Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Bachus in Facilities. So, once again, I was really getting a great overview and perspective of
all the things that were going on in the Corps and the engineer side of the Army.
I could take back information in anticipation of certain things and tell my public affairs folks
to follow up or see if we could take an initiative to help.
I knew I was not an expert in the technical aspects of public affairs, but I had a pretty good
feeling of how things worked and of communications. I learned a lot that year--I learned a
lot of things that held me in good stead ever thereafter.
For example, the fact that you have to deal with perceptions, not only reality, when you deal
with people. Also, that public affairs is really communications, and there are a lot of different
audiences that you need to communicate with--external, internal, your own staff, the Army
external, the environmental external, the Corps employees in the field, the employees in the
office. I mean there are just a lot of different audiences. I learned that if you want
communications to succeed, you have to target the audience and design communications for
that audience.
Sometimes there can be more than one target audience, but you really have to know what
messages are intended, and you have to change the design of your communication to target
each audience. I can't tell you how much that understanding has helped me. I rely on that
now in talking with folks.
When you prepare a briefing, you need to develop your boilerplate briefing on how you
communicate your intended information, issue, solution. When you go to brief General X,
you need to sit back and make sure you know what you want General X to come away with
and what you want to convince him of. You need them to redesign your briefing, be prepared
to throw out charts, change charts, change words on charts so that you're targeting General X
for that briefing.
Or if you want to take it out to the outside media, you can't just go with your standard pack
of charts. If you go with your standard package to every audience, not stand back and look at
it critically, then you're going to have something in there that's going to turn them off,
irritate them, or cause you to lose. So, you really need to redesign your brief for the audience.
Now you might have two people you want to target. Then you've got to make sure that even
though you're speaking to General X, you know that Colonel Y is looking at it from a
different angle and agenda. You want to convince him, so you're going to have to put the
things essential to his perspective in there to convince him, but making sure they don't kill
you with General X.
Just understanding the reality that you have to design a communication or a briefing for a
particular audience and target them is invaluable. We in the world so often don't do that. You
always know because you get burned by the result when it happens.
Some people don't understand why they got burned. That's why I've never liked slides and
Vu-Graphs printed up so nice and clean and beautiful--because then you're reluctant to
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