR communications integrated.
To proponents of ‘KM’ (and detractors of ‘PR’)
In the rush to dismiss the more public-relations (PR) kinds of communications work in our CGIAR enterprise, often now deemed obsolete, in favour of newer forms such as knowledge management (KM), we might profit from looking at a short history of public awareness (or PA, as PR came to be called throughout CGIAR) and the more recent KM and its allied disciplines (knowledge sharing, organizational learning, and so on) in CGIAR. Do these functions really serve different ends? Does separating these functions and reporting lines, as the CGIAR Consortium and some centres have recently done, have anything but organizational novelty and some ‘repositioning’ to recommend it?
Let’s start with the older function and term (I hesitate, given the prevailing ethos, to say ‘discipline’): PA. This is what I do and know best. In my (long but limited) understanding, PA work in CGIAR centres grew out of straightforward science editing and writing in the late 1980s, when ‘core funding’ (funding not tied to any particular research project or program) began to become scarce. It was no longer enough to document the science conducted for our knowledgeable, and accommodating, partners and donors. We now had to translate that science for lay publics, showing its relevance for development-focused decision-makers and their constituencies. We had to show value for money to people new to the worlds of developing-country agriculture. This mostly externally focused ‘corporate communications’ work involved science writing (now more ambitious to emulate Scientific American than Science, New Scientist rather than Nature), media relations, photography and videography production. It demanded skills in basic story telling; in framing topics, summarizing progress, and targeting messages; and in designing information (flyers, posters, photofilms) and branding corporate materials (annual reports, calendars, newsletters). PA work of late is expanding in, and through, ever-evolving diverse social media platforms. Distinguished from science editing and information services and other kinds of communications work ‘back in the day’, this kind of communications work might be characterized as that which originated content, as well as new ways of presenting content, so as to help raise the profile, repute and interest in a CGIAR institute or program or initiative or achievement. Writers and designers worked together to create products that would ‘make a difference’, with a large part of that difference being the ability to attract and keep the attention of people and institutions that mattered most to CGIAR, and yes, with donor organizations and key research partners always near the top of the list.
I was first introduced to KM work in CGIAR by the ICT-KM Program of the early 2000s, run out of WorldFish and then Bioversity by CGIAR CIO Enrica Porcari. Peter Ballantyne’s arrival at my institute, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in September 2009 as head of knowledge management and information services gave me my first practical understanding of what this field was about. We revamped our website within the first month and developed and followed new workflows to ensure that our communications were posted online and recycled efficiently and effectively. We developed an online repository of all our communications materials and began tagging our communications religiously. We made use of the whole of the Worldwide Web to do all this, shunning in-house built programs in favour of the most popular and functional sites and software. We grew our readership enormously in the following years. We hired new kinds of communications staff and gained a reputation for facilitating meeting in ways that made a profound difference in the ‘engagement’ and future collaboration of all the meeting goers, and even those who attended virtually. We began working ‘out loud’ on Yammer and wikis. We hired and embedded communications officers of diverse kinds in our programs and regions. We transformed our libraries into infocentres and our training programs into capacity development programs that involve everything from fellowships to e-learning to mobile telephone projects to advocacy work to innovation platforms. We moved service up front and centre in our IT agenda.
ILRI’s PA work has profited enormously from all the new KM-related kinds of communications work. We ‘corporate writers’ can now dream up and publish materials online within hours, and can quickly get our hands on the best and most appropriate images and slide presentations and other materials among diverse and rich institutional online collections maintained by many, many people. We can reach many, many more people with our materials through posting on key social media platforms, where we can actually engage our readers in conversations. We live and breath now in the online universe, pleasantly surprised at how much we have widened our reach and how much we have enriched our listening to others.
Of course, everywhere we look, there is lots and lots more to do, but that’s not so much a sign of our backwardness as it is of our driving ambition to keep moving forwards, finding better ways to communicate ¬— to engage with and influence and listen to and learn from others.
Those of us in corporate communications want to add ‘messy stories from life’ to our ‘impact narratives’. We want to get really, really good at capturing an idea and engaging an audience in under two minutes flat. We want to experiment with some ‘lyric essays’ and start series of long-form articles that dig deep into the everyday (ambivalent) research experience. We want to get more science in our communications (rather than talk about science). We want to eradicate faddish development clichés and tired, contrived formats from our speaking and portfolios. In short, we want to live up to our diverse collective communications potential and ambitions.
