A lot of time and energy in lobbying is spent providing, digesting and reading information.
I suspect a Head of Office could easily spend half their time just reading monitoring reports and issue updates from their many sources of information: subscriptions, agencies, and trade associations.
All that time spent digesting and understanding may leave little time to act on the information.
The very best you can be is a well-informed bystander to ‘events’.
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Option 1
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Option 2
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Option 3
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Option 4
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Option 5
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Well-presented synthesis of what’s in the public domain
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Well presented Synthesis of what’s not in the public domain
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What’s really driving events and what’s next – never in the public domain
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What are the 1-2 things you can do to change the direction of travel
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Who to speak to & what to present to them to change the direction of travel
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0-3 months
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3 years
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7 years
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10 years
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10-15 years
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Each of these 5 options has its value.
The skills and expertise needed for each offering are different.
Options 2-5 require experience and a network to draw the intelligence from.
Whilst many will say that they want 4 & 5, they really don’t. They won’t have the time to act on the political intelligence; they’ll be too busy in trade association/ internal meetings to assemble the information that they’ll need (4) to engage with the right people, at the right time, with the right information and solution (5).
The time it takes to develop the necessary skill, expertise, network, and trust varies.
Presenting a clear synthesis can be learned quickly, and with the help of clever AI bots, near instantly.
After that, everything else takes time to be able to do well.
My hunch is that it corresponds to the time to take genuine expertise: around 10 years.
Most people don’t want to spend 10 years honing their craft.
I suspect that is the baseline to sometimes being able to change events.