Surviving (and thriving) in risky environments

Issues include significant environmental and internal operational factors that are likely to have an impact on organisations as well as a gap between your company or client's actions and stakeholder expectations.

Issues management includes changes such as setting new policy, community dialogue, public education, introducing a new product or service, and even modifying operations. Further, a number of operational issues such as free cash flow, customer retention or acquisition, capital cost, capital structure, production efficiency, quality and price may well have considerable communications implications and impacts. As such, issues management combines with traditional strategic planning, corporate governance and communications to work on specific objectives in managing the issue or closing the expectation gap.

Some business and communications experts trace the origins of formal issues management to Howard Chase in the US who coined the phrase "issues management" in 1976. However, in Europe management experts were also extensively investigating issues that affect industry and its freedom in the mid 1970s. Cyril Parkinson and Nigel Rowe compiled their conclusions in a slim volume called "Communicate: Parkinson's Formula for Business Survival" which covers many of the concepts we know today as stakeholder management, crisis communication, corporate advocacy and corporate governance. Rowe was with multinational, ITT, as a public relations director in Europe, where he crafted campaigns to reduce hostility towards the corporation from governments, civil service, and the media and to close the "information gap". Another early issues manager, labour lawyer, Herbert Schmertz was known for his constructive confrontational campaigns for the Mobil Oil Corporation. He pioneered several of the issues management campaign tools that we take for granted today.

It is always difficult to pin point the development of a conceptual process as, most often, pieces of the puzzle begin to converge from various quarters and then the thought, trend or concept is synthesized into a more understandable and usable manner.

In South Africa in the 1970s, certain business leaders of the day dealt with various public and social issues outside of their purely business domain under a hostile political and economic environment.

Issues management, not just issues communication, allows best-practice companies to proactively adapt their corporate strategies, plans and operations to capitalise on opportunities, reduce risk and increase competitive advantage. Where much issues management falls short today is in the understanding of bottom-line business issues and the relationship to communications responses to the issues. The communications practitioner generally enters from a narrow specialisation and from this limited view tries to understand the business issues. Issues management should begin with the broader economic, political, social, and technological contexts. Companies operating in increasingly political economies need to understand the political climate at international, national and local levels to perform effectively. Stakeholder mapping interactively and interdependently define the "game" of business for a company. While players in the value net such as customers, suppliers and competitors and complementors play a crucial role within the market context, the corporation interacts with many non-economic players such as government regulators, politicians, special interest groups and activists important for gaining public consensus. Companies need to think carefully about divesting resources from efficiency-enhancing activities to those that repair or enhance their social legitimacy.

Care must be taken in identifying stakeholders who may have the greatest impact on their social legitimacy. A major potential threat is that there are few barriers to entry for social actors in a company's domain.

In today's turbulent world markets with increasingly fierce competition, shorter innovation and production cycles, shorter planning horizons and uncertainty about strategy issues, risk management has become a crucial factor of business success. Public scrutiny and media attention place good corporate governance at a premium.

There are many issues that face a business in South Africa today but below is merely a sample list of generic issues that could be considered. While the communications practitioner may not directly have influence over some of the business issues it is important to be aware of them as they may impact communications, particularly internal communications programmes: