Transcripts For CSPAN2 Public Diplomacy Discussion With Stat

Commissioners of the Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy, vice chairman bill hippel and commissioner weidner. Today we know under the offices of the Advisory Commission we called a Public Meeting to look at the question of the gpa, and state department, and the executive director, it is my honor to open this event. And for opening comments, i want to tell you how things will go today. And to principal speakers, they speak to the tagteam formation and at the end of their formation we will take your questions and comments. Please hold your questions and comments until they finish their presentation. For the moderated q and day session there will be a microphone. Please speak into the microphone, and your questions and answers are part of the transcript that will be part of public record. It is important to capture your question so we can reflect them accurately. It is my great pleasure to turn it over to the chairman. Thank you for the audience being here. The president of Public Diplomacy council and adam power, the director of usc, communication leadership and policy programs in washington dc. I am pleased to have bill hippel here, vice chairman from colorado springs, colorado and for 70 years the commission has represented Public Interest by advising the Us Government Global Information medium, culture and Education Exchange programs, a bipartisan and independent body created by congress in 1948 to assess and recommend policies and programs, to Us Government efforts to understand, inform and influence foreign publics particularly but not limited to the work of the us to permit of state. The commission mandated by law to report findings and recommendations to the president of the United States, congress, secretary of state and the american people. The commission to comprehensive annual report of Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting is the premier product compiles and analyzes 20 state Department Offices and other Us Government agencies including recommendations from the commission for effectiveness and efficiency of the programs. In fiscal year 2015, 112 recommendations, 55 were implemented resulting in improved operational efficiencies, and these recommendations, it is the proposed merger of the bureau of Public Affairs, into what is known as the bureau of Global Public affairs. The gpa creation is described as the largest restructuring of state Department Since the merger of the Us Information Agency to the department of state 20 years ago. Hard to believe it has gone by quickly. The assistant secretary of state and gpa Principal Deputy assistant secretary both here today to help us understand what the gpa looks like to the Strategic Vision for Public Diplomacy. The commission appreciate this opportunity to learn about the structural programmatic and policy changes and the ways the commission and Public Diplomacy community can support this effort. Thank you for joining us. I am pleased to invite michelle gita to speak and nicole hewitt. Thank you very much. [applause] it is a pleasure to be here today, thank you for hosting us, love being involved in this. And very excited to talk to you today. There has never been a more there we go. Can you hear me now. Never been a more exciting or important time for Public Diplomacy and communications and how the United States is communicating policy and values in every corner of the world. In his media environment, and by the intent behind it to make sure we can accelerate and deliver on what we are doing, previously with ip and effectively communicate for the United States around the world. We know the communication landscape is fast decelerating, changing a new platform popping up. Tech is driving a lot of change when it comes to communication. There is a are, ai, the acd report in 2017 whether Public Diplomacy can survive the internet with a good indication of where things are going and coming fast. We know business and media and culture and entertainment and government are colliding. They dont sit in separate worlds anymore. They are integrated. We need to communicate in that environment where things we do from a government perspective impact culture and vice versa. We know that the Foreign Policy issues we are dealing with on any given day are most if not all multiregional and multinational in nature. We have to look at things through a global lens to communicate effectively and think about the audiences we are trying to reach so in that type of environment our focus is to bring together the best of both worlds from Public Affairs, the strength both of them had to accelerate and enhance the ability of the United States to compete in the world today. It wasnt an internal driven thing but an external driven thing. We have to compete and win and lead and be effective and successful in the world today and being able to do that meant integrating the strength and best of both worlds meaning communicating to the us and foreign audiences so the domestic focus and foreign focus, how to think about both of those and also communicating both policy and values so there is foreignpolicy piece that was very focused on communicating. There is some rich storytelling and value driven communication for international audiences. How do we think about both of those in communicating america to the world and talk about values that make america unique and longstanding history, rule of law, religious freedom, individual liberty, things like that . We know this wasnt the first time that a merger was explored or thought about. The a cpd together recommendations a number of years ago. We had conversations with alumni from the state department within and without who previously explored iterations of the merger to inform our thinking and the difference this time is the external world. There is an urgency to the ability, the need for the United States to communicate effectively and i wanted to deliver on that. We had tremendous support and leadership from secretary mike pompeo who from day one made sure to empower the state Department Team to make changes and do our jobs most effectively and we knew we had that support going into this and we talk about how we accomplish the merger. So our areas of focus bringing together the best of both worlds were first and foremost integration. I use that word a lot. But bringing together the best of both worlds, strength from storytelling and communicating values and understanding foreign audiences and working with the post to understand audiences on the ground, culture and language and narrative on the ground and bring that before storytelling and Public Affairs breaks from strategic munication communicating policy, realtime environment, thinking of both of those together. We placed a large emphasis on data and insight and research and analytics. One of the tremendous Opportunities Technology provided us, Digital Communication provided us is able to measure and in some cases in real time how effectively or quickly we are communicating on any given issue in terms of longterm Audience Research on however time we make an impact which weve explored for a number of years so we placed a big emphasis on how we are putting data and insights at the core of communicating, to measure at the back end and inform when we are designing a strategy and communications and message how we are communicating so we are informing at the beginning, measuring along the way and improving in real time as close to real time as possible. Speed was a focus of hours. The news cycle is moving instantaneously. How are we working together to deliver on that to get the message out, before some counter narratives. And effective and fast, for longterm communications and values we are communicating over time. And future proofing of the bureau, and 2018 when we started the 2019, we wanted to set ourselves up for success, 5 or 10 years down the line and that means having written into our structure and the way we work a focus on new