Water Foresight Podcast
Water Foresight Podcast
Can Public Relations Professionals Shape the Future of Water?
What role, if any, can public relations professionals play in shaping the future of water? After all, it seems that "public relations" is what an organization needs after--not before--the crisis. As a seasoned public relations professional, Stephen Dupont, Principal of Dupont Foresight, offers a different, aspirational perspective on how public relations professionals are able to take a more proactive role in anticipating, framing, and shaping the future of water.
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Aqualaris. This is the Water Foresight Podcast powered by the Aqualaris Group, where we anticipate, frame and shape the future of water through strategic foresight. Today's guest is Stephen DuPont, the principal of DuPont Foresight and board member of the Association of Professional Futurists. Stephen, welcome to the Water Foresight Podcast. It is a privilege to have you with us today, hey thanks for inviting me, matt.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate it and I look forward to our conversation.
Speaker 1:Well, no better time than the present to talk about communication, public relations and the future of water, and tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you're really popular within the foresight community, but tell our listeners a little bit about your background and your relationship to the discipline of foresight.
Speaker 2:Sure Again. Thank you and welcome to all your listeners. So my journey into foresight began as a communications professional. I was working for the financial division of General Motors back in 2004, 2005, 2006. And I started. I was invited to participate as a communications professional on a special task force. Our company had identified the risk of bird flu and the CEO and the risk management folks were wondering what would happen. What, if? What would happen if bird flu were to shut down our entire country for weeks, months or longer, country for weeks, months or longer, right, Wow. And so that began this journey of mine, shifting from being a communications professional.
Speaker 2:I'm an accredited public relations professional. I'm the member of the Peter Save Fellow Colleges. I've spent 30 years doing public relations, marketing communications for very well-known organizations throughout the United States, Companies like Mack Trucks, Toro, Snowblowers and Lawnmowers, Rapala Fishing, Lures, American Standard, Amana Appliances, things like that, FedEx. But over the years, especially the last 15 years, I became more and more interested in foresight and thinking more longer term, embracing the long term, and I eventually went on to get my master's degree in foresight from the University of Houston, and I'm in. So, in addition to being an accredited public relations professional, I am also an academically trained futurist as well, and I leverage that to help my clients think further ahead, to make smarter decisions today and to help them communicate the vision that they really want.
Speaker 1:Excellent, excellent University of Houston, great place. Is there a difference between just what we commonly think of communication and the notion of being in public relations? Is that a nuance that the public may or may not understand? Do you have a sense of whether those are two different terms? Are we kind of in a Venn diagram here? But is that significant to use the term public relations?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, if you want to get into nitty-gritty, you could differentiate between the two.
Speaker 2:I mean, broadly speaking, communications could be everything from, you know, communicating through the press to using advertising, to using social media, all these different mediums that we have to communicate to specific audiences. Public relations I would define it more as you're trying to actually intentionally create trusted relationships between your organization or your community and with other stakeholder groups. It could be within an industry, it could be with customers, it could be investors, it can be employees, you can, you know whoever you have a relationship with. And so I tend to prefer the public relations because it brings into the conversation this concept of trust, and I strongly believe that, as we look into the future, trust is going to be the new oil. As you see, throughout our society, our economies, when you see trust breaking down, things don't move as fluidly, as smoothly as they can, and that creates friction and that leads to conflict and that leads to a breakdown in collaboration and cooperation, which is long-term not good. So trust, to me, as it relates to public relations, is the key factor here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it takes what's the phrase? Takes a while to build trust and can be gone in a moment. You can ruin it right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely right. Yeah, and I think that applies to foresight too. I mean trust as we think about the long term, embracing the long term, trust is a factor within that. You know you have to build trust with the people. You're trying to build the future with right, and if we can't trust each other, it's hard to imagine or visualize a future that benefits all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things that intrigues me about this conversation is it seems that in the world of public relations, you always seem to and maybe this is the movies, but you seem to see people in the world of public relations. They always seem to be reacting. There's an accident, a fire, a car crash, you name it right A hurricane. They're usually responding. Or hey, clean up in aisle seven, right, and do you have a different take on the public relations professional in our world?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, yes, absolutely I do. I mean, for the most part, most of the professionals I have had the honor of working with are very intentional about planning ahead. They're anticipating crisis situations. Big overlap between public relations and communications and foresight, because PR professionals are taught even in undergraduate classes, right, that you need to anticipate crisis situations. Crisis situations are going to happen. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. What we don't know is exactly how those crisis situations may unfold, right, but what we can do is we can, using all the tools we have, our expertise, our knowledge about how to best communicate, how to effectively communicate, we can anticipate various incidents or situations where everything is, yes, a complete mess, but you have the thinking in place to help you navigate through that situation. And most organizations do have that right. Any of the, say, the Fortune 1000 corporations in the US or the world have crisis communications plans in place to help them anticipate a crisis situation and navigate through that as easily as possible. Remember, you can't think of everything, but you do have that in place.
