Copyright International Association of Business Communicators Apr 1993Your organization's veteran curmudgeon appears at your door at the end of the day. He innocently asks what you're planning for the company's 75th anniversary in four years. Four years! Streee turn to distress. You didn't know about the anniversary. More troubling is that you know very little about the organization's history. In fact, you feel paralyzed by the pressures of the present, and the future is something you attend to whenever you get some spare time. How will you ever manage 75 years? You'll have to form a committee, of course (just like for any other crisis), and you'll have to...Wait, don't procrastinate quite yet. An anniversary is not a crisis. It should be--swallow hard!--a welcome opportunity. Step back a moment and think about what makes communication work. Isn't it credible messages delivered consistently over time that have a compounding effect on your organization's audiences? Hasn't that been why your organization has survived all these years? Sure, you have had the right products or services at the right time for the right customers. But, if management had not told its story credibly, no one would have signed up. If the organization had not been consistent in word and deed, customers would have fallen away. And you would not have that core of faithful customers had not the organization's messages had a compounding, positive effect on them. The same could be said for your other audiences: employees, shareholders, association members and the media. "An image can be invented, but reputation is built over time," notes Bruce Weindrvch, founder of The History Factory, a Washington, D.C. consulting firm. "An organization's history substantiates the reputation that substantiates the image."
But what have those messages been? Who gave them credibility? How were the messages told consistently? And why did they work for so long? Most important, where do you go for answers?
Get yourself ready. You are about to take a surprising journey into the great unknown your organization's historyy And here's a street map to that past.
START WITH THE FUTURE AND WORK BACKWARD
Many organizational histories start at the founding and work their way forward to the present. Makes sense. However, the result may be interesting reading for historians but tells the communicator little about the heart of today's organization or its possibilities for tomorrow. That's because the chronological approach has a beginning and an end. But history is dynamic, unfolding, never-ending.
Reverse the process. Start with the future. Where is the organization heading? What mission has it set for itself to satisfy customers, employees, shareholders and the community? Does it want to be the market leader, the quality pacesetter, the most technologically innovative? Does the organization want to be managementdriven or employee team-driven? With that information in hand, you can look back thematically and efficiently to determine when and how those priorities, values and strategies evolved from your past.
YOU MAY NEED TO HIRE A GUIDE
Your eagerness to explore stalls quickly when you stand before the overwhelming organization's library. Who knows where else you are likely to find more historical records and memorabilia? You tell yourself that you simply do not have the time nor the research training to cope. Then consider hiring a professional archivist, historian or historical consultant to create a system for reviewing and logging information. They can also sort through the volume and produce a manageable repository. However, be careful. Check to see if these guides have the thematic, future-oriented approach you need. Make sure they look carefully for the events, personalities, major decisions, quirks--anything from the past that helped shape your organization's character. Also be sure they meet the criteria for any outside counsel: solid track record, thoroughness, ability to stay on budget--in sum, results-oriented approach.
KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN
Visual history should be critical to you as a communicator. Get beyond paper and ink. Envision a lobby display or 10-minute employee video that shows off the historical records. What will pique viewers' interest enough so they will want to know more about your organization? Which 15 artifacts capture the soul of your past? Many current and former employees, for instance, will have product samples from the past 30 years. But who has that original benchtop widget that failed initially but was revived by some bootstrap engineer and became your flagship product?
What about photographs? Scoop up most of the people pictures, but be selective with building shots. Study all of them carefully. You might find something enlightening or unusual.
SIT DOWN WITH STORYTELLERS
The paper churning and artifacts collecting can get tedious. Put it aside for a while and take up the most exciting part of the historical tour: interviewing the storytellers. This is what communicarblts do best: humanizing information. You still might want to bring in a skilled, objective interviewer from the outside to help ferret out historical gems that are easy to miss.
Make a list of the types of individuals who might have pockets of your history in their files and in their heads. They could be your former senior executives, the founder's granddaughter, the 40-year employee and the retired banker who took a risk on the company during hard times. Once you have your categories down, roam around the organization and ask both for the names of these individuals and opinions on which ones would be the best informed and most interesting to interview. You should end up with about a dozen storytellers, most of whom can validate their memories with artifacts that they will lend to you.
Interview these street-wise historians individually in their homes. Take along a video person who will not be obtrusive or intimidating to the interviewees. You will want to get all of their experiences on film and audio tape, both for the "living" archives and for your already evolving anniversary communication plan. Avoid taking notes; become their friend, though stay objective and in control. Bring out the color and sounds of the past. After each session, review the tapes and form questions for the next person. Each subsequent interview will increasingly show you an unfolding pattern.
