Continuity

As I have gotten older one thing I have come to appreciate in so many aspects of my day to day activities is continuity. I like it when one thing flows to the next in a fairly smooth, logical manner. It could be in the form of a well written article characterized by the seamless transition of ideas from one paragraph to the next. It could be in the form of a comprehensive communication plan in which the tactics utilized complement each other as they advance a client or organization toward a specific goal or result. On a much broader scale, it could be in the form of life itself when one generation follows another. Ideally, the evolution within these and other examples represents ongoing improvement as opposed to negative decline. In the literal sense, a downward slide may represent continuity, but it is not the kind any one wants.

Without question, the kind of positive continuity we desire is not easy to come by. It requires focus, thought, consistency and vision. Successful communication efforts are not the result of wild ad libs. They are drawn from either previous strategies that were successful or largely from variations of those same successful strategies. A case-in-point can be seen in the way many of us commute to work. Often we take the same roads each day. But if one day we are hit with an unexpected traffic tie-up, then we incorporate a variation of that normal route. The result is not only a successful journey but positive expansion of a previously-identified successful strategy. This is a form of continuity in that we are building on what has come or been done before us.

One of the challenges our country currently faces stems from an innate lack of continuity. Driven by its own vision, the Clinton administration, for example, had a number of economic policies that it incorporated. When the Bush administration took over, it had its own vision of economics. It quickly replaced the vision of the previous administration with its own, thus dramatically altering the economic direction of our country. In 2009, the Obama administration took over and, with it, began implementing its own vision of what the country's economics policy should be. The result was a series of dramatic changes with little attempt to build on the strategies of the past. Instead of continuity, we had - and still seem to be experiencing - a lurching from one vision to another. In the long run, it makes for questionable economic policy and it certainly makes efforts to communicate it all the more difficult.