Leidy Klotz’s ‘Subtract’ struck a chord with the lobbyist/campaigner in me.
The book’s not about lobbying, but it has some useful lessons that any lobbyist or campaigner can take away.
And, as many people don’t like reading, here is my takeaway.
Klotz contends that it seems that our biology, our culture, and our economies all conspire to keep us locked in a cycle of acquisition. I have a room full of my sons’ lego, toys and children’s books. Age is not reducing the size.
A lot of people think that being busy and doing stuff is the right thing. As I get older, I’ve come to the heretical view that doing less is doing more. It is why Subtract resonated to me.
A lot of people blieve if we just do more – more internal meetings, more external meetings, more speaking events, more letters, more reports, more position papers, more advertising, more column inches in the press, spend more on the campaign – that what we want will come about. They are wrong. Doing less but better is a more effective way.
Some Key Takeaways
- Less internal meetings. A takeaway I took from a successful NGO campaign I worked on was that success came about because of the lack of internal meetings. This happened during a campaign that I and another NGO worked on. When colleagues were on holiday, we had the time to meet the few key people who needed to be met and get the right press attention. The campaign slowed down when people came back from holiday, and the internal meetings re-started and dragged on. Success had been delivered their vacation.
- Less external meetings. Campaigns come down to meeting the right people, at the right time, with the right information. After many years, I’ve come down to a simple rule of thumb is that on any proposal there are around 200 people in Europe who’ll have an influence on the proposal (Ministers, politicians in the country and MEPs, advisers, key officials in national government governments and the EU Commissioners, some academics and journalists). You don’t need to meet the 32,000 Commission officials, the 3119 Council staff, or the 705 MEPs.
- Even then out of the 200, a few countries, politicians and officials will really decide what happens. This is around 20 -40 people. That’s the group that you need to influence.
- For the 705 MEPs, your future will be set by a handful of MEPs and Advisers – the Rapporteurs/Shadows, Group / National Co-ordinators, and key Advisers.
- Focus on a few things; you can’t do everything. When I was at the NGO IFAW, they applied this rule strictly. They only worked on a few things that had good plans and were well-funded. Lots of important and worthy issues came through their doors. But, they knew that if they took on more and more, they would imperil success.
- Copy Jim Collins’s idea and have a ‘not to do list. Work only in your circle of competence. You’ll be asked to do new things that you don’t have experience in. Don’t give way to the urges to take on it on board. You’ll land up doing things less well than you do the things you do well.
- Follow Herbert A. Simon‘s advice “….information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Producing lots of and long reports, position papers, letters won’t help your case. If you bombard your audience with lots of information, you will push them into cognitive overload, and they’ll shut down.
- Your audience has a limited bandwidth, so what’s the right amount of points to put forward? Klotz notes that in “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” (1956), Miller proposed as a law of human cognition and information processing that humans can effectively process no more than seven units, or chunks, of information, plus or minus”. Further research suggests that the magic number is three. If you can limit yourself to three points, you’ll be a lot more influential. One is even better.
- Most lobbyists’ writing is too long and unclear. John Locke explained the reason for this as “But to confess the Truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy to make it shorter”. Don’t be too busy or lazy.
- It is hard work to make our writing products (letters, position papers, reports) good, and for that reason, we default to “good enough”. For the recipient, your satisfaction is gibberish. To make it good, make the extra effort and subtract the points.
- Pablo Picasso defined art as the “elimination of the unnecessary”. Have a look at Edward Tufte, known as the DaVinci of Data, to best communicate political and policy messages powerfully and visually.
- Take a page out of Amazon, who followed Edward Tufte’s advice, and banish powerpoint. It is a flawed tool for conveying information. It is an even worse medium for persuasion. That it is the default medium for communication, both internally and externally, is not a good thing.
- The most successful lobbying force I’ve ever seen at work is the fishing industry. It’s a political force that I’ve seen no other interests match. In practice, real fishermen engage directly at the constituency level with a group of select politicians interested in the file and with a handful of officials year-round. A few meetings a year with some good press coverage for supportive politicians back home makes them punch way above their economic clout. No army of lobbyists is needed.
The most successful lawmakers I know don’t do lots; they do a lot less. They focus on a few things, do them very well, and have an amazing strike rate of getting the laws they want on the books. They don’t take many external meetings, few speaking engagements, no social media, no media outreach, and manage to do much of this by clocking off by 6 pm. They do less but do it a lot better.