Speaker 2:And certainly here's where foresight comes in, and this is my message to my fellow PR peers out there is, use your foresight capabilities. Many organizations now have foresight functions within them McDonald's, ford Motor Company, other major corporations have foresight functions within them. I'm telling my PR friends go see those folks. Use that expertise of foresight to help you think through. You know incredible crisis situations that you can't think of yourself and you need the help of foresight people to think of, and also potential opportunities as well. Yes, right, and also leverage those foresight people, because often the best foresight people are those who look into the past too. They study history, they look for patterns, and so there are lessons to be learned. For example, for both foresight people, we know that some water systems in the US have been the targets of cyber attacks right, Yep, or a water system in another part of the country, and we haven't experienced anything like that.
Speaker 1:I can learn from those incidents to better prepare ourselves for the future. Yeah, absolutely, and boy, a couple thoughts. It seems that you consider a public relations professional to be not only reactive minded, but you are encouraging your fellow PR professionals to be more proactive, even if they're not thinking about it. They need to begin to think about the possibilities, probabilities that they may encounter and, as you point out with, say, cybersecurity issues at water utilities. They can look around and say, hmm, we haven't been attacked yet, right. But let me take a look at how other systems have responded to this and instead of us responding to when it happens, we can be better prepared to proactively communicate about this and get ahead of it, instead of just simply waiting for the problem to occur. Is that a fair sense of how you're trying to engage your fellow PR professionals?
Speaker 2:Absolutely 100%, and it goes back to how I kind of introduced myself in this conversation here, matt, back when I was working at GMAC. I have to tell you, as a communications professional, who's doing, you know, preparing for crisis situations? Even I didn't think about bird flu, yeah, and its impact in shutting down the country and what that could do. Somebody else raised it because they were watching the news. They were looking for the signals of change, those weak signals out there, right Yep. And today, in fact, I've been telling folks since 2018, when I really actively have been addressing the PR community be watching for the pandemic. Back in 2018, when I spoke to the National Pure State Conference, I said we have had some scares over the last 20 years, some little, some pockets of pandemic that didn't spread, but I said the epidemiologists are saying it's coming. The epidemiologists are saying it's coming, and eventually it did come Right. Even today, though, epidemiologists are saying the big one hasn't come yet, the really big one. And so I would tell my PR peers don't put away those COVID-19 crisis communications plans, you know. Learn from them and be prepared for what could come next. And we're seeing with in real time.
Speaker 2:Now, with the bird flu, there's another virus that scientists are very concerned about, the, the Camp Hill virus that they've identified in Alabama. And you're also seeing, we're seeing now a wave of a measles outbreak, not just in Texas but in multiple states. Now you're seeing that we, we can ask these questions, these what if? Questions and that's the point of bringing in a foresight person is you, may, you know, there's things that you can identify. You know, like we have an identity theft issue. We can, I would say any water system right now would say, yeah, we should be thinking about cyber attacks. That's almost like table stakes now, right, yeah, yeah. But what if? What haven't we identified yet? Yeah, no. And so that's, that's the whole point is being proactive for not just the communications people but the leaders within the organization too right attitude.
Speaker 1:You have to have your leadership team around you enable you to live that out and to enable these meetings, these task forces, the scenario planning activities. You need some good leaders around you that understand that, grasp the discipline of foresight, so that the PR professional can lead it or be a part of it in a meaningful way. Is that fair? Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, I should note, here we're talking a lot about negative situations like cyber attacks and pandemics. There can also be positive or maybe neutral events that could happen, for example, ai. Ai seemed to explode in our society just only a couple years ago with open AI and chat, gpt right, and all of a sudden now everybody's thinking about it, everybody's talking about it. That is also a disruptive change that you know. Pr people and their leaders need to be thinking about, and I absolutely agree with you what you just said you need the whole leadership team to be thinking, to embrace the long term, to embrace the long view, and it should not be just thinking about just a crisis, but it could be also thinking about opportunities that come along too. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're absolutely right and I think I deserve that comment, because my opening framework and maybe this is what a lot of people in America think, but they think of PR people as responding to bad news, right, yeah, know, and not you know. Oh, the PR person's here to talk about how we save the day, right? Or how we're proactively harnessing the you know the opportunities with AI, right? Or machine learning or drones or something like that. You know you're getting ahead of things and framing it as a good instead of will the water company fly a drone over my house and spy on me thing, right?
