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By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Almost every public affairs professional I speak to today is experimenting with artificial intelligence. Some are using tools like ChatGPT or Claude to draft emails, summarise documents, or brainstorm ideas. Others are beginning to integrate AI into more analytical tasks such as policy monitoring, document analysis, or briefing preparation. But a recurring question keeps emerging in conversations with colleagues and clients: are we ahead of

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Academy Not long ago I ran a workshop with a group of practitioners working across several countries with very different political environments and very different levels of transparency. Some of the systems they operate in are relatively structured. Others are far less predictable, with policymaking processes that are more opaque and where informal dynamics often play a much larger role. Despite these differences, the questions people were grappling

The Strategic Edge - by Stefan Borst The Association Alibi There is a sentence I have heard in boardrooms across Europe more times than I can count. It usually comes from a CFO, sometimes a CEO, occasionally a general counsel. It sounds responsible. It sounds efficient. And it is quietly eroding competitive advantage. “We don’t need a bigger PA function – we’re members of the XYZ association.” On the surface, this seems like a perfectly rational statement. It may even be root

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy That's not an accusation. It's just what happens when you start with the wrong question. Teams spend weeks debating which metrics to use, how to weight them, which tool to build in. They produce something that looks rigorous. Leadership nods. It goes into a folder. Nothing changes. Call it a dashboard, a portfolio review, or a one-page executive summary — the format matters less than most people think. What matters is the logic underneath. A

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy In Executive Teams across regions and sectors I am seeing a question that is being asked with increasing frequency: “What are we really getting from our Trade Associations?”. This is not a new question by any means – but it is being asked more frequently and more seriously than ever before. For decades, Trade Associations have been seen as a standard line item in Public Affairs budgets — essential for repres

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy Placing Public Affairs under Legal often feels logical. But without careful leadership, it can unintentionally reduce Public Affairs to a compliance function. Public Affairs operates in regulatory environments, engages policymakers, interprets legislation, manages risk exposure, and often deals with sensitive issues that carry compliance implications. The overlap is real. The Legal function is usually well-e

By Stefan Borst In my work in global Public Affairs one thing always struck me as odd: US CEOs never needed convincing that the PA department was important. They rarely ever challenged its value for the company or the budget (which tends to be significantly larger than those of EU counterparts). In stark contrast the scepticism of European C-suite executives towards the PA function was significantly higher. I always asked myself „why“. It is certainly not the basic understand

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy / Advocacy Academy Recently I ran a workshop with a public affairs team on presentation skills. The formal focus was visual representation, structure, and delivery. The discussion moved quickly beyond slides. We found ourselves talking about something more fundamental: how advocacy teams think, how they structure their work, and how they translate technical expertise into influence. Many of the issues we work on are highly technical, scienti

Internal Side of Public Affairs 66 By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy To make GHOST practical and more real it helps to walk through a single example end-to-end and show how the framework works when done well — and where it most often breaks down. Let’s take a commercially critical issue that should be familiar to many right now. Our example A government in Country X is preparing legislation that would significantly restrict the use of a core

Internal Side of Public Affairs 65 By Alan Hardacre, Founder Advocacy Strategy One of the most persistent challenges in Public Affairs is not a lack of activity, effort, or external engagement. It is a lack of internal clarity. Too often, Public Affairs teams are busy but struggle to answer some deceptively simple internal questions: What are we actually trying to achieve? How does this activity support the organisation’s priorities? How do we explain progress and value in a

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy When “technical execution” becomes decisive Implementing acts are often described as the administrative end of the policy process: technical measures designed to ensure that EU law is applied uniformly across Member States. This framing is misleading. While implementing acts are formally about execution rather than amendment, they are frequently where policy outcomes are fixed in practice. They determine how rules are applied, how burdens ar

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy The illusion of closure after legislation There is a comforting assumption in EU public affairs that once a legislative file is adopted, the main political battle is over. Delegated acts quietly undermine that assumption. They sit after the Ordinary Legislative Procedure, often described as technical follow-up, yet they frequently determine how a policy actually works in practice. For advocacy teams, delegated acts are not an afterthought.

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy A recurring tension in advocacy, public affairs, and campaigning organisations is the question of structure. As my last post outlined structure is critical - when done in the right way and tailored to your organisation. One of the key questions is should control sit at the centre — with tight governance, shared systems, and standardised ways of working? Or at least how much should sit there. Or should power

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy When we talk about Public Affairs, the conversation almost always gravitates towards what is visible. Meetings with policymakers. External messaging. Campaigns. Moments of influence. These are the parts of Public Affairs that are easiest to see, to describe, and to showcase. They are also the parts most often highlighted in case studies, conference panels, and award submissions. And this is great - we need t

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy - Advocacy Academy I recently ran a workshop on EU trilogues, and what struck me most was not a lack of technical knowledge in the room, but the level of engagement. Even among experienced public affairs professionals, there is a strong appetite to better understand how trilogues really work, and how to engage with them effectively. That interest is telling. Most practitioners know the formal rules of the ordinary legislative procedure. Th

By Paul Shotton, co-founder Advocacy Strategy To kick off the new year, after what was a restful Christmas break, I want to raise a question that many public affairs teams are already circling around. Are you ready to start using AI agents as part of how your team works, not just as a personal productivity trick? I'm not talking about trying an agent onces. I mean deliberately designing, using, and maintaining agents so they support real public affairs workflows, in a way

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