Pharmaceutical Market Europe • December 2023 • 14
MIKE DIXON
MIKE DIXON
LIVING IN A VUCA WORLD
It’s been a year characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
Preparing for a recent awards presentation speech, my co-presenter suggested that this had been a VUCA year – characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The acronym was created in America to reflect the reality of the end of the Cold War. Since then, it seems to have integrated itself into leadership training vernacular and, to be fair, does capture the essence of 2023 for pharma rather well. Political instability, economic uncertainty, medicine shortages, financial polarisation, government pricing agreements, reimbursement pressure, the list goes on…
So how has the VUCA world impacted us in comms and marketing? One very worrying response we have perhaps seen is paralysis. Delaying, or just not doing anything, presumably in the belief that things are going to settle down. Although understandable, this is clearly not a strategy that is going to deliver our business goals or be beneficial for patients in the long run. Similarly, holding back promotional spend due to concerns of reduced sales or profit for the year has the danger of becoming self-fulfilling as the lack of promotion will inevitably lead to those scenarios.
In a VUCA world, the one business philosophy that we certainly need to embrace is agile working. Agile working allows us to keep moving forward while being cognisant of the environment. Agile working is not new anymore, but I do question how integrated it has become in pharmaceutical communications programmes. There still seems to be a predominance to plan the programme for the year ahead and then set it loose to be delivered, perhaps with agency partners, only occasionally checking that what has been planned is proceeding as expected. This is not agile working and, in a VUCA world, why would we expect what we planned – probably at the end of the previous year – to still be spot on, even at the end of first quarter? Agile working demands you are constantly learning, adapting and improving.
Focus on your audience
To do that we need to know and understand our audiences well. That means we need to be meticulous with our insights and that comes from truly engaging and listening to them. With comprehensive insight at the outset, we can ensure we have an accurate benchmark and appropriate measurable objectives. We also need to keep asking our target audiences for feedback, early and often.
We need to be prepared to hear things we perhaps don’t want to hear. We also need to understand their VUCA world and how that might impact on our communications activity.
Keep learning and improving
Agile working means you will most likely need to keep adapting and changing your activity. There is no point listening to feedback if you are not going to use it to benefit your aims. This may mean making minor or major adaptations but, in most cases, you will have greater success if the programme of activity you end up with is different from the one you planned at the start. There are no prizes for ‘sticking to our plans’ if the world has changed around you.
Engage your team
The same learning and adapting philosophy needs to be employed by your team. When working with a client, agency or cross-functional team, it is essential you view yourselves as one integrated team. There should not be any information or learning that everybody in the team is not privy to. Additionally, ensuring the diversity of our teams in terms of skills, backgrounds and experience will help to deliver communications that are accessible and appropriate for all the diverse audiences we need to communicate with.
Identifying any challenges and problems, and fixing them as you go along, will not just ensure problems don’t fester and become permanently detrimental to the working relationships – it will most importantly benefit the outcome of the programme. This may also require gaining cross-stakeholder buy-in for process changes to facilitate moving at speed, for example, for medical legal review pathways. There can sometimes be a tradeoff needed to achieve greater agility within a team or organisation.
Fail fast and respond quickly
Recognising and accepting when something is not working is critical for agile working. It is important to establish an environment where things that are not delivering as hoped are seen as a positive learning opportunity for everyone. Without this environment, innovation will be stifled, as people are afraid to try something different. Environments where everything is presented as a success, without taking important learnings, just means that mediocre work will continue. We need to identify problems early and resolve them quickly. Once again, this means from the outset we need to ensure processes are in place to be able to regularly and rapidly measure and evaluate. Too often evaluation is not considered until the end, when it should be integral from the start. Or worse, it is the first thing to be taken out due to time or resource constraints. In a VUCA world in particular, we need to value evaluation and see it as a mandatory component of any communications initiative.
As we go into 2024, it does not feel like our VUCA world is going away. So, as we develop new communication programmes, let’s embed the principles of agile working to help ensure our communications activity is cutting through the noise and delivering benefits to patients.
Mike Dixon is CEO of the Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) and a communications consultant