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The largest impact of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – the overall topic of this year’s World Economic Forum – will be at least as much on the public affairs ecosystem of most countries as on their economies.
This revolution has already begun. These technological and communication changes have already started to have such a huge effect on the politics (and, therefore, the public policies) of so many nations around the world that their impact cannot be discounted. To be effective, public affairs efforts will have to employ these changes.
As the WEF meetings have confirmed, given the accelerated speed at which the Fourth Industrial Revolution is occurring, many more communications changes will be coming in a very short period. No matter the country or level of government, regardless of whether you’re seeking legislative or regulatory change and irrespective of whether you’re concerned about an election or governing, the way individuals and businesses communicate with policymakers and candidates will be vastly different in the not-too-far-from-now future than they are today.
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign is the best recent example of how effective these new technologies can be. Obama defied expectations by micro-targeting voters in a way that, until then, had only been a fantasy for political campaign consultants. Mitt Romney’s limited use of those same technologies has in part been blamed for his failure to defeat Obama in 2012.
These Fourth Industrial Revolution advancements have continued to disrupt the public affairs world since then. Using social and digital techniques, elected officials now communicate more directly, often and effectively with constituents and interest groups. This is making the media and mailed newsletters obsolete, and even more recent innovations like websites seem quaint by comparison.
This will alter the ways laws are made and regulations are promulgated in a variety of previously unimaginable ways. For example, corporate and individual tax reform is a high-profile issue in the United States. But the increasing ability of representatives and senators to communicate at the same time as deliberations are taking place is virtually guaranteed to complicate and delay all of the decisions that will need to be made, because those who would be affected will instantly respond to what’s being considered. As a result, the length of time it takes Congress to implement tax reform now is likely to be considerably longer (as in years) than the three years it took when it was debated in the 1980s.
This points to something that has yet to be realized: the most dramatic changes in public affairs brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution will likely be in the opposite direction; that is, to rather than from policymakers. Indeed, research recently conducted by MSLGROUP on this topic shows that voters, corporations and interest groups are not yet avidly using social and digital media to contact lawmakers and regulators. Europeans in and around Brussels were further along in this change than their counterparts in Washington, D.C., but the signs of rapidly growing acceptance and use in the two major policymaking areas were unambiguous.
The MSLGROUP study also pointed to another inevitable conclusion: the younger generations more comfortable with Fourth Industrial Revolution communications will soon be far more prevalent as policymakers and influencers than those currently in power. That makes the acceptance and use of these technologies virtually inevitable.
By Stan Collender, Executive Vice President, Qorvis MSLGROUP
