“Communicate on the
same wavelength”

How important were communication and dialogue for companies 40 years ago?

When I joined KWS in 1986, there was no communications department at the company. The Executive Board did the communications work itself in cooperation with a small agency from Hamburg. The main focus of that was on corporate policy issues and the annual financial statements with the Annual Report. At that time, no one was interested in plant breeding and genetic engineering.

What changed that?

KWS’ first field trials with genetically modified sugarbeet in Germany starting in 1993 – the first trials of this kind with agricultural crops outside the greenhouse. From then on, the discussion about green genetic engineering placed great demands on communications, and still does. However, organizing visits, for example as part of the local EXPO project at KWS in 2000, the visit of Chancellor Kohl and numerous federal and state ministers, and in 2006 organizing the 150th anniversary celebration with more than 1,500 KWS employees from Germany and abroad, were also exciting and challenging projects.

What became the guiding principle of dialogue and communication?

Bringing people and issues together and also being able to deal with conflicts. Reaching out to critics and actively engaging in dialogue with them, breaking down communication barriers and not being condescending to people – KWS had pledged a lasting commitment to those aims. That’s why Andreas Büchting went alone to the campfire of the demonstrators occupying the fields in the evening to discuss green genetic engineering with them. Getting stakeholders on board and explaining why you are doing something was a new approach in communication.

Innovations and new technologies drive growth and are thus essential for commercial success. Some of the public tend to view technologies with skepticism. In the 1990s, KWS entered an extremely difficult field from a communications perspective with the first applications of genetic engineering methods. What role did communication play? And what role does it play today in the complex debate about genome editing?

It’s likely that more than 99 percent of the population is hardly able to understand the technical background to genetic engineering methods and genome editing. It’s certainly possible to increase some people’s background knowledge with objective explanations, but in my view the decisive factor is the extent to which a company (and an industry) is trusted to handle the new technologies responsibly. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Genetic Engineering in Plant Breeding Advisory Board/Forum initiated by Andreas Büchting, in which experts from various disciplines were represented, opened up new perspectives for us at KWS. In the discussions in this body, the technology was examined not only from a biological, but also from an ethical, agricultural, theological (keyword: preservation of creation), ecological and social science standpoint. That enabled us to communicate the new technologies with a holistic view of them. As a result, KWS won a high level of credibility, which was unfortunately not the case with our competitors such as Monsanto and the like – to the detriment of the entire industry.

What sets KWS apart from the competition in terms of communication?

Thanks to our company’s character as a family business and our independence, we can communicate with our customers on the same wavelength, on the foundation of similar values. We know what worries our customers have, offer solutions, but accept that farmers make the final decision because they know best what’s good for their farm. That allows us to convey greater credibility than companies with an anonymous ownership structure and a management that often thinks and acts short term.