#ConversationsFest24, Sligo
Why are you here?
That was the question posed in the afternoon session by Andy Green, introducing us to a multimedia but wilfully low tech creativity exercise.
The answers ranged from the quirky and the comic to the existential. But at a practical level, why were we in Sligo when the initiative led by Andy Green and Padraig (approximate pronunciation Porrick) McKeon is named the Dublin Conversations?
Padraig is well known in Dublin PR circles as a practitioner, lecturer and PRII committee member. But he grew up in Sligo and so knows where to eat and drink, and which Gaelic football matches to watch.
Sligo is as far as you can go from Dublin before tipping into the Atlantic Ocean, but he’d attracted a room full of practitioners of all levels of experience joined by a sprinkling of academics and educators, supported by some members of his MSc class.
We were there for some directed conversations and plenty of the other kind too. Ireland’s genius is words: no one is honoured there more than poets, and we were gathering in a building that is a memorial to the life and works of WB Yeats.
When did you last have a good conversation with a stranger? Our post-pandemic, remote working lives are mediated by scheduled online calls. Education has become a structured process. It’s considered weird in the UK to talk to strangers on public transport whereas in Ireland people willingly volunteer their names to appear in the reservation screen above their seat on the train.
Where’s the serendipity? Where’s the joy? Where’s the real learning in working and studying in this environment?
Some of us still claim to be practising public relations, but we rarely attempt the fundamentals of relationship building. Most say we’re communicators, yet we narrow our communications to a few formulaic channels.
Reason enough to be in Sligo for a weekend of conversations.
There were some semi-structured thematic talks too – though no PowerPoint. How refreshing.
Professor Paul Willis – one of the subject experts involved in PR Academy’s delivery of the CIPR Diploma in Sustainability Communication – kicked off by talking about complexity and asking how we can cope with uncertainty, with never having complete information or rarely knowing the right answer. How should we operate in an imperfect world? We need to be presentists rather than futurists, attempting to simplify complex problems (‘simplexity’).
Since there was nothing as conventional as a Q&A, let’s judge the talk by the takeout. It was another of the speaker’s portmanteau words that had people talking. We’re living in the ‘shitegeist’ he argued.
Paul Conneally spoke about the challenge of team leadership – about the need to create trust to establish a culture of continuous learning that’s willing to embrace failure and of the need for the human touch throughout remote or hybrid organisations.
My talking point from his talk? He opened a sentence with ‘In my careers…’ The plural was deliberate. We need to talk more about failures and about the lessons learnt. We need to welcome diversity of experience.
Kim Blanchette introduced us to a long-running project: modern Canada’s reckoning with its historic yet surprisingly recent mistreatment of indigenous people. Among the many insights, the following phrase leapt out to me. We need to ‘think like a wise man, but speak in the language of the people.’ She was referring to what Paul Willis had called ‘simplexity’.
Your value, your legacy, is the relationships you create, she reminded us. It should be public relations 101, but it’s a hard lesson to learn.
From these starting points, we had time to develop the conversation. One unexpected thread that resonated with older and younger practitioners was the need to push back on clients – even to the point of firing them. It’s a rarely-discussed topic and names have been redacted from the notes, but it was a cathartic discussion.
As was the observation from one of Padraig’s MSc students on the pressure on young women to be perfect. We know about the social media pressures on that generation but she was taking it further and alluding to a fear of messing up in the adult world. So the conversation turned to the need for psychological safety and returned to another of the themes from the Paul Willis talk – our need to navigate imperfection (we will always only have imperfect knowledge and imperfect data).
So, why are you here? We’re not always enacting a perfectly conceived and brilliantly executed plan (this unconference allowed for the unplanned). Sometimes we’re just there for the craic.
Lesson learnt. Thank you Sligo.
