Click, Comment, Convince: A New Model for Project Communication

Carleton Chinner is the Managing Director of MagniStrat, a Brisbane, Australia-based project consultancy specializing in program capability maturity improvement. Carleton works on large complex projects and is often called upon to speak about his experiences.

  Communications Management   Risk Management  

I was once involved in an enormous infrastructure project designed to secure the future of our region’s water supply. This project would deliver not only a desalination plant, but also three wastewater treatment plants.

Each of these keystone infrastructure items would be linked to the wider water supply grid to secure our region’s future from drought. A key feature of this plan was that recycled water would, for the first time, be added back into the drinking water supply.

Recycled water supplementation of drinking water supplies is nothing new. However, perception is a powerful thing when this kind of project is being done for the first time in an area. With an impending state election, the opposition political party saw a golden opportunity for leverage. The project media team suddenly found themselves fighting an uphill battle against an overwhelmingly negative narrative.

If I hadn’t known better, I might have believed the breathless local press as they found one expert after another to convince us that we would almost certainly end up drinking untreated effluent.

The end result was that the project was not given permission to supplement the drinking water supply. The water provided by the new infrastructure had to be diverted to other uses at great cost.

On a different, equally prominent project, the public was primed by a lot of social …

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