BEGIN WEAVING YOUR OWN STORY
With an office filled with taped interviews, as well as documents and other memorabilia culled from the organization's cellar, local libraries and former executives' homes, you should be feeling exhausted, less overwhelmed and more excited about the prospects of translating it all into communication techniques. Unfortunately, not everyone will be as excited about this historical stuff as you are (see sidebar for examples). All the organization "lifers" will absorb any and all nostalgia. But those who have been around for less than, say 15 years, won't identify with much of the past. Likewise, customers, shareholders and members will have to be motivated to peer into the organization's history.
But this is where you're especially talented: converting what could be dry and humdrum into something with substance and sparkle. What's required is sound strategic thinking blended with creative juices and funneled through the most effective form of communication the story. Information is power and the story is the tool of information. Your research and skill have now made you a powerful storyteller. Decide how you will tell the organization's story and to whom.
RETURNING TO THE PRESENT
As you plan for the anniversary, once again, start with the future. Go back to your compilation of the organization's mission and strategies. Develop on your own--or with your consultant, who caa shorten the learning curve--a matrix that matches those future plans with facts from the past. Expand the matrix from there to include all the audiences you want to influence. Now, let the creativity explode. But not creativity for creativity's sake is allowed here. Your ideas must flow from the communication and positioning needs of your organization. To demonstrate, here is how to think about one piece of the matrix: employees.
Look first at employee morale. How healthy is it? If robust, then tilt your anniversary program toward celebration. For instance, you might rent a local theater and hire a professional troupe to produce a humorous but pointed reenact Rent of the organization's past. On the other hand, if several hundred workers lost their jobs over the past two years, take a more subdued but still thorough approach. Look at integrating stories into your employee publications, for instance, that illustrate how the organization has prevailed repeatedly through difficult times.
Other factors that would influence the choice and tone of employee communication techniques include a recent or pending merger, with the need to marry two cultures; a new chief executive officer who wants to empower employees with responsibility to improve quality and customer service programs; and the introduction of a union into the work force.
The same thought process should apply to each box of your matrix. If your stock price has been falling, do your investors need to be reassured that, historically, the company has rebounded from similar downturns through renewed investment in research and development? Do your customers need to realize that quality is not a fad with your organization, but rather that your founder established strict guidelines on quality assurance 75 years ago? Do your members need to be convinced that the pending name-change of the association is not a rebuttal of its history but a reaffirmation of longstanding priorities?
Enjoy your tour through your organization's past. And just think, you never saw yourself as an historian, particularly when you used to doze off during those college lectures on the Peloponnesian Wars! If that professor could only see you now.
STUMBLING BLOCKS AND MILESTONES
Who wouldn't want to celebrate the past? The past is what gave your organization its present success and future prospects. Still, there are several types in your organization who might resist uncovering history.
For one, your organization's senior management might hesitate. Each of us wants to take credit for our contribution to the organization's prosperity. For some, this means ignoring the credit of forerunners. The CEO, for instance, may feel strongly that his immediate predecessor already had his turn in the sun or that the ornery chief in the 1950s almost bankrupted the company. Consequently, the CEO might want to remove what may be milestones from the organization history.
That's the value of a future-oriented, themed approach to history rather than a chronological one. In whatever diplomatic way you can, convince the top boss that your goal is to extrude the material from the archieves to support his or her program for the next five years. If that convinces the CEO enough to give you the go-ahead, proceed as planned and come back later with a comprehensive and impressive plan that buttresses organization values and strategies--and the future.
One more individual to be conscious of is the unofficial keeper of the organization history. Typically, these people have been elevated to the role through longevity, loyalty and a love for corporate lore. They will not be ones to take the lead on organizing an anniversary program, preferring instead to view themselves in a consultative role. Their approach to telling the organization's story will be linear and product-oriented.
If you bypass these people, you will be cutting yourself off from invaluable guides to the past. However, if you cater to traditionalism, you run the risk of producing a dry rendition of your history that will stop just short of the present. Two suggestions: Ask them if they would be willing to serve as senior historians for the anniversary celebration and, second, put them in charge of organizing the network of people and repositories that will provide the grist for your forward-looking communication program.
Richard Skaare is a public relions consultant and senior consultant to The History Factory, a Washington, D.C.-based firm.
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