Address of

Toni Muzi Falconi, business communication consultant,

"Communication to the Citizen"

    December 1996, New York.  A workshop at the Lotus Club with senior vice president of public affairs of 25 among the first 500 US corporations.  To break the ice I ask each of them to scribble on a blank slip of paper their five top priorities for 1997.  I collect the slips and report the responses on a flip chart.

    The Millennium Bug tops the list.

    I am obviously amazed, so I ask for enlightenment. The answers I get sound roughly thus: "We know that the attention for the issue is going to be raising fast, and want to be pro-active and alert all of our stakeholders so they may be encouraged to put their house in order before it gets too late.  We want to reduce the possibilities of having to convey information under an emergency that might well turn out to be traumatical".

    May 1999, Milan, IULM University of Milan.  I hand over to a smart female student of mine, a list of names and phone numbers of the chief of public affairs of 10 of the first 50 Italian enterprises, and ask her to call them on behalf to hear what their first five priorities for the year would be.   One out of ten includes the Millennium Bug among the top five.

    This quick flash is totally coherent with the data from the SWG survey which show that only 15% of Italians (in northern Europe, and not only in the US, the average is over 80%), are aware of the Bug.

    What should we do, then?

    From what has been said yestarday and today, two things seem to me quite clear :

1. It is too late to push on conversion more than so much. This for the reason that the portion of the Country that is most exposed to international competition is by now fairly on schedule; while for the other part it would be impossible to meet the deadline anyhow;
   
2. this is the classic example of the train speed being set by its slowest carriage.  Without beating about the bush, this means that we are all at high risk, and in no way we are to achieve timely compliance. 

    Bottom line: organizations must hasten to hammer out adequate contingency plans.

    For many reasons, which would call for lenghty discussions, Italian organizational culture tends to be refractory (perhaps, also because.....superstitious?) to emergency planning.  And, when it does, it tends, as a fundamental variable, to neglect information.  Here, then, with the bug, we may have a chance, if we wish to seize an opportunity, to beging correcting such an anomaly.

    Beginning with the Council of Ministers invoked by president Bettinelli right thru the definition of the guidance path that the Comitato will have to provide the interested subjects with, it is essential that the information variable be taken in due account.

    This is all the more important for large enterprises: shareholders, suppliers, employees, customers and authorities have the right to know whether a firms be or not bug compliant....and thus far, let us say, it is business as usual.  But what will business say to empolyees, shareholders and the others if and when should emergency strike? And, even more important, how will they say it, keeping in mind that the worst case scenario foreshadows no electricity (not even cyclostyle would work), nor telephone, etc...?

    I quite agree with Mariella Gramaglia when she says, if I got it right, that it is not necessary to inform the citizen when there is no important event to publicize nor a specific behavioural pattern to be required as a consequence of such an event'.  This is true in general, and not only for public information (let me recall what David Ogilvy used to say about institutional advertising: it's like pissing in your own pants, nobody notices and you feel so hot inside...).   I disagree, rather, with those (a few were indeed around, these days) that say: 'since Italians know little or nothing, we might as well keep them in the dark...why risk to promote panic when there might even be a chance that nothing happens?'.  It is the reasoning of those whom have appealed to the ability of the Italians to score in "zona cesarini" (an Italian locution--originated in soccer--that describes one's ability to resolve a situation just before a deadline), maintaining that, all considered, the backwardness of Italy's information technology structure may well represent an element of strenght.  No comment: I can already smell a Los Angeles.

    As a citizen, I believe it necessary that the citizens be aware.  And I frankly do not see how to prevent Camping Gaz or others from preparing alternative solutions for essential services that could be disrupted, and communicating them, correctly, to consumers.  None of us holds the monopoly of truth and, even more so in this case, none of us holds the right to suggest to others particular communication rules.

    Certainly, each organization should take care of its own possible emergencies, prevent them wherever possible and adequately prepare to handle them otherwise, even with regard to information.

    It is possible to forecast that, in 2001, the citizen, the voter, the consumer, the worker, the shareholder will base his behaviour--within the market of reference--even upon the way in which organizations will have communicated with him at a difficult time.