While I confess that I share what seems to be Michael Victor’s dissatisfaction with conventional PR—and I too like the innovative ways CGIAR communications is moving—I think he has homed in on the wrong target. PA/PR isn’t the reason so much of today’s development communications is uninspired and lacking impact. For that, we have many other causes we can consider, such as an emphasis on documenting for documenting’s sake, a tendency to lean on secondhand development ideas as a cover for incomprehension or lack of confidence, insufficient understanding of the science we are communicating, a corrosive fix on donor interests and pots of money, conventional university communications programs, and so on.
What I think I hear in Michael Victor’s article above, and what I have experienced in recent years at my institute, is that rather than go for something truly collective, we are being tempted to split up our diverse and innovative communications work so as to privilege one or more kinds over others. For example, I see hints of us jockeying to position ourselves, and our disciplines, for the very fashionable ‘strategic communications’ domain. As though only one kind of communications can be truly ‘strategic’. (See, for example, this comment by Michael Victor in response to this question by ILRI’s Ewen Le Borgne in an interview: ‘What trends are you observing in comms/KM in the development world [or any closer arena]?’ Answer: ‘Moving from service orientation [corporate] to much more outcome-oriented focus. Also moving from a support/administrative function to a strategic one.’ https://km4meu.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/communication-for-development-km-...)
Where I used to have to convince scientists that ‘corporate communications’ plans should be integrated in projects from their start, I’m now having to make the same argument to my communications colleagues on the KM side, who tend to think that my kind of communications work can come in at the end of the project, ‘when the project has a result to announce’. (Sigh.)
The indictment of PA’s obsolete conventions are well taken—the well-worn, familiar and comfortable production of self-serving annual reports and newsletters, the spurious authority of impact assessments. Indeed, it’s no wonder that good communicators like Victor are dismissive of PA. But I also think Victor is saying that rather than separate out PA from other communications functions, we ought to be revelling in our new-found communications breadth. I agree. I think we ought to be relying on and using each other’s diverse expertise to be more experimental, more confident, more inclusive of different realities and perspectives. More effective!
Rather than discount PA because we associate it with mundane-to-trivial prettily decorated materials, we should work together to explode those formats, those predictable plots and dilemmas, manipulated quotes, neat endings, ideologically correct goals, received [and unquestioned] wisdom. We should go after (co-create) narrative drive, newsy news, nuanced arguments, subtle characterization, original (odd) ideas, recommendations that matter, dramatizations that approximate lived experience . . . .
Good science communications of all kinds baffle our desire for easy explanation. They give us not what we want but what we suspect is more meaningful, more accurately reflecting life and life’s complexity. Maintaining (and valuing) what Victor calls, in the interview quoted above, the ‘blurred boundaries’ of our institutional communications expertise in a single coherent program is, I think, a good start to achieving that.
***
Note 1: It has not escaped my notice that the title and substance of my ‘ruminations on communications’ employ not one but two abbreviations (more precisely termed ‘initialisms’) — PA and KM — the use of which of course outgrew its welcome in the 20th century and is now deemed an egregious form of jargon by all right-minded language teachers, communications pundits and style guides. I myself have spent much of my professional life painstakingly excising such forms from literature of one kind or another and, where that was forbidden, making endless lists of the ugly little words for study by myself and hapless readers. But in this little description of what might be perceived as a fight for hegemony among different kinds of CGIAR communications, reference to ‘PR’/’PA’ and ‘KM’, as well as other jargon, seems apt, as it seems we have a tendency (to be disrupted!) to continue to obfuscate our communications even as we argue for its ever-expanding role in CGIAR work.
Note 2: In the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food PASEO think piece that Michael Victor describes and links to in his blog article above (https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/51589/PASEO%20thinkpiec...), there is more dismissal of PA communications. This statement may serve as an example: ‘Corporate communications will always put a “positive spin” on any unfavorable news and will always present a “unified” image of the organization.’ I recognize in this description neither myself nor any of the CGIAR ‘heads of corporate communications’ I have worked with over the last several decades. Indeed, part of my ‘corporate’ communications responsibilities has always been to provide nuances missing in most public discourse, to articulate diverse points of view and why they deserve our attention, and to name research failures as failures, most importantly including those of my institute. Just saying.