Robert Bauer joins us to unpack the intriguing topic of predictions within the PR industry—how they are formulated, their inherent risks, and their potential impact on reputation management.

He emphasizes the need for balance between cautious foresight and bold, sometimes controversial declarations about the future and shares his insights into the process of crafting meaningful predictions that resonate both with clients and broader audiences.

Our conversation also touches on the intricacies of risk management, the responsibility of experts in shaping future narratives, and the psychology behind authoritative predictions.

Key Takeaways

1. Predictions in public relations are tools for building credibility and positioning organizations as thought leaders within their industries.
2. Experts must strike a balance between making predictions that are too obvious and those that are excessively improbable.
3. Trust and credibility are crucial; audiences are more receptive to predictions from individuals they find trustworthy and knowledgeable.
4. Effective predictions often require a blend of boldness and modesty, acknowledging the inherent uncertainties of the future.
5. PR professionals play a critical role in not just making predictions but also managing the risks associated with them.

About the Guest

Robert Bauer is Managing Partner of accelent communications in Vienna, Austria, a firm he cofounded in 2011 (then as “asoluto public relations”) together with two business partners. Today, the agency is one of Austria's leading communications counselors, especially (but not exclusively) in the healthcare sector. Robert has a university degree in communications and has been working as a PR consultant since 1995. Among his main achievements were multinational PR campaigns for digital payments companies as lead agency and huge PR campaigns for the mandatory Austrian social security system. He was president of PRGN in the 2020-21 term.

About the Hosts

Abbie Fink is president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. Her marketing communications background includes skills in media relations, digital communications, social media strategies, special event management, crisis communications, community relations, issues management, and marketing promotions for both the private and public sectors, including such industries as healthcare, financial services, professional services, government affairs and tribal affairs, as well as not-for-profit organizations.

Dr. Adrian McIntyre is a cultural anthropologist, media personality, speaker, and strategic communications consultant for PR agencies and marketing firms. He's lived in over 30 countries and spent more than a decade in the Middle East and Africa as a researcher, journalist, communications adviser, media spokesperson, and storytelling consultant. He earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Fulbright scholar and National Science Foundation fellow. Adrian helps agency leaders strengthen their positioning, sharpen their messaging, boost their visibility, and win new clients by replacing impersonal, intrusive and ineffective marketing tactics with authentic human conversations.

PRGN Presents is brought to you by Public Relations Global Network, the world’s local public relations agency. Our executive producer is Adrian McIntyre. The show is produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, AZ.

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From the Public Relations Global Network. This is PRGN Presents. I’m Adrian McIntyre.

And I’m Abbie Fink, President of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Our guests on this biweekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications, and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now let’s meet our guest for this episode.

Hello, my name is Robert Bauer. I’m a managing partner of accelent communications, an agency within PRGN located in Vienna, Austria, almost at the heart of Europe. I’ve been in PR business since, oh my God, 30 years now. 31 years. And I hope to stay there for another, let’s say 10 to 15 years. That’s my plan. But you never know. And this is maybe already a prediction about my life.

Well, you stole my line. That’s exactly what I was going to say. Do you think that’s a prediction, how much more time we have in the industry? I think a PR person’s favorite thing to do is gather our clients and say, what do you think the future is going to look like for the industry? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But what do you really think about predictions? What do you mean when we’re talking about predictions in the context of public relations and using predictions as a tool for PR practitioners?

Yeah, I mean, predictions are always a bit of a tricky thing. You know, it’s a kind of general future-oriented statement which tries to anticipate something that we naturally don’t know very much about as it is in the future. So it has always a strong element of speculation as a kind of built in weakness. But maybe that’s also the strength of a prediction as you reach the curiosity and what listeners or audiences like to speculate about.

And I think in PR, of course, we talk about such statements with the purpose to position a person, to position an organization as a kind of thought leader or a trustworthy source. Because somebody who knows something or pretends to know something about the future is always more trustworthy than somebody who has no clue about what might come or might not come.

We know, I always think about, I do more reflecting back necessarily than predicting future and looking at how our industry has changed over time. And could anyone have really predicted X number of years ago what technology would look like for our industry or the impact that AI would be having on the work that we’re doing? And it really does require a lot of faith, I think, to be kind of predicting forward and be willing to stake your reputation on that. You know, I think our industry is going in this direction or I believe that this is going to be, you know, impactful in the next three to five years.

