Issues

Some review first:

Identity establishment and maintenance is crucial to organizations.
	YOU have to know who you are (internal to org.)
	THEY have to know who you are (publics)
Both (internals and externals) have to understand and trust your identity. 
Ideally, both buy into the organization’s construction and display of identity
	(“identifying” with the organization)


Consistency in organizational behavior and values. 
	Considering whatever that identity is, the organization must be seen as comporting within community expectations and standards. It’s almost better to have no identity than to violate expectations set by it.

=======

Issue management folds back on all of this: the organizational identity tills the soil for taking on issues AND the ways that issues are approached plants back into the field. Weeding and flowering works both ways. 

Organizational communicators face ”contestable questions of fact, value, or policy that affect how stakeholders grant or withhold support and seek changes through public policy." 

Sets the ground on external issues. 
As we'll see in Chapter 10, there are also issues among internal publics (within the organization) so the "public policy" part isn't 100% correct here (unless one dumps EVERYTHING that happens internally into the "internal rhetoric" pot….)

Note the (internal)potential disagreements over issue aspects: 
-whether X is even an issue; 
-whether positions taken about it are true or false; 
-whether something should be done about it; over what should be done about it; 
-over who should do something about it; 
-over who should make decisions over what should be done about it; 
-over who should get to speak about the status of the issue and/or it's resolution. 

In other words: if the organization is large enough that it enters the public consciousness in light of issues/an issue, a set of involvements have already been invoked—that are way more complicated than they look. 

And in many ways, job #1 for an organizational communicator is to make sure that the appearance of complexity doesn't enter the scene. As issues become more than just a normal part of everyday life in/to the organization, trouble arises. Making it look (symbolically) normal is very important. 

This is a two-headed monster. Calming the waters in these ways threatens to drown the organization in ideology and group think. It’s a fine line. 

Issue management (sometimes via issue management campaigns): Shape the audiences to agree with the organization, and to act on that. 
Could be via persuasion (aristotle), identification (burke), shifting adherence to values (perelman), ideology (foucault). 

A central feature is the effort to define the situation (Definition of the Situation— DoS). 

Think of the notion of "punctuation of a sequence of events" in a "he said/she said" argument 
OR
in the work that a trial lawyer does throughout the trial, but especially in closing. 

The side that wins is (usually) the side that gets to frame the narrative by defining the situation regarding cause and effect/time ordering. Although not everything just follows from defining the situation, with issues management, DoS is the first big step.

As noted (141-142) both parties (the organizations and publics) have outcomes at risk. 

One can never say, definitively, that one can still benefit if the other loses. 
There is a symbiotic relationship between organizations and their communities. 
HOWEVER…. with regard to issue management, the basic feature is that the issue gets managed the way(s) the organization prefers without excessive damage to the external community (hopefully, with benefits to the external community).
This implies a preference within the collaboration.(“Our way”)

Issues are like real estate (location location location) . . . they have to compete in clutter clutter clutter.

Issue cycles: Potential, imminent, current, critical, dormant. 
Issues have a shelf life in terms of attention. 
If unresolved within that shelf life, they "spoil." 
In many ways, one would almost rather that they go against you . . . then have to live with the festering wound forever. 
Get em resolved.

Potential stage: identify and plan for them. 

Remember debate. Remember wrestling. Remember the legal system.
Clear establishment of, and residence on, the status quo as the high ground. 
Notice the potential that the status quo might shift. 
Get there before the ground shifts under you and you no longer hold the status quo. 
Change or die. 
Effective change requires planning and preparation for change. 
Change management is a very important aspect of managing issues.

Imminent stage: LISTENING not just hearing. 
Avoidance of "we didn't see this coming," esp. if it's actually already here. 
Ya can't plan for what you can't see. Once you do, plan.
[we’ll take this up next time . . . but organizations HATE facing up to their shortcomings]

Current stage: pick and execute the right influence strategy(ies). 

Critical stage: especially prepare assessment methods. Be ready to learn, in a data-based way, the outcomes of the decisions/changes.

Dormant stage: Move on, but don't forget. 
Organizational histories are powerful techniques for definition of the situation as one moves forward.
It takes WAY longer to go back and find out why something was done than it does to keep great, searchable, records in the first place.  
SO much of issue resolution gets buried SO fast. Information management is crucial, over time.

The rhetorical situation. Again, you’d like to define it… to bring it into being.. not just to have to respond to it (Vatz over Bitzer)

Vigilance. 
But more than that. Someone (or some set of someones) has to take "the vision thing" as a major part of their role. 
They have to be given the time and support to be able to "look out, toward the horizon.” 

You cannot do this effectively if the org. keeps everyone always working at now. 
Google used to offer 20% time for free, open ended, innovation. That's probably extravagant. 
But if everyone is always putting out fires, no one has time to watch out for flammables before they arrive. (more about this in risk)
[again, the authors tend to confuse the situation with the rhetorical situation…but oh well. Remember, the situation is NOT the rhetorical situation. The rhetorical situation consists of the meanings that folks have for situations).

in addition to the two Exigences listed, (the org. pursues a position on an issue that effects them; the organization seeks change by advancing an issue) I would offer a third: 

Issues organizations make via their behavior. These boarder on crisis and they take risk management --- so they pre-figure our next two chapters. But they are interrelated. If one deals with the outcomes of the organizations' doing, insightfully and front end, one ends up with less risk management and fewer crises.

Who is the enabling audience for the issue? 
They are the focus for the effort, cause they can make the decisions happen. One can't forget the other audiences. 

And I'm not sure that lumping the media in with other diffused audience (p. 148) is correct. 

The media are connected at the hip with the enabling audience  because in many cases, how the thing plays on the media is as or more important than the nature of the actual changes.

Constraints and Assets: Clutter, lack of time, complexity, and identity.