Issues management is a powerful strategic planning tool, but it has been slow to attract the widespread attention it deserves (Gaunt and Ollenburger 1995). Much of its invisibility can be attributed to the invisibility of successful uses of issues management techniques. Proper use of issue management requires identification of issues, how they evolve, and responding to the issues in an appropriate manner.

What was originally defined as a method for businesses to respond to their critics, it was later expanded to encompass the new-found focus on the policy process:

Issues management is the organized activity of identifying emerging trends, concerns, or issues likely to affect an organization in the next few years and developing a wider and more positive range of organizational responses toward that future. Business and industry, in adopting issues management, seek to formulate creative alternatives to constraints, regulations, or confrontation. Often in the past, the awareness ofa trend, a new development, or the possibility of new constraints came too late to frame anything but a reactive response (Coates, Coates, Jarratt, and Heinz 1986)

Despite the confusion, issues management is not the same as crisis management or risk communication. Issues management is “proactive in that it tries to identify issues and influence decisions regarding them before they have a detrimental effect on a corporation” (Gaunt and Ollenburger 1995). Crisis management, in contrast, is mainly reactive in dealing with issues/crisis after they become public knowledge.