Now there’s maybe no harm in doing that in that, you know, that it is just that, a prediction. My hope is that it to some extent is based in your experiences and things that you have witnessed over time, making it feel a little bit more accurate, maybe a little bit more logical in being able to say that. But you know what is it about predictions that are so meaningful for our client base, for our audiences? But media as well, I mean, they really also take this information as pretty valid talking points for stories that they’re developing. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think they try to relate to their audiences. It’s always the same with media that they of course, if they are, and this is what we assume kind of quality media that they at least are interested in what their audiences are interested in. And so looking at predictions, I think if it is meaning if it should be meaningful, it must relate to the knowledge and experience and also the fears and worst case scenarios of audiences. I mean, you know it from yourself. If you listen to a prediction, mostly it is more interesting to hear those dystopian predictions, what might go wrong than the positive things that everything will turn out well and everything will be bright.

If you’re really honest, you are more interested in those things that might be dangerous. That might be a bit, yeah, not so easygoing for the future. And I think this is something very basic human because of uncertainty in which we live. We are looking for a kind of certainty. And people who bring certainty with their predictions into a life, how ridiculous it may ever be because a CEO telling me about the future of his company doesn’t really bring certainty in my life. But still it sounds like our future is not so difficult. It might be predicted. It might be easier than I thought in advance.

Now do you think there’s a difference between a CEO predicting the future of their particular company versus that same CEO talking in a more general sense about their industry? I mean, we all want our companies to be successful. I see A great future for my company. I mean, that, you know, we would hope, is what we would say about our own business. But there has to be a distinction, I think, between that kind of conversation and positioning that prediction for the industry that they represent.

So the CEO of a healthcare company talking about their company versus that same CEO speaking about the healthcare industry or the impact of new legislation on the industry or something feels like to me that that’d be a lot more meaningful in terms of positioning and really maybe a little bit more attention grabbing from a media perspective.

Well, the healthcare sector is a good example for that. I think those two areas blur a bit. If one of my oncology clients, for instance, I know that they know what they are talking about and they are really heavy in R and D. So if he predicts something, not on his products or on his therapies that they are developing, but more general, where the trend is going in, let’s say, oncology treatments for a special tumor entity, whatever it is, then I listen more carefully than, let’s say, just a journalist who tells me something about this.

Okay, he has several sources, he talks to more people, this journalist. But I know the person who is giving this prediction about their very special field. So this is about credibility and about also my relationship to the person. How much trust do I give to this person?

Do you think there’s a particular time of year where. I mean, I think predictions usually end up at the end of a calendar year as we look forward. Not many of us at the end of that calendar year go backwards and say, were we right? But you know, maybe we should do some of that as well. But you know, predictions can happen at any time. I mean, I can, I can be predicting at any point along the way. You know, when you’re developing these, you know, this idea with your, you know, with your clients, do you have any recommendations or thoughts about how to do it, what to look for, what you know, what are the do’s and don’ts for predictions? Is there any, you know, kind of guiding principle that you find to be most beneficial when you’re working with those that want to be a little bit more forward thinking?

I think the guiding principle should be the balance. The balance between predicting something that is obvious that it will come is on one end of the extremes. And the other thing is things that are completely unrealistic, things that nobody can reasonably predict. But of course there are unknown unknowns, there are black swans and things like that. So you have always to be aware that you never can predict it correctly without Things like these coming along.

But you know what I mean, the balance between something that everybody knows and something that you say, this is way out of what can be thought of. And for a CEO, I mean, in private context, you can predict everything you want. But guiding a CEO, guiding a spokesperson of a company, you have to find the balance between those two extremes so that it really pays into the credibility and reputation of the whole organization or company or NGO or whatever it is that he or she is speaking for.

Robert, I was trained as a social scientist, and sometimes I think about these things through that lens. Niklas Luhmann was probably the most prolific and influential German sociologist of the 20th century. And he wrote a wonderful essay which I read in Graduate School 20 years ago, called the Ecology of Ignorance. The point of his essay was that in a modern society, in a knowledge based society, ignorance gaps in our knowledge is not something we can ever overcome. It is actually a function, it is built into how things are. And so the role of experts is not to remove that blindness, remove those gaps, but in fact to name them and be responsible for them.

Because predicting the future is of course impossible. But managing risk, that was his kind of key theme. Managing risk is essential. What’s interesting to me is how few people acknowledge that their predictions are nothing more than rabbits pulled out of hats, ideas, fever dreams, fantasies, or the painfully obvious, we already knew this was going to happen, common nonsense that you referred to. So I wonder, how do we strike a balance between acknowledging the unknown unknowns? There are things that we don’t know and can’t know, and then responsibly guiding clients through the process of moving forward into a future where we may never know some of the things that we need to know. In other words, how do you bring risk and risk management into a conversation about prediction?

If I take a step back and not think about clients, but about my own agency, like many agencies, I hope we have a business plan and a risk assessment plan as well. So we try to identify which are the risks and how probable are they that they would come along, how much impact would they have for us, and how much influence do we have, not only in them coming, but also in overcoming them as an organization.

