Journal of Public Affairs
Volume 2 Number 3
Regular Feature
Analysis and analytical tools for managing
corporate public affairs
Craig S. Fleisher
Received: 13th February, 2002
Odette School of Business, 508 Odette Building, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON N9B 3P4, Canada;
tel: þ1 519 253 3000; fax: þ1 519 973 7073; e-mail: fleisher@canada.com
Craig S. Fleisher holds the Odette Research
Chair in Business and is Professor of Business
Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Odette School of
Business, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Previously President of the Canadian Council
for Public Affairs Advancement, he has written
several books and scores of articles on public
affairs related topics.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the place of analysis in
corporate public affairs practice. It examines analysis in the larger context of organisational decision
making, examines models, tools and techniques
available to the CPA practitioner, and identifies
factors why analysis has not received the prominence it deserves in the field and beyond.
KEYWORDS: analysis, education, methods,
models, professionalisation, techniques
INTRODUCTION
In two previous articles for the Journal of
Public Affairs, it was suggested that the author
did not believe that the field of corporate
public affairs (CPA) had yet met all the
crucial tests that would warrant it being
named among the so-called professions. Cor-
porate public affairs might be alternatively
labelled a discipline, an area of knowledge, a
field of study, or a collection of associated
concerns. Whatever it is called, for CPA to
attain professional status, it must be associated
with knowledge, expertise or skills that are
unique to it and not shared with other fields.
Whether it is a medical doctor studying
bodily symptoms to proclaim a diagnosis or a
lawyer studying criminal evidence to piece
together a plausible pattern of action, all
professions entail practical applications of
their underlying unique knowledge bases to
improve the human condition. This process
is arguably the most fundamental knowledge-based task underlying any profession
and requires the professional to skilfully convert inputs into outputs of value.
Despite the typical absence of discussion
or empirical research on this topic, CPA
practitioners also perform the process of
analysis. In this article, the focus will be on
the process and techniques of analysis used by
CPA practitioners. Positioning analysis in the
context of the larger organisation’s decisionmaking process will come first. Next, two
dozen unique tools by which CPA practitioners can analyse just two facets of their
Journal of Public Affairs
Vol. 2 No. 3, 2002, pp. 167–172
& Henry Stewart Publications,
ISSN 1472-3891
Page 167
Analysis and analytical tools for managing corporate public affairs
environment, issues and stakeholders are
identified, to give the reader a better sense of
the breadth and depth of models and techniques that are potentially available in the CPA
analysis tool kit. Last, a number of key
reasons are examined as to why CPA analysis
has not received more attention and prominence.
THE PLACE OF CPA ANALYSIS IN DECISION
MAKING
Every strategic business decision entails opportunity or risk. So how are socio-political
strategies formulated and how do firms ensure that they are the ones that maximise
opportunities and minimise risks? The answer — it is only through the careful collection, examination and evaluation of the facts,
that appropriate strategic alternatives can be
weighed in light of organisational resources
and requirements. Despite the seeming obviousness of this statement, as strategy guru
Michael Porter noted in a recent article, very
few managers actually receive analysed information for their decision making or even
have a strategy (Hammonds 2001).
Every successful CEO recognises the need
for systematic analysis of their organisation’s
external environment. Nevertheless, few academic studies have formally assessed how
CPA practitioners actually perform the analysis process and what methods they utilise in
different analytical contexts; however, this
absence of study does not negate the importance of analysis in the overall CPA task.
What is analysis in a CPA context? Both a
product and a process, analysis involves a
variety of scientific and non-scientific techniques to create insights or inferences from
data or information. CPA analysis is the
multifaceted combination of processes by
which collected socio-political information is
systematically interpreted to create intelligence and recommendations for actions.
Analysis answers that critical ‘so what?’ question about the gathered information and
brings insight to bear directly on the deci-
Page 168
sion-maker’s needs, helping the client to
make enlightened decisions.
Most managers implicitly or explicitly recognise the need for more systematic analysis
of their public policy environment (Fleisher
1999). However, recognising there is a need
for the capability and putting into place the
systems, structures and skills needed to exploit the capability are very different things.
Numerous researchers through the years
have identified enduring gaps between what
is viewed as being needed for decision making in organisations (ie expectations) and
what is actually being delivered by organisational analysis systems (ie performance)
(Ghoshal and Westney 1991). Experience
and observation suggest that these gaps also
exist prominently in CPA.