Speaker 1:So I hear a couple trends and I think so far, number one foresight is. I'll call it a tool of leadership and it is something that every PR professional should become aware of, be trained on and demonstrate in their organization, and it should be part of how the whole leadership team engages. Practically, we need to be thinking about. You call them the signals of change, right? Any good foresight professional will understand that. I mean your ability to see the future, to talk about possibilities and probabilities, is really only as good as your ability to identify and find signals of change. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:I think that is.
Speaker 2:I think well, I think it's a combination between not only identifying signals of change, whether they're strong signals that are right in your face or very weak that may take years and years to develop, but also it's imagination and curiosity too. We have to be curious about the future and we have to have, we have to leaders have to unleash the imaginations of their employees, to think further ahead, to think about possible what-ifs and also so what. You know there's lots of what ifs right, but it's also prioritizing those what ifs to identify, you know, what are the most likely things we might face? And then, what are these? What are the potential wild cards Right? And and also asking ourselves, how can we not be blindsided? You know so. I think, like the COVID pandemic is a really good example, I think a lot of corporations and organizations out there in general felt blindsided by that, even though you could look back, the epidemiologists were saying something's going to happen, right, yep, but we blindsided ourselves and not only did not ask the what yes but we didn't ask the so what?
Speaker 2:So it's a matter of, yeah, a pandemic could happen, but so what could be the implications, what could be the impacts of that?
Speaker 1:And those are the questions we really need to ask as leaders in our organizations scenario happening or perhaps our response to that event or to your point about the opportunity side of foresight what is the unintended consequence if we seize on that opportunity or we work toward that preferred future? And what will happen? Is a governmental entity going to get mad at us, a representative is going to get mad, maybe a competitor will get mad at us, customers will be furious with us. Those are some things. Everything that you laid out needs to be considered, I think, by the public relations professional, and I think it starts with the identification of the signals of change weak signals, strong signals. What are the unintended consequences? What are the implications if we see that as a threat or a risk versus an opportunity and being able to sit around the table and talk about that and I think the PR professional has a lot to offer in those meetings Is that fair?
Speaker 2:I agree with that, yes.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, speaking of unintended consequences or implications, I think back to the COVID pandemic.
Speaker 2:I gave a number of talks to PR professionals around the country, in fact also to some different water systems, at that time, and one of the things that I thought a good thing that came out of that is that scientists were able to track that pandemic by scientifically measuring COVID in water systems, right In the wastewater, in the wastewater, right, and so that was something that was a learning from that that we can use to prepare for future pandemics as an example, right, or as we think about other future environmental damage.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm sure that maybe in Southern California or California, where they've had a lot of wildfires, those water systems could probably start tracking some of the contaminants that are going to be getting into the water from these large swaths of cities that have been burned down. Well, there's things that the PR people, combined with the other experts within their organization, can be learning about and use to anticipate the future for their organization, and that's one thing I do want to get across is this is you know, we've been talking about PR people, right, but foresight can be used by any function within an organization the HR, legal, marketing, engineering, you name it. It's an interdisciplinary function. All functions within an organization should be leveraging foresight, and leaders should be challenging their team members whatever function they're doing, whether it's retail sales or investor relations or whatever to be anticipating the future.
Speaker 1:And correct me if I'm wrong. You can disagree, but the benefit of having a seasoned and experienced public relations professional is to your point. Earlier you can map out both the unfortunate events and the positive opportunities that you want to pursue and be prepared for either scenario or any scenario, and be able to start to put together wireframes. On messaging how do we prepare press releases, social media campaigns, internal presentations to develop for stakeholders? The benefit of foresight to the PR professionals they can begin to work on these things based on the signals that they're seeing. I'm not being too futuristic, am I?
Speaker 2:You know what we're using, the word futuristic, but to me that's basic crisis communications. That's basic crisis communications. And to give you an example, you know, we know, based on climate change, that our weather is getting crazier right, and so what I've been telling folks in my PR, folks in my presentations, is that a weather disaster, you know, we often used to think they're confined to certain areas. You know, hurricanes are just confined to the Gulf Coast in Florida. Hurricane tornadoes are confined for the most part to Tornado Alley right in Kansas.
