What do Greenpeace and Saatchi and Saatchi have in common?

Someone disturbed enough to work for both, does his best to tell us. Part three of conversation with Stephen Fitzpatrick

Part three of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: How did you make the transition from Greenpeace to Saatchi and Saatchi – it doesn’t make much sense to me  to see how anyone can go from an organisation like Greenpeace to a place like Saatchi and Saatchi?

Well. There was an intervening step – I raised venture capital and founded a web-design company – but we did retain Greenpeace as a client but I guess your question isn’t really about chronology – it’s about values so I’ll try to respond to that..

What motivated me to make the shift was actually simple curiosity.

After Greenpeace and charter 88 I had a pretty good idea of how campaigning organisations worked as media organisations but hadn’t a clue about how commercial organisations and their big-time agencies went about things.

Working in the not-for-profit sector, I always had a sense that we were winging it with any weapons we could lay our hands on but we didn’t have the resources commercial organisations had. I always had the sense they ‘knew’ and I didn’t so I set out to get in on the inside and find out.

M: How did you convince Saatchi and Saatchi to take you on, after Greenpeace?

SF: A very long interview procedure that lasted more or less a whole day, that’s how I got in.

I also told them I was going undercover. They laughed. Nervously, but they did laugh.

M: And did you get what you expected?

SF: Lets just put it this way - it killed any sense of inferiority that I had about how the ‘professionals’ did it (laughs).

I did learn how to survive in one of those ‘elite’ blue-chip organisations.

I also learned how chaotic they can be. So watch out!

I don’t mean to underplay that – the survival aspect. It’s an amazing thing to learn.

Actually, the similarities were more striking than the differences.

One of the really striking things I learned was that, whether it was Greenpeace or Saatchi and Saatchi or LloydsTSB or Visa -  any organisations I encountered, no matter how they differed in terms of their aims, objectives, their values and cultures… there was a deep level at which they were all the same…

M: what was it?

There would always come a point when the client would realize that what we were proposing meant change – real change.

At this point, when it really came to the crunchpoint where they had to let go of the old way of doing things -  at that point there would be a loss of nerve – you could feel them tightening up and then they would begin to pull back…

I realised then that this wasn't just a marketing and communications issue – it was a strategic management issue and unless we could find a way to keep the conversation – keep the emotional bandwidth of the conversation open - during these really difficult moments, then things would never really change.

M: what were they afraid of?

SF: Losing control. Things getting out of hand. Being blamed for having initiated a process that would lead them into uncharted waters.

M: what happened when thye got scared?

SF; well, we would lose control of the situation….actually control’s not quite the right word. More that - suddenly, we found it impossible to talk to them in the way we had before and we also found it impossible to talk about the fact that we couldn’t talk about that – the really important issues had been buried and the fact that they had been buried had been buried too.

M: So what did you do?

Well, I realised that without knowing how to keep these difficult conversations with clients going – during the moments when they needed to implement a social media strategy, then social media – although we didn’t call it that then - would either be dumped, used as just another channel become anti-social very quickly.

It was worse than that actually – because even if they went ahead I realized that, unless they found a way to keep the emotional bandwidth open – when things got difficult say, when customers, the general public began to ask difficult questions or the organization had difficult or embarrassing news to break – then at that point, they would freeze and go back to playing it safe.

M: What do you do now then?

SF: well, to tell you the truth – I think they were right. If we couldn’t keep difficult conversation going with them, to get the damn stuff implemented, then how could we expect them to trust us that they would be able to keep them going with their customers when things got tough.

That’s when I started to look outside marketing and communications at other disciplines such as organizational and social psychology for insights into how to manage difficult conversations so that a) we could get the clients to take on board what we had to say and b) to build these insights into the model itself so that we could say more than ‘just do it’ – so we could teach them how to manage difficult conversations online.

All this stuff eventually fed into the Social Media Lab project and it’s what one of the themes we’re going to be pursuing with Journal of Social Media. 

Part four: “I’ve just had a very interesting meeting”

How Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab by introducing Peter to Steve

Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite.

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business

Comments

[Angelique]

To my mind it is a great article.
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