New draft of the Stockholm Accords
The second draft of the Stockholm Accords is now posted on the website. Some 60 people from 20 countries have commented and contributed to the document, which will be finalised in Stockholm in less than three weeks.
The document contains six themes in which public relations add value to their organisations and it will be monitored and evaluated by Global Alliance.
The process is based on five basic guidelines:
- total transparency of mission, vision and strategy of the process and its short term objectives and mid term goals.
All accessible to any student, professional, scholar, educator anywhere in the world; - a few fundamental rationalizations inspired by some of the more recent concepts of our global body of knowledge such as: the network society; the communicative organizations; the value network; the authentic organization; the stakeholder governance model; the generic principles/specific applications and the global stakeholder relationship governance paradigms; the business case…. only to name the first that come to mind.
- a fully open and collaborative process which allows anyone from anywhere to offer input and or criticism.
- a particular attention to considering, beside the global picture, the diverse stages of development of the profession in different regions of the globe.
- the integration, in whatever platform would eventually emerge, of an evaluation and measurement process.
Toni Muzi Falconi has been editing the document:
- Of course to keep the process moving we have – and I take full responsibility – had to sacrifice a few fundamental (ideological?) objections that were voiced during the process by some of our critics to who we are all (and I in particular) greatly indebted… as their criticisms, arguments and suggestions have led in parallel to actual changes in the text, as much as to convince us even more of the merit of the process and of the choices we made, he says.
- For example, we decided that the option for the stakeholder model of governance of the organization could not, as some indeed requested, be abandoned.
Similarly, and against the advice of others, we decided not to abandon the communicative organization, the network society and the value network concepts.
Again we did not think, as some suggested, that the sustainability option was in contradiction with the communicative organization: to the contrary sustainability in no way implies conservativism and it does stimulate risk taking…. Surely these points are all highly debatable but, quite frankly, we believe that the draft which is about to be posted on the forum website will demonstrate that these decisions were valid and founded on solid arguments.
- And finally, we all agree that the language could have been better (jargon some call it, management speak said others and plain crap from the more down to earth) but the English language today has many variations around the globe and no custodians… by the way, doesn’t this remind you of public relations? This is the good and the bad of a global language and of a global profession, and thank god that they exist and that we can at least try to understand one another….
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Euroblog 2008 – Day One (13.03.2008)
[...] New draft of the Stockholm Accords | World Public Relations Forum [...]
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toni muzi falconi
nigerian professional and scholar Sunday Odedele writes:
It is nice of you all who re-drafted the accords in response to the complaints of some of us in order to make it more reflective of the criticsms that will improve our professional performances
toni muzi falconi
German scholar and professional Holger Sievert comments:
Like others, I have been following the development of the Stockholm Accords and originally also planned to participate in the process but wasn’t able this time due to time restrictions. However, as a German PR professional and academic with a lot of international experience, I’d like to comment on it now.
I really like the general approach of the paper, especially the approach from classical PR to genuine modern communication management, from pure media relations to comprehensive stakeholder management. I also like the language generally, because I think that communication managers need to be able to speak a management language to be understood by non-communication manager in their organizations.
Nevertheless, I have problems with some details (1), I think that one important is not place prominently enough (2) and I deeply believe that this can only be a first step (3).
(1) In detail, I am not sure about the pyramide and its structure: are the upper section real always consequences of the lower once and vice versa? I also do not really understand why the coodination of internal and external communication ranges below the internal and external communication itself.
(2) There is one important point missing for me (or at least not emphasized enough): the notion of communication ethics. Of course, it is partly included in the notion of sustainability, but only partly. I don’t believe that ethic can be reduced to a pure technical issue of processes, it’s a question of behaviour and professional understanding.
(3) I would like the end of the accords to formulate even more clearly next steps: How to commnicate this ideas to general managers? How to train actual communication professionals to act more in this direction?
How to teach future generations the knowledge that is behind this “new”
approach.
I hope that my comments might be helpful for the future process of the accords. I especially like to thank Toni for all his engagement with this important issues. He has been doing and still is doing so much for our profession – that is really wonderful!