The essential responsibility of a CPA analyst is to protect and enhance their company’s
competitive and non-market interests by
providing useful and high-quality analysis
about the ‘4Is’, interests/stakeholders, intelligence, institutions and issues (Baron 1995) to
their decision making, policy making, and/
or resource allocating clients. Analysis is
provided to these clients in the form of
analysis products such as assessments, briefs,
bulletins, charts, conclusions, estimates, forecasts, issue reports, maps, premonitory reports, profiles, recommendations, and/or
warnings. These analytical products are the
most tangible manifestations of the outcomes
of the CPA analysis process.
My view is that CPA has made strides in
recent decades in developing a collection of
rigorous analytical methods, models or techniques. Practitioners can utilise these techniques and make worthwhile contributions to
effective organisational decision making.
Some of the tools are mostly unique to CPA
itself, but the majority of techniques have
been borrowed from related fields like administration, management, marketing, political science, public policy, and public
relations. In the next section, the analytical
tools available to the CPA practitioner to do
Fleisher
just two of the tasks underlying their responsibility set, analysing issues and stakeholders
will be briefly illuminated.
KEY ELEMENTS IN THE CPA ANALYTICAL
TOOL KIT
In the following section, some of the more
popular tools in the CPA analytical tool-box
for assessing issues and stakeholders are identified—two of Baron’s (1995) four non-market
strategy framework elements. It might strike a
casual reader that these are a substantial set of
tools, models and frameworks that can be
applied in assisting them to do analysis of their
issues and stakeholders. In reality, the number
of unique tools to assess just issues and stakeholders is substantially larger than the ones
listed, and, from the author’s research and
teaching well over 100 that have been practised and proven in use can be identified.
Research currently and prospectively being
conducted about these fields will only serve
to extend and to validate new ways of assessing these critical CPA task components.
It is not the intention to be exhaustive in
this characterisation, although it would be
useful to the field for scholars to someday
make this important contribution. The goal
in this paper is to provide the reader with a
keener sense of the range and value of analysis that can be performed using these frameworks, models, techniques and tools.
Issue-related CPA analytical techniques
These techniques include the many tools by
which CPA practitioners identify, understand, research and assess how the organisation should address critical socio-political
issues. Heath (1997: 84) defines an issue as a
‘contestable point, a difference of opinion
regarding fact, value or policy the resolution
of which has consequences for the organisation’s strategic plan.’ Prominent among these
issue tools are:
• issue scanning-monitoring-analysis system
model (Johnson 1983)
• issue life-cycle charting (Buchholz 1995;
Corrado 1984)
• issue source assessment (Bartha 1982;
Molitor 1979)
• issue priority scoring (Gollner 1983;
Sopow 1994)
• issue impact/occurrence or probability assessment (Bartha 1982)
• issue congruency test (Bartha 1993)
• issue distance mapping (Corrado 1984)
• issue expansion mapping (Mahon 1989)
• issue frequency model (Mack 1989)
• issue response patterns (Buchholz 1990;
Mahon 1989)
• issue typing schemes (Bartha 1982)
• issue implementation planning schemes
(Fleisher 1999)
• strategic issue management model (Ansoff
1980)
• strategic management model for issues
(Ryan, Swanson, and Buchholz 1987),
etc.
Stakeholder-related analytical CPA
techniques
A key stakeholder is an individual or group
that can materially affect or can be affected
by a company’s actions, decisions, goals,
policies or practices. CPA tools used to
identify, understand and assess stakeholders
include, but are not limited to, the following:
• influence/importance matrix (Bartha
1982)
• stakeholder cooperation/threat diagnosis
matrix (Savage et al. 1991)
• pyramid of corporate social responsibility
(Carroll 1991)
• social actions modelling (Jackson and Aldag 1993)
• social
context
stakeholder
model
(Buchholz 1990)
• stakeholder mapping (Michaelove 1985)
• stakeholder responsibility matrix (Carroll
and Buchholtz 2000)
• stakeholder view of the firm (Freeman
1984)
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Analysis and analytical tools for managing corporate public affairs
• three attribute stakeholder
(Mitchell et al. 1997)
typology
Analysis using the items above is carried out
by using a variety of research-based applications. This can include, but is not limited to:
attitude and opinion polls, survey techniques,
focus groups, expert panels, observation, scenario development, content analysis, Delphi
methods, event and/or trend analysis etc.
