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By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy How confident are you that the facts underpinning your advocacy are still up to date? How often do you pause to ask whether a statistic you cite has quietly aged out of relevance? And if influence is partly about providing information, are you sure you are using your evidence as deliberately as you think? These are uncomfortable questions. In my experience, they rarely get asked until something goes wrong. Over the past months, I've worked w

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy   Public Affairs tends to focus externally on policymakers, regulators, and critical stakeholders. Internally we then tend to focus on alignment and buy-in (notably from senior leaders). All of this is best practice – but it overlooks one of the most potentially interesting stakeholder groups inside our organizations: employees. Ever since I first attended an @Publicaffairscouncil conference in the US I have

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy In my last blog (59), I looked at how Public Affairs can better align with General Managers. A recurring theme was the need for Public Affairs professionals to be more commercially aligned and show stronger commercial acumen. In this blog I want to address what commercial alignment actually looks like in Public Affairs. Let’s start with something that I have stressed many times in this post series - if Publi

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy I promised myself I wasn’t going to write another piece about AI this month. I really did. And then I came across The Economist ’s latest article, “Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening,”  which shows that AI adoption inside organisations isn’t accelerating—it’s actually slowing. What struck me most was how strongly the numbers reinforced something I’ve been saying repeatedly: the biggest barrier to meaningful AI adoption is

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy In my experience one of the biggest battles that Public Affairs faces for internal recognition is with commercial General Managers. Working with, and winning over, GMs is critical for the success of any Public Affairs professional because on the one hand GMs sit closest to revenue, customers, market dynamics, and operational developments (so they know the business inside out) and secondly, they are powerful

By Stefan Borst, Senior Partner Advocacy Strategy The request lands in your inbox at 07:42. “Can you approve this statement for the media and policymakers before 9 a.m.? We’re getting questions.” Legal has comments. Communications has edits. Your Public Affairs lead adds a paragraph that begins with “It’s complicated…”. You have 18 minutes before your next call and now need take a decision that could affect regulators, investors, employees, and maybe your own reputation if it

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Director There’s a team in your network scoring key wins in their major policy files through sharp messaging targeting key stakeholders. They haven’t made a splashy hire. They haven’t launched a new campaign. They’ve simply mapped what their team can do, fixed the gaps, and built tech-savvy practices into their everyday work. It’s quiet gains in efficiency, quality and output. But it’s effective. And it’s coming for your edge. The HR Perspec

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy The world around us is moving faster than ever — and so is Public Affairs. The volume, speed, and breadth of what we now need to monitor, analyze, and act upon have exploded. Policy developments, regulatory shifts, trade, geopolitics — the list grows longer each month it seems. For most Public Affairs professionals, it feels like the bandwidth is shrinking just as the expectations expand. So how can Public A

By Stefan Borst, Senior Partner Advocacy Strategy We’ve all been there: the LinkedIn post goes viral, the panel is packed with stakeholders, the photos look great – and nothing in the annex changes. Welcome to the squeaky-clean world of “hands-off” lobbying. A place where performance scores higher than impact. An in these digital times it sometimes feels like our craft lost its bite. Do not get me wrong, visibility is crucially important – as a tool in certain moments. Public

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy co-Founder "We understand AI is important, but we don't really see where it adds the most value to our work." A PA lead at a large multinational company said this to me last week, and honestly, it was refreshing. No pretense about having it all figured out. No vendor-speak about "digital transformation." Just honest confusion about how this technology actually helps when your job is mostly about coordination and strategy, not churning out po

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy In today’s challenging external and internal world, Public Affairs professionals must be fast, informed, and interconnected. But too often, we operate in functional silos—geographically, hierarchically, or by business unit—leading to  isolation, duplication, missed insights, and the lack of a real Public Affairs team feel. The solution? A strong, intentional Public Affairs community within the organisation.

Paul Shotton, PhD Co-Founder, Advocacy Strategy & Advocacy Academy We talk endlessly about technology. But it’s politics that keeps changing the world around us. Janan Ganesh made this point brilliantly in a recent Financial Times  column, arguing that political change is now outpacing technological change . Inflation, war, populism, and trade fragmentation have disrupted business far more directly than AI ever has. And yet, in public affairs, we still tend to treat political

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy Working effectively in the EU requires working with all three key European Institutions (Commission / Parliament / Council). European Trade Associations often excel with the Commission (their natural partner) and work well with the Parliament (more challenging but still based in Brussels-Strasbourg). Where things become much more challenging is if/how/when they work with the Council across the 27 Member Stat

By Paul Shotton, Co-Founder Advocacy Strategy Many organizations want to train their teams to use AI tools—but quickly discover they can’t design meaningful training without first understanding where they stand and where they want to go. When developing a training program on AI adoption for a client’s public affairs team, we were ready to dive into practical skills: prompting, mapping workflows, building SOPs, and even developing AI agents. IN many instances it becomes clear

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy As organisations operate in increasingly complex political, regulatory, and societal environments, Public Affairs teams are being asked to do more—with greater sophistication, speed, and cross-functional alignment. This in itself is obviously a challenge. But there is a second challenge emerging that we see with many clients - internal capability and capacity building in Public Affairs is not keeping pace wi

By Stefan Borst, Senior Partner Advocacy Strategy C‑suite leaders are operating in a post‑lobbying age. The old model - episodic meetings, discreet intermediaries and back‑channel deal‑making - has not simply frayed; it has been officially re-priced. In 2024 the OECD broadened the global bar for conduct by revising its “ Recommendation on Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying and Influence” . It explicitly widens “lobbying” to include the full spectrum of influence - from di

By Paul Shotton, Co-Founder Advocacy Strategy / Advocacy Academy I joined the OpenAI Academy this week. a bit late i have to admit... My goal was practical: learn to create custom GPTs for drafting emails, designing quizzes, and navigating policymaking structures. But amongst the treasures I found I realized that prompt engineering is a skill worth reexploring. It isn't just a technical skill—it's a thinking skill. It forces you to structure tasks clearly, provide context pre

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy As AI becomes increasingly integral to the world of Public Affairs, a subtle yet significant challenge is emerging—not around whether to adopt AI or indeed for what to use it, but how it's being adopted internally. My recent work with clients reveals a consistent pattern: AI usage often begins and remains at the individual level, rarely maturing into fully integrated team or organisational capabilities. This

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy Insights from the “Internal Side of Public Affairs” Webinar Last...

By Paul Shotton, Co-founder Advocacy Strategy Two stories caught my attention this week. The first, from Le Monde  (7 October 2025),...