How many junior civil servants does it take to upset the Pope?
Only one, but they need to be in a culture that encourages the kind of thinking that allows them to come up with ideas for the Pope’s visit to England that include, opening an abortion clinic, blessing gay marriages – and even launching a brand of ‘Benedict Condoms’.
Outraged newspapers, seizing on the chance to write about something other than the election are stopping short of suggesting it is surely the end of days.
It turns out it was part of a brainstorming exercise at the Foreign Office ahead of the Papal visit to the UK. The mistake was circulating the ‘blue sky’ ideas from the exercise so widely that it was inevitable they would enter the public domain.
The Foreign Office has been swift to apologise – stopping short of asking for forgiveness – and while the headlines are still screaming from the newsstands, already more circumspect clergy are altogether more tolerant on broadcast interviews.
Significantly the ‘junior civil servant’ who is to blame has been assigned ‘other duties’ rather than being cast out of the temple. This suggests that they hadn’t really done anything wrong!
Now in terms of public relations it is a mild problem for the Government and one that has been deftly handled and honestly, it does fall way short of the PR crisis that the Catholic church faces with its gross mismanagement of the who paedophile priests issue.
As ever, repenting is a good crisis management public relations strategy. Contrition justifies how people feel about you and is normally followed by a mellowing in their viewpoint. Of course, it does depend on what the crisis is! That’s why it pays to speak to crisis PR specialists. Morgan PR learned its skills in the dizzy, helter skelter world of Thames Valley Police, which is about as dramatic as it gets outside central government!
A tougher sell for the Foreign Office would have been to try and explain the brainstorming that led to a junior civil servant dreaming up ‘Benedict Condoms’ – which is still available as a domain name for any enterprising souls out there!
For example, there is a great business visioning tool called The Disney Model, based on Walt Disney’s approach to problem solving, which involves taking three distinct approaches: the dreamer, the realist and the spoiler.
Essentially the dreamer would come up with amazing ideas with no constraints on creativity and then the realist comes in and is more pragmatic and wants to know how it would actually work. The spoiler comes in and questions what is wrong with the idea.
I learned how to use this model when I qualified as a Neuro Linguistic Programming Practitioner with the remarkable Miriam McCallum of McCallum Associates, who teach NLP in Berkshire. We would physically move to different parts of the room to take on the different roles. When Google employ this approach they even use different buildings for each stage.
It is a great technique and one Morgan PR uses internally when business planning and we sometimes use it with clients too. It is a good strategy to elicit what you really want to achieve in your wildest dreams, before focusing on what is realistically achievable.