Like other fields, CPA is amenable to the
application of a wide range of traditional
qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and practitioners need to be informed of and able to choose and use the
appropriate ones for the relevant analytical
tasks they face.
WHY IS CPA ANALYSIS SHORT-CHANGED IN
MANY ORGANISATIONS?
Why hasn’t CPA analysis become more
prominent in the training and practice of
CPA practitioners? In the following section,
several of these forces are outlined that need
to be dealt with before progress can be made.
Some of the more important ones are summarised in the following categories: individual, organisational and institutional. These
are dealt with in turn below.
Individual-level factors
There are few CPA practitioners who will
admit that they cannot do analysis; however,
few besides the most fortunate of CPA
veterans actually can do it effectively. Despite
the popular misconception that everybody
can naturally do it, studies have shown that
analysis is a task that is substantially learned
over time and through experience. If they
were ever to be truly tested, undeniably some
practitioners will demonstrate they have
learned how to do it better than others.
Not all CPA practitioners are born with
the same proclivity to perform rigorous
analysis. Some have an inclination to perform
lateral thinking and analysis, such as ‘NTs’
from Myers Briggs Profile Typing (Fleisher
Page 170
and Bensoussan 2002). It would behove
companies to hire those individuals with the
highest level of capability to perform analysis
positions. Most HR departments do not perform this testing at present, not the least
because there are few reliable ways of testing
analytical capability in CPA. Last but not
least, analysis is hard work and many people
prefer paths of lesser resistance than having to
perform rigorous thinking and assessment.
Organisational factors
Analysts do not make the organisation’s public policy-related decisions. Their task is to
advise and/or to make recommendations to
their clients based on the best objective
assessment they can deliver. Unfortunately,
many organisations have decision makers
who do not know quite what to make of
CPA analyses and recommendations, sometimes due to their lack of education and
familiarity with the field.
Few organisations provide the CPA practitioner the time necessary to truly think
strategically and analytically and to rigorously
apply analytical tools such as those previously
outlined. Also, how will analysts get beneficial practice in applying these techniques if
their formal or on-the-job schooling does
not allow them ‘safe’ case studies and projects
to apply it to without the real-world organisational pressure? What makes this situation
worse is that CPA practitioners are often
blamed for non-market organisational failures but are rarely given praise for successes.
Good analysts need to be given opportunities
to fail without it causing them irreversible
career damage.
CPA analysts rely upon good data collection of both hard information and soft information (human intelligence). Any CPA
practitioner knows that the most critical
public policy positioning intelligence will
come from dialogues, conversations and discussions. If only hard data is collected from,
say, the Internet, then the analytical task will
be biased and, in turn, so will the output.
Fleisher
Remember the old GIGO adage — garbage
in, garbage out. Unless analysis encompasses
both hard and soft information, garbage will
come out. Formal and informal education
about the task of actually gathering quality
data through primary methods is another one
that is sorely lacking in the field.
Institutional factors
Analytical capability in CPA requires instruction, training, development and experience
— practice helps in analysis, the more experience one gets in doing good analysis, the
better they become. The author is not aware
of a single university course that teaches the
fundamentals of CPA analysis, and the many
concepts and tools underlying the task are
only available in fragments among a wide
variety of mostly academic research and
scholarship. Furthermore, there are few
mentors or instructors who could disseminate
this scholarship. Most practitioners never
received training in CPA analysis, and there
is no handbook they can pull off their shelves
to guide them through the process.
These and other factors mean that analysis
will remain under-emphasised in CPA.
There is much work to be done by a variety
of stakeholders, including academics, associations, managers, practitioners and scholars, in
order to overcome the factors identified
above. Although some groups, including the
Issue Management Association and Public
Affairs Council, have recently organised task
forces to study the questions of providing
education, the field is a long way from meeting this essential underlying characteristic of
the established professions.
SUMMARY
The task of analysis requires a delicate balance of art (creativity, insightfulness, resourcefulness) and science (methods, techniques,
processes) that few can effectively manage.
The process of CPA analysis has never gained
prominence as a sub-discipline within the
field. As long as this remains the case, CPA
and its practitioners will never exploit the
field’s vast potential to simultaneously increase both its value and legitimacy.
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