Dr. Holger Sievert
komm.passion GmbH – http://www.komm-passion.de/
toni muzi falconi
And I also add a recent comment by David Phillips posted under Ronel and Anne’s excellent post on this forum’s website, but which also belongs here:
A small contribution for the Stockholm Accords
I am delighted at what I have seen of the Stockholm Accords
The dynamism of Toni Muzi Falconi is breathtaking and I am full of admiration for the efforts of Ronél Rensburg and Anne Gregory in their explication of the change that is taking place in the world today.
But I am not without concerns.
Perhaps, as we look to the next two or three years of PR practice it gives us a clue as to the life of the Acccord. It is a bold effort but, in my experience, will have a struggle to survive or have any impact.
My interest is in how the internet affects the world and PR in particular. I did predict its significance to the CIPR in 1995 and was involved in some of the papers for the now long forgotten 1999 CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (some of the papers are here and some are here Journal of Communication Management; Volume: 5; Issue: 2; 2000 ).
I am a practitioner, researcher and teacher and so am part of this industry.
Part of me is agast at how little we regard the future. Students leave university with scant understanding of internet implications for their future work. At best they are told about something called ‘Social Media’ (a module that could equally be called etiquette). I see some agencies ’sliming down’ because of the ‘recession’. They don’t recognise that they are being by-passed. There is some form of belief in this industry of ours that the internet is, progresively, having a greater effect on our lives and has effects that mediate everyone’s life. The big thinking concerns online reputation developments, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement. This is a linear view, a straight line graph of change.
The reality is much more potent.The influences brought about by the internet are not straight line, they are exponential. According to an IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will now be doubling every 11 hours. Some years ago Kevin Kelly explained the effects of exponential growth of hyperlinks in network rather well when he told of the prior and future 5000 days.
Some clue to this change can be seen in the consumer/tech cell phone in our pocket or handbag. The move from phone/text to email to hand held mobile computer has been quite quick and as quickly has become passe. Another clue may be found in changed consumer habits and annual growth of online retail sales of 25% plus every year. The biggest development is from, effectively, no cloud computing four years ago to common place corporate application with, in the UK, companies like Rentokil Initial replacing all their email into the cloud in two years, Insurance giant Aviva, Logistics firm Pall-Ex and Universal Music already implementing mass internal and extrernal communication in the cloud and tiny tiny organisations like mine with mega computing power for pennies.
Should it care to use it, the Centre for PR Studies at Leeds Met now has unlimited computing power available without making the lights dim. In the last month, the capability for my research into semantic public relations has moved from being stalled by the high levels of media coverage for the general election to being able to provide both semantic analysis of text and an automated taxonomy to find infered links. This is not a mega university reserach institute it is, literally, in a shed at the end of my garden.
In three years we will have both inference of relationships and predictability of discourse at very high levels of accuracy routinely using massive cloud computing power.
These capabilities will change how governments and societies operate because they will provide near complete radical transparency of every organisation.
You and I will be able to find out the precise nature of the common values that hold disperate organisations, their financial backers, customers and other stakeholder in thier networks.
As for companies, so too for terrorists, wayward governments and so forth.
As the leading thinkers in the world explain in this video, we very nearly have the knowlege and we do have the computing power.
It may possibly be that it is the PR industry that benefits from these developments but linear thinking however ambitious the growth projection may be, is not enough.
From the values lecture, I gave in Lincoln four years ago to Bruno Amaral’s Euprera discourse this year to cloud capacity for semantic PR development in the last month is pretty impressive.
But this thinking has drawbacks. It is not a conversation one can have with practitioners. They both could not understand nor have the inclination to want to stare so much change in the face. Equally, I know of only one Masters course world wide which is prepared to entertain such radical thought (I don’t know of a PhD doing such work – but would be thrilled to find one).
It is for these reasons that I think the Accord, like the CIPR Internet Commission will need re-thinking from scratch in three years.
But it is a great start that can be developed in June.
toni muzi falconi
A reply to Holger and David:
I am not particularly happy as to how the Accords discussion o this site has been formatted, and this partly explains why Holger remarks elements which have already been cleared during the discussion.
As he does not refer to the given explanations, I presume he has not read them.