Speaker 1:The people in Western North Carolina may not agree with that hurricane statement. Right the people in.
Speaker 2:Western North Carolina may not agree with that hurricane statement. Right, exactly right. Well, I'm just saying now, crazy weather can happen anywhere. No one is immune. A blizzard, freeze event can take out the power grid in all of Texas, even Houston Texas, right, don't worry. Right, even Houston Texas, right, right? So the whole point here is think, you know, there's things that you think that the box that you think of. Oh, these are potential crisis situations that could happen.
Speaker 2:The point of bringing in foresight people is to help you think about outside of the box, and this applies not just to communications and PR people, but to any function with an organization, with, right now, with our federal government. You know, there, there, I think, the numbers are we might lay off or the Trump administration may let go as many as 200,000 people, employees within the next 30 to 90 days. So I'm just kind of like okay, let's say that's true. Well, if you're a communications professional working for the federal government and you're seeing this happen, you need to start preparing your. You are preparing your communications now, but what you should be preparing for is what is the impact when you lose so many people so quickly and then situations start coming up right? What disaster happens in a part of the country and we've let go all these people in FEMA. Now what do we do, for example? So yeah, that's what we're trying to do, you know, it's just anticipate more and be better prepared to navigate disruption.
Speaker 1:So what would your advice be to a typical leader in the world of water? Let's pick the general manager of a water or wastewater utility who's recently learned about this word foresight and maybe its benefits. What should they do apart from hiring a PR professional on staff? But what are your recommendations to a water leader who's trying to figure out how to meaningfully engage their PR professionals in foresight for the betterment of their organization and the people they serve? What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:Well, I would, first and foremost, if they're just learning about foresight, I would encourage them to hire a foresight professional, even as a you know consulting futurist, just to open up the door. Open up the door to their thinking and their imaginations. And I know that there's a lot of smart leaders out there who can anticipate already, various situations. Right, you know, if you're you run a water system anywhere, say in the Midwest, you've been. You know the lesson over the last, say, 10 years, we've had major flooding in various communities, for example, that have taken out water systems. So you, you kind of know that already and you would charge your PR professionals, develop that crisis communications plan. If our water systems are compromised through a mass flooding event, a massive rainstorm or something like that, you can anticipate that. What I'm inviting them to do is to think not only further out, but to think more broadly about disruptions, and we have to think through that.
Speaker 2:All of our systems are connected. We live in one, for better or worse, one enormous, open, highly complex system, right, and so we have to anticipate what happens in other systems that could affect us. Well, what if our federal government shrinks dramatically, funding for infrastructure projects ceases, and your organization wasn't prepared for that. So now we have to think through. Where are we going to get the funding to maintain our water systems? Do we need to raise rates? I know that. What do we have to do to educate our customers? You know water, the water industry. I think a lot of folks don't understand how little they actually pay for water Right.
Speaker 1:It's out of sight, out of mind, right, right.
Speaker 2:Out of sight, out of mind, right, and I think a lot of these the water systems have to do a better job of maybe communicating the value of their water systems, what they actually provide and how they actually maintain clean drinking water or effectively use waste. You know, remove wastewater or treat the wastewater, but then what happens in the years ahead when water infrastructure might be compromised or we might face additional climate change situations where water systems are under even more stress or are overwhelmed by more water? Right? So you know as well as I do. You know parts of the US are facing, you know are going to face, water shortages in the years to come, and there might be places in the US that you never would have thought of are going to face water stress. You know, like places here in the Midwest where I'm in Minneapolis, minnesota, and there's water systems around us that you know, we primarily get our water from aquifers and those aquifers, if they're not replenished, are going to dry up. And what happens when the water dries up, right, right.
Speaker 1:Well. So number one would be look, if you're a smart general manager, you need to either hire a communications PR professional that understands the foresight discipline or, if not, then work with a consultant that can come in and help your team understand the future of water. Both, again, the challenges, the risks and the opportunities. Maybe there's an opportunity to acquire a neighboring utility that may be challenged, right, and of course, we always love talking about the risks, whether it's cybersecurity or drought. But then even I think you've talked about some other steps in your previous comments obviously getting around the table regularly to talk about scenarios, good and bad, and systematically identifying these trends, the signals of change, I think, as we talked about both good things, bad things, or well, what does this mean? Is it a weak signal, as we say, there's something there? I'm not sure what it means for us or some wild card?
