This fall, my capstone professor asked us to write a speech outline about the importance of planning in public relations. Settling on a Ted-esque setting and audience, I used LEGOs to capture the exciting creativity that communicators need to engage when our perfect plans–inevitably–hit the fan.
Start with a smile :)
There’s a misguided preponderance in public relations to discuss strategy, tactics and planning in spartan terms. Planning, at its essence, is impossibly fun—it’s a system that actualizes romantic visions into better futures. Think about your loved ones giving you a gift as a kid. Think about peeling back the colorful wrapping paper to reveal a LEGO kit and feverishly ripping into the box for its thousands of bricks. Think about your excitement to pore over the meticulous instructions. You might have followed the instructions chronologically. You could have even bounced around to get the easy parts done first and worked up from there. Whatever your plan of attack, you knew, even as a kid, that ignoring the instructions doomed any chances to build that beautiful, glossy creation promised on the box.
Pretension undermines thoughtful, human, and exciting marketing plans. We build beautiful creations for those we represent. Like bricks, we use excellent communications. Integrated communications planning is most effective when we reframe stress positively, see complex systems as possibilities, and package our goals as exciting creations (just as we do with LEGOs).
A Positive Stress Mindset
This year, public relations was ranked the eighth most stressful profession (Carufel, 2019).
Between first opening the box and placing its final brick, we tend to forget about all the tiny stress points along the path of creation with LEGOs. We come to these moments of stress as a product of our own progress and critical thought.
As strategic communicators, we first have to rethink occupational stress as a natural, progressive product of our own professional development, which signals the high demand for our critical skills in communications thought. By recognizing our own patterns of dealing with stress along the communications path, we can only learn and grow as a profession.
Strategic Plasticity: One Brick for Endless Outcomes
LEGO bricks push us to convert ideas into tangible objects. Different LEGO kits cater to different kids with different attitudes. The best communications strategy will visualize tangible experiences that the public has with our messages. A flyer is engaged with far differently than a mobile YouTube video. However, both rely on some tangible link between media form, audience, and content. My second piece of advice is to inventively visualize how all of the bricks at our disposal can come together. We thrive on plans that assemble communications efforts into tangible solutions that interface ideas, individuals, and information channels in never-before-experienced ways.
Complex Problems are Just Opportunities
Pieces will go missing
One time, my dog chewed up an entire bag of pieces in my LEGO Star Wars kit. The crisis could have thrown a catastrophic wrench in that project. But, I didn't let it.
How did I leverage the instructions to address these challenges?
Get scrappy
Well, I had a whole bin of discarded bricks from old kits. A scrap yard. With enough digging, it was a statistical probability that I could find all of the pieces of right dimension to the instructions.
Yeah, the end result was gaudy. Regardless, everything fit together as something entirely my own. My final and most important point for public relations planners is to find joy in unexpected challenges that call for scrappiness.
Think colorfully
The hiccups that arise during our public relations campaigns push us, for the better, to invent colorful combinations of communication tactics that become lasting stand-out work.
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