Teaching Top Gun to narrate the organisation

The Public Relations literature has long touted the need for the discipline to extend its reach into the C-Suite and to become part of the management of organisations. Studies such from the European Communication Monitor and the USC Annenberg likewise report on the reporting structure of the public relations function to the C-Suite. While the C-Suite can set the tone for how disciplines are integrated into the organisation, little attention has been paid to how other functions within the organisation use and understand the role of public relations. This is an important question as the work of public relations in narrating the organisation becomes decentralised. In large organisations, a range of organisational representatives engage with stakeholders, deal with social media, and other tasks in telling the organisation’s story that previously were able to be more tightly controlled by the public relations role. This paper reports on the teaching program developed for senior level defence personnel who were required to deal with a range of local stakeholders within the context of an international air force program. In this case, local activists, employees and media coverage had the potential to impact international relations and formal public relations efforts at Nation leader level, and billions of public funds and political support were at stake. The program engages local level leaders with military and engineering backgrounds in issues management and stakeholder and employee engagement as a means to ongoing narration of the organisation and the program at hand.