Speaker 1:Some people would think the COVID-19 was a wild card. Other people think, well, we've been talking about it for a long time. No surprise here, no black swans, right. So what? I guess? Systematically incorporating I guess I call it the culture of foresight, right, but systematically weaving the foresight discipline into the organization, whether you're a water utility or a non-governmental organization, but being able to identify those risks and opportunities and then preparing. I think you spent some time talking about preparing for how you're going to respond to those opportunities or challenges. Is that kind of a fair summary of your advice, your thoughts on how we can harness the discipline of foresight?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, as I reflect on our comments right here now, Matt, you know we've been talking primarily about a lot of crisis communications and preparing for a crisis, you know like, for example, preparing for a flooding situation or a hurricane or another pandemic.
Speaker 2:But I think to me, the main message I really want to get across, especially to other leaders is or especially leaders within water utilities is that the whole point of using foresight and thinking, embracing the long view, is to help you make smarter decisions today, and it's about your legacy, Right, you know, if you're, you are in charge of that water system, that water utility, more often than not I'm assuming you want to leave it a little better off than how you found it right, and you want to prepare it.
Speaker 2:You want to make it more resilient to whatever the future holds. You know, whatever challenges it may hold. And so the whole point of embracing a culture of foresight, a culture of futures thinking, is to make those better decisions today so that the next generation, the generation after that, the generation after that seven generations or more, after that, seven generations or more has a water system that they can rely upon, that is resilient, that will meet the needs of future generations, and I think that's the most important part. Foresight is, to me, a strategic function and it helps you create better strategy, better informed strategy, and when we have a better strategy, a more clear strategy, we can communicate better, we can navigate disruptions easier, we can build trust with our stakeholders and that process of building and maintaining and keeping that trust goes easier. You know, we can maintain that trust when things go bad.
Speaker 1:And that's the whole point. Yeah, I'd like to think that if leaders in the world of water appropriately harness the tools of foresight, it's possible that we could take the crisis out of crisis communication, because we will be able to anticipate the scenarios that we've worked through and, when they happen, it won't be a crisis, it'll be well. We saw that coming and we're ready for it. Right, we're prepared, we're getting ahead of the issue, or, yep, we saw it coming and we know how to respond to it. Is that fair, or am I living in a fantasy land? A?
Speaker 2:crisis will always feel like a crisis, but you can go through it more calmly. And the whole point is building up the muscle so that, if the crisis goes sideways in a way that you didn't anticipate, you have the muscle memory or whatever you want to call that to be able to handle that crisis better, handle it more effectively and reduce the time of the crisis situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think foresight will help me and perhaps others, I hope, change their perception, their mental model, that PR professionals are only there when there's a problem. You know, break the glass, pull the lever and get my PR person out there, and I think our discussion today tells me no, that's not at all the case and I think you're a professional that's working towards changing whatever paradigm may be out there that PR professionals are only reactive. They are much more proactive and they need to be even more proactive, if they're not already, but being more proactive at identifying the signals of change and being prepared for the opportunities and the challenges that face us in the world of water.
Speaker 2:Is that fair? Yes, yep, I agree with that.
Speaker 1:Well, stephen, I want to thank you for being a guest today on the Water Foresight Podcast. Stephen, I want to thank you for being a guest today on the Water Foresight Podcast a very rewarding and optimistic conversation, I think full of optimism, I should say, and I look forward to hearing more from you in the future, no pun intended about how you are encouraging communications and PR professionals to be more proactive by harnessing strategic foresight. I think it is certainly an opportunity and I think you'll be successful in that. So where can people get a hold of you, stephen, if they want to learn more about what you do and the things that you write about?
Speaker 2:Sure. First off, matt, thank you for this invite to speak with you and your audience. It's been my honor to share my thoughts with you and you know what? Every time I have a conversation like this, I always learn more. Just having conversations like this, I mean, it's really great to have, and I hope that that's the benefit for your audience. If folks want to reach me, obviously LinkedIn is nowadays the best way of reaching me, but I also have my blog site and website called stevendupontco, and that's another great way to reach me, or reach me through my email stevendupontmn at gmailcom. Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, and thank you again for all your work in this area, and thank you for your service to the association of professional futurists as well. Um, we appreciate all the work you do there. So thank you to our listeners for joining us on this episode, and we look forward to hearing from um uh, our next guest, on the next episode of the water foresight podcast, and we'll see you there. Have have a wonderful day. Thank you for listening to the Water Force Sight Podcast powered by the Aqualaris Group. For more information, please visit us at Aqualariscom or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