platforms and new technology, best practices not only on technology but in present munication and relationship building, how are we future proofing Global Public affairs the we are constantly improving and changing and evolving as fast as or ahead of the communication landscape in the world today. That was the focus, a really great strength in doing that over the course of the last few years as we wanted to make sure that was part of the culture in the merger. Very collaborative effort. Nicole will talk about the way we made this happen. It was a large exercise in collaboration. An opportunity to work with folks all across the department with the a cbt and other stakeholders as well. I will turn it over to nicole to explain. Im happy to be here and talk to you about how we put this together. Michelle has laid out the vision behind the creation of the Global Public affairs commission. Let me talk to you about how. Last year we pulled together a working group that michelle mentions with representatives from across the department. We included ip, we made sure to have colleagues from big hr at the department to make sure we are considering all of the hr potential issues. Colleagues from our Budget Office so we were thinking what budget might look like and senior pd professionals to get the benefit of their experience. So that we could get the benefit of their experience and incorporate their thoughts in this. We gave the team a basic framework and leaned on them to put a plan together so let me lay out what the framework consisted of. First, they were to focus on Strategic Communications, that was the purpose of the new bureau and merger and also to look at the capabilities and think about where if it didnt fit into a Strategic Communications bureau where might they be houston the state department . The merger was to be budget neutral. We were not asking additional funding for this. We were trying to future proof this has michelle mentions. We wanted to build a structure that would last into the future that wasnt based on personalities. A structure that would really last in the future and we wanted to make the best use of all our employees, skills and abilities, to make sure they were in places to utilize their talent. They put a plan together. And developed it. We looked at it and continued to consult throughout the department. We tried to engage legal colleagues to make sure we were thinking how to communicate domestic and foreign audiences. We continue to engage with the budget and Human Resources to make sure we were thinking about all those issues and that we had all the details right. The devil is in the details. Thats the hard part. We did the initial briefs to the hill and the employee unions to see what their concerns might be, to incorporate any feedback they gave us. We started working on implementation. We started the hard work of implementing the changes and through implementation, we set up a working group to elicit broad participation from the workforce. We wanted to make sure folks had the opportunity to have their voices heard, taking into consideration their thoughts moving forward with implementation. We prioritize regular communication, talking about the process and what was going to happen. We took input from the field, from regional bureaus. We send out a survey to Public Diplomacy professionals to see how they wanted to partner with the new bureau and what they valued most from the old in pa and think about what we wanted to continue in the new bureau. The emphasis during that period was on communication and continues to be on communication. We have been functional for 3 months, we are fairly new. We are focusing on communication within the bureau. And at posts around the girl, understand what a partner we can be for communicating with American Values and Foreign Policy priorities. We recognize the posts are best equipped to communicate the bilateral relationship but we have a distinct advantage in communicating the key Foreign Policy priority and American Values. That is where the comparative advantage is. We will continue to engage the ongoing planning and continue to engage with others as well. This engagement is part of spreading the word, we hope to continue working with a cpd and see how we may continue to improve our communications at the state department. One of the things nicole touched on quickly before we turn it over to questions continuing to engage and improve, one thing we talked about with team members in this process is what our values are, it has changed. We know the world outside us has changed quickly. We have tried to put that at the center of how we are communicating which is change is constant and consistent and required if we are going to be effective at what we do. We are trying to ingrain that in our culture and know that we didnt solve everything, it is not a static thing. Our team is to keep evolving in learning and changing of the bureau has to keep evolving of learning and changing to deliver our objective to communicate on behalf of the United States. We made it clear when working with hr at the department. There will continue to be changes we need to make to make the bureau as effective as it could be. Thank you both for coming today with incredible news and descriptions of what you have done. Congratulations on changing a major piece of a strongly ingrained bureaucracy. You have done it with great competence so that is awesome. What we are going to do is take questions from the audience about the gpa bureau. I want to start with a softball and how i was thinking about it, the creation of the gpa has perhaps elevated pd function to a place where it has more respect in the state department. I was a young officer back in the day. The pd function was seen as lesser and now you have been able to create status and career focus that didnt exist before. We hope that to be true in the Energy Around this and the impact that it has makes that true. We want to tie in storytelling and the way we communicate values to policy priorities, thing that the center of the conversation while still communicating longterm across the world. And in that time from the time i joined until now in which pd has been elevated overall is seen as central to not only communicating values but achieving and accomplishing policy objectives has become more apparent to folks inside and outside the pd world and the same is true in the private sector. Marketing at a private sector business how a business gets its work done and the thing that is true for pd is central to the state department diplomacy. I was thinking of someone who said all diplomacy is Public Diplomacy which is increasingly true. Everything is transparent now. Everything is part of the narrative and conversation so i hope and think pd has been elevated through this and hopefully we contributed to that. Career Foreign Service Public Diplomacy, the state department nomenclature is odd. I am excited about this. I think it has elevated Public Diplomacy to your point. And placed us at the table in this policy conversation so the messaging component and how we talk about American Values is core to when we are looking at policy limitation. Who wants to be brave from the audience . Lets go to the front here, brave woman in the front. Thank you. Can you say who you are . Absolutely. My name is greta morris and i am a retired Public Diplomacy Foreign Service officer and congratulations to both of you and everyone involved in this incredible process that i have been involved in a small way. It has been an exciting process. I want to ask about the bureau of Global Public affairs. We have been talking Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy, the sign says nextgeneration Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy. It seems the Public Diplomacy part has gotten lost. I wonder how you are thinking of Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy. There used to be distinct in the Public Affairs was what we did domestically, Public Diplomacy was what we di