Agile public relations planning: The Reflective Communication Scrum

•Today, organizations live in a public arena of ongoing constructions of meanings.•To cope with this arena, public relations planning needs to be agile and adaptive.•Existing public relations planning methods see change as an obstacle for delivering predefined results.•This urges for a view of communication as a multi-way diachronic process of ongoing meaning constructions.•Scrum is a strong instrument to become a reflective practitioner, able to adapt to change.

In this paper a new, agile, method will be introduced for public relations planning. Existing planning methods all suggest that research and analysis should be the first phase, followed by strategy, smart goals and a detailed action plan, and ending with an evaluation of the results. These models provide an undesirable illusion of control. That is why this approach is no longer suitable in a digitalized society in which organizations must function in a public arena of ongoing constructions of meanings done by (self-invented) stakeholders. Consequently, the context of modern public relations is much more complex than the rusted notion of two-way communication with relevant publics implicates. That is why preference should be given to the view that communication is not so much communication between two or more actors but is a multi-way diachronic process of ongoing constructions of meanings in which one cannot foresee who is – or will be – involved, in what way, and what the results will be. To be successful, a more flexible planning method is needed in which change is a defining part during the process. Scrum is such a method. To make it applicable in public relations, this agile method, well-known in IT, needed to be expanded by supplementing theory on communication, change and reflectivity, and by enrichment of the common notion of evaluation.

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