And I think the same questions or challenges apply to almost any kind of future challenge that might come. So thinking about how strong is the impact, how can we deal with it, and how probable is it that this will ever happen? I’m not ignorant to the fact that the unknown unknowns don’t follow this scheme because yeah, we don’t know them and we can’t assess them. And looking at clients and that their predictions that they do, I mean, the main point that they want to have is they want to do predictions to generate content, to generate something that adds to their reputation, to their credibility as a voice of the industry, not just the voice of their company. I mean, that’s the easy part. But really talking as a speaker of a whole industry, or at least a part of an industry, this is the art of the prediction, to say it like a book of somebody who tries to make an art of the deal.

An unpredictable figure if ever there was one.

So to do a reasonable prediction is kind of an art. So that you really are, that people really react in that way that you want them to react. They say, hey, this is really something I have to talk about, think about. This is something I have to be aware of in the future because I heard this and that person tell to me about that.

Well, and there’s some benefit in being a little bit out there in your prediction, right? I mean, to be a little bit controversial, a little bit challenging in what you are suggesting might be the future outlook for the industry. We’ll just sort of leave it at that. I mean, that definitely makes a stronger headline when you can be a little bit bold in what you’re saying. I think where, for me, where it comes from. And Robert, you mentioned this is really about the.

To the extent that there is already credibility built up in the individual that is making this prediction, we can accept that they have some knowledge and background and industry understanding that says, this is something I’ve experienced, therefore I feel confident that I can make this prediction, even if it is a little bit more outlandish or a little bit more difficult for us to comprehend. They’re coming from this place.

And if we take the role that we play in helping our organizations be thought leaders and be respected in their industry, predicting or forecasting, projecting out into the future feels very genuine because we’ve already trusted that individual to have this knowledge and understanding. So I think we can, we can look at as much about who is making those predictions. You know, what does that, who, who does that person represent?

Who are they in that organization? And is what they’re saying valuable? Because we already know and respect them. So there’s probably some real discussion that needs to have about, you know, who, who are we crediting for the prediction? You know, who, who is it that is, you know, putting themselves forward and the trust factor that we’re trying to generate by Putting forth the individual that’s, you know, being recommended to, you know, put the prediction out there.

I would like to add something to that which I totally underscore. I think it’s also about modesty. The more modest the person is, the more of boldness I can accept in their predictions. So if they combine, they can give the most weird and outlandish forecasts. If at the same time I have the impression that they say, but it could come completely different. It’s just my knowledge. It’s just based on my experience, and I know it could be completely different. What I really don’t like is people who come along and say something, and of course it will be like that.

They tell it with their body language and their mimics and everything and say, no, no, you can’t know that. And this is what I mean with modesty that you always are aware of. It could be completely different. I just give now my impression.

Now, this brings up such an interesting paradox because back to my pal Nicolas Slouman, one of the things he points out is that we know one thing about experts is that they are almost always wrong. And yet we don’t. We talk about credibility. We talk about, you know, staking a reputation on our analysis, on our insights and on our predictions. And yet there’s a very interesting phenomenon. We don’t necessarily assume that the expert is no longer valid because the last 25 of her predictions were wrong, as long as she continues the kind of careful, measured approach that you’re describing. So what would possibly make predictions irresponsible or unacceptable?

You mentioned one which is sort of the tone that doesn’t convey trust. But is there a line that you would draw, given that most predictions are in fact wrong, once we arrive at that previously unknown future, how do we strike that balance between credibility and ignorance? And, you know, we don’t hold people accountable for what they said before. Usually I’m just thinking out loud here. I don’t even know if there’s a question there. But, Robert, what are your thoughts on this?

I mean, I’m no psychologist, of course, but I have my impression. I think as we are talking about human beings, there is always this human factor. If a person giving a prediction, you feel sympathetic towards them. You are more eager to accept the prediction if it is consonant to what you already think or thought. You are more open to it, of course, even if it appeals to something inside of you that you are not aware of yourself, but it triggers something within you in a positive way, then you will react in a different way than if you say no, that’s, hey, it’s complete nonsense. And I don’t trust that person. I don’t like that person. So I don’t like their forecast because I don’t like the person.

And I think this is the point that it sooner or later comes down to. It’s about the human relationship that you have with that person, even if you don’t know them in person. But just a media person, for instance, media personality or a show personality, for instance, if you like them, if you like their movies and their sports performance or whatever it is, their political views, of course, then it is about consonants and you say, yeah, yeah, sounds good. Sounds credible. Yes, because it’s him or her telling me that.

And you don’t go really into assessing what did she actually say? What would it mean if this came true, what she’s predicting here? How does it relate to my own experience? You don’t do that. And this is dangerous, of course, in some fields. And at least it’s not the most intelligent way to deal with it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

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