In any case, I fully agree with Holger’s comment on the pyramid idea and, as I replied earlier to Peggy Bronn who made the same comment, this will be deleted as the final text will come out of the Stockholm discussion e be transferred for implementation to the Global Alliance website.
Holger also asks how we intend to move forward after the text has been agreed upon.
This, for me, is rather an amazing question coming from a person who has received at least 10 messages detailing what comes next in the last six months, or that he would have been able to read from this very web site simply by clicking under ‘Stockholm accords’ the ‘about’ link..
Rather than reiterating that the format of this discussion is misleading, I interpret this request as if the text which has been posted and which addresses the ‘what now?’ issue was not clear and will try again.
And maybe this also addresses part of David Phillips concerns, in the sense that it limits (!?) the ambition and the boundaries (we are both visionaries David…):
Let us imagine (associations, students, scholars, educators, professionals in consultancy as well as in private, public or social organizations ) that we all had one single CLIENT to serve and that this client was the Global Alliance.
Let us imagine that this client -after having worked on a collaborative effort which involved a considerable number of experienced and reputed members of the community- agreed on a BRIEF. This brief is better than most, is fairly thorough and consists of statements, considerations, explanations, references and asks YOU (every single one…) to develop a two year (I agree with David on the time frame…) public relations advocacy program.
How would YOU go about this?
What would you do?
Which of the six themes is more relevant for each of YOUR stakeholder groups?
What will you do?
How will you evaluate and report on what you are doing?
I will not respond to Holger on the ethics issue.
We covered this extensively during the two video conferences he missed and have also discussed it here.
Only one brief sentence: read responsibility (not sustainability) as ethics. The approach is utilitarian and basically implies that for the organization, for the profession, for the single professional a responsible behaviour is an indicator of effective public relations.
Dear David,
I am always taken aback when you comment, so I took the liberty of posting the whole text of the comment rather than only the link to your excellent blog, so that all interested could read in full.
In these days I am re reading Groundswell and, towards the end, the authors imagine what a day of a marketing manager would look like in 2015…..
I also remember that back in 2001, when I was writing the early edition in Italian of Gorel for Il Sole 24Ore, the first chapter was entirely dedicated to illustrating the ‘day of Mario Rossi’ describing the hundreds of outreaches organizations make every day, in every manner, with every possible tool to each of us in order to attract our attention and develop some kind of relationship.
In 2001 the digital environment gave few but solid spaces in which this could happen.
Today of course the options are many more and, as you say, in three years time, they will be many more again.
I am absolutely convinced that the Accords (that integrate the digital environment as fully consubstantial to our professional practice) intends only to be a two year brief to our global professional community containing arguments and narratives which, where properly advocated to the specific stakeholder groups and adapted to the diverse levels of practice and culture of different territories, will allow the Global Alliance in 2013 to review and update the effort and so on.
And , in the meantime I believe that the profession’s reputation worldwide will have made a substantial step forward.
I entirely agree with everything you say… but allow me to be a bit more optimistic.
I know very well that you, and I,as well as others, have gone through many disappointments.
But you probably would not be dedicating so much thought, time, ideas and committment if you did not think that things are progressing, maybe not at the speed which is demanded, but certainly not slower than many other professions….
Thank you David.
toni muzi falconi
As the World Public Relations Forum begins to debate the second draft of the Stockholm Accords, two recent and unprecedented (?) events that strongly reinforce the stakeholder model organization.
On the mini side, the Italian content producer VITA (a cooperative formed by some 25 of the more reputed non profit organizations) received on Friday a formal approval from the financial market authorities to list on the Italian market a 3 ml. Euro IPO explicitly stating to investors that it will never distribute dividends.
On the maxi side the London market on Friday gave a 6.5% boost to BP share value, and the financial press attributed this rise to the rumour that on Moday the Company will decide to at least temporarily withhold distribution of dividends.
Can someone think of a precedent for either of the two totally unrelated instances?
These to me are indicators that the consolidated concept of value is under severe review, and that responsible shareholders are the first to attribute to the responsible Boards the situational decision on whose stakeholder group to favour when, as almost always nowadays, they are in conflict.
Therefore… the Stockholm Accords.