The Times, They Are a-Changin’ … (Like, Really Fast)
Social norms are now changing faster than they ever did. What are the consequences for business?
Generational business
The fact that our collective perceptions and attitudes can change radically is no surprise. They always have done. Denying voting rights to to women or the poor or people of colour now seems outrageous, yet over a century ago, this was the norm. However, the greatest difference in how cultural change happened then and how it happens now is the tempo. This has been accelerating at a mind-blowing scale and has moved from moderato to allegro to presto within several generations. Why does this matter?
It’s important because, since the beginning of the industrial era, the pace of cultural change has corresponded more or less to that of generational change. Some 50 years ago, it could reasonably be expected that the social norms and conventions you encountered as a young twenty-something would largely continue unchallenged to the end of your working life. They would start to change gradually at some point over these 30 years but by that time, you would be nearing retirement anyway and could afford the luxury of not caring much. A new generation would just come in, declare your generation ‘old hat’ and move on with their own trends and customs.
The change in ethical standards for business has also sped up. A company in the 1980s could pick its cause (say, eradicating malnutrition), donate a certain amount of money each year and relax — if it didn’t screw up big time (like, dump pollutants in a river), it could be fine for years and years to come, as far as its public relations and reputation was concerned.
What will we think in 2026?
Now, changes in attitudes and norms happen within a much shorter timespan — what used to take a generation, now happens within a few years. Take the #metoo movement or the change of attitudes towards racial justice or towards fast fashion’s impact on climate change. All of these norms — and each of them is not a single idea but a whole cluster of social conventions — has transformed radically over the past five years. In 2015, no-one imagined that five years later, the statues of King Leopold II would be removed in several cities across Belgium, while the figures of other (in)famous eighteenth-century British notables would suffer an even less fortunate fate by being dumped in England’s rivers and canals.
If this tendency continues (and there is no reason to think the tempo of cultural change will wind down now that it has accelerated so quickly), it is reasonable to expect that at least some of the social norms we regard as absolutely ok in 2021 will be seen as repugnant and ridiculous in 2026. We just don’t know which ones yet.
No insurance policy
And this is what scares so many people. And many companies and brands as well. How do we know that in the not-so-distant future, we won’t be punished for doing or saying stuff that seemed so absolutely normal at the time? After all, this is exactly what happened during the questioning and approval process of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Unsolicited, aggressive sexual advances while drunk are now widely condemned as unacceptable, whereas during Kavanaugh’s young college years, social attitudes were by and large far less strict.
The truth is, there is no way of insuring yourself or your company against such turns of history, precisely because before the norms have changed, we don’t see them as problematic. So what can be done to avoid missteps as much as possible?
Boost your readiness
Under volatile and unpredictable conditions, solutions are much more about risk mitigation than prevention. On top of making sure your company is not crossing the lines that have already been drawn (in subjects such as climate change, racial and social justice, etc.), there are three moves we would recommend considering:
· Make your PR team more diverse to avoid blind spots. This is important because our personal identity has a bearing on professional decisions (we tend to overestimate the urgency of concerns related to our social group and underestimate those that aren’t). As audience backlash against tone-deaf messaging on the part of brands is becoming exceedingly harsh, having your ears attuned to various types of insensitive communication from your team can save you a lot of stress — and possibly even money;
· Draw on academic expertise to pool for potential future challenges. As excellent as your PR team may be, it doesn’t have the same resources available as the global academic community studying cultural change. Keeping up to date with the latest research can be executed in very different ways — from regular meetings with social scientists who visit your PR department to reading academic journals (or at least, browsing through the contents);
· Define general principles for reacting to a challenge rather than create detailed crisis communication plans for each issue. Or course, a detailed crisis communication plan is a must for predictable problems (just as an airline should have an accident emergency plan for plane crashes). But in a fast-changing world, you’ll also need a framework that clearly outlines how to react to risks that are as yet unknown. Who is consulted? Who makes a decision? What arguments/parameters matter? What calculations need to be made before making a decision? What are our general corporate principles for apologies? How is policy translated into substance in your company? The types of questions being asked will depend on the specifics of your industry.
As for smaller brands, right now, they are held to a lower standard than big companies, but that may change as well. So it makes sense to prepare for the unpredictable tomorrow even if today you feel perfectly safe.
