Over the coming weeks, I’m going to look at some of practical tools in the lobbyist’s toolbox.
I’ll start with one of the most useful, The Grid, made well known by Alastair Campbell when he worked for Tony Blair in government.
If you head Public Affairs in any organisation that has more than three people, you’ll need it.
The Grid
This is an example.
Source: ‘Alastair Campbell’ Peter Osborne and Simon Walters, Annex One
I found it has some practical uses, including:
- You avoid clashes of reports/press releases being released on the same day by different parts of your organisation.
- It enables you to coordinate communication – both external and internal. Always useful if a colleague wants to go off message and sneak a ‘crazy’ report out the door when he* thought nobody was looking.* It usually is a he going off message.
- It provides a mechanism to install message discipline and check on the quality. I’ve seen reports and accompanying press releases that required an experienced Sanskrit translator to understand their content. The grid gives you the chance to nix it.
- It delivers some peace of mind to your leadership that they are not going to public and come across as speaking to the fairies.
- It is a simple mechanism to screen for quality before it leaves the door.
It requires you to:
- List all the important events for the next 6-12 months. Do you want to launch a report to influence the 2026 Commission’s Work Programme on the day the 2026 Work Programme is published?
- Get a list of legislative, regulatory and policy initiatives you are looking to influence. See what you plan to do to influence those decisions? If you are leaving change up to the ‘animal spirits’, and don’t feel the need to produce evidence (reports, studies, events) to influence decisions, you may wonder what this exercise is about.
- Take your list of reports, studies and events and see if they will be ready in time to influence decisions. It is not the week of the vote in plenary!
- Put down the internal and external events in a calendar.
- Check you are not doing three events on one day, about five different things. Your message will be diluted,
- Check that you have the resources to do all the things you want to do.
- Check that you have leeway in the schedule to allow relevant officials to review your report & studies for errors, and invite them to the event launch. You don’t want to host a reception where you want officials and politicians to attend, forget to inform them until 24 hours before the event, and schedule it on a day 90% can’t participate in.
The benefits include:
You start to influence decisions.
Your message comes across as clear and on point.
Peace of mind for your leadership.
You’ll have push back.
Many people mistake gibberish as inspired creativity.
Some people like to shoot from the hip. They tend to shoot themselves or colleagues in a ricochet.
Many people believe that the fairies are real and they are making the decisions. Once you stop them feeding by their fantasies, by blocking their reports etc going out the door, the fairy visions will hopefully decrease.