PR, Static Wine and Dynamic Wineskins

So The Good Book says you don’t put old wine in new wineskins. You put the old wine in the old wineskin, and the new wine in the new wineskin. The principle: new things need new containers.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to PR, which I’ve been writing about this week. Traditional PR is old wine in an old wineskin. That’s fine – it still works for certain contexts. But trying to do new PR with old PR thinking is putting new wine in an old wineskin. It will burst.

The container has to match the content.

This applies beyond PR. Any time you’re trying to do something genuinely new – a new culture, a new way of working, a new community – you can’t just pour it into the old structures and expect it to hold.

New wine needs new wineskins. New ideas need new structures. New communities need new norms.

The question isn’t just ‘what’s the idea?’. It’s ‘what kind of container does this idea need to thrive in?’