Hobson’s choice

For those unaware of the term Hobson's choice, it is used to imply you have a number of options when there is in fact only one choice.

Thinking of Thomas Hobson, we assume every charity risk register will contain the same identical risk – its reputation. This is because a charity’s ability to achieve its goals are so closely aligned with how it is perceived.  This can either affect its fundraising success, or the credibility with which it delivers its charitable purpose.

The mitigation is of course reputation management, a control that is conventionally seen as part of marketing and which has grown massively since advent of the world wide web and the availability of online material (regardless of whether it is right or wrong).

The discipline of reputation management exists to limit the damage when something goes wrong, and this is usually done in one of two ways: acknowledging the failure head-on and dealing honestly with the consequences, regardless of the pain, or covering it up in an attempt to ‘manage the risk’ and protect the valuable reputation.

The greatest scandals in the public sphere have all arise from the latter - a web of half truths in to which the organisation has become ever more entangled. That looks like the story and Mr Bates vs the Post Office, and beyond that, so many medical and other scandals.

And if you take it on the chin, it doesn’t always turn out for the worst. An old apocryphal story tells of a well known national charity that was swindled into investing £2m into some bonds that turned out to be fraudulent. Once they knew, they confessed to their public and apologised, but to their great surprise received twice as much back from their donors as they had lost, entirely out of sympathy, and then the police recovered the original £2m investment too.

So although reputation is one of a charity’s most valuable assets, it will never be as valuable as a charity’s integrity. Hobson’s choice was one between two false alternatives: there was only one course to follow; there was never a choice.