Timing is everything
August 2009

We’ve heard it before.  Whether it be comedy, story telling or even military strategy, we’ve all heard the phrase, timing is everything.  True.  And it also rings true when making public announcements. 

Some timing problems can’t be forecast or fixed.  The story of Jack Welch’s New York book launch being scheduled for the morning of September 11^th, 2001 is well known.  There was nothing Jack could do about the events that unfolded on that fateful morning.

More often than not, however, timing issues can be forecast and fixed.  Take the events of July 24^th, for example.

To jog your memory, Friday July 24^th was the VIA strike deadline.  Engineers were going to walk off the job at noon and in the process would leave thousands stranded around the country. Everyone who listened to the news in the days leading up the deadline knew it was happening.  Most news organizations had people at Union Station in Toronto to cover the mess.

But apparently the Feds weren’t reading the papers last week.  The Federal government, after all, decided to announce stimulus funding for - wait for it - Union Station’s revitalization on the same day VIA’s engineers were going on strike.  Yup, when all the talk about Union Station, and there was a lot of talk about it, was focused on stranded travelers and picket lines, someone thought it a good idea to make an unrelated announcement regarding the same Union Station. The net result, of course, is that the story about the stimulus funding got lost.  When you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, that’s a problem.   It was the equivalent of the City of Toronto announcing funding for a waste transfer station in the middle of the recent Toronto strike.

What can we learn from this?  To begin with, no one ever sets out to make timing mistakes.  Generally, we find that when timing issues arise it’s usually because something is rushed.  It’s a quick, knee-jerk effort and adequate time isn’t available to analyze competing issues.  

Tangentially, every announcement needs to be evaluated within the context of the entire media landscape.  When people get too close to their issue, cause or announcement, they forget there is an entire world of people out there with similar views about their own issue, cause or announcement.  Never assume your news is bigger than what else is out there simply because it is your announcement.