Comms Superpower: Root Cause Analysis

You know what a Comms superpower is?

Root cause analysis. I don’t mean like a technical one like the engineering team puts together after an incident, I mean like getting to the actual core of a business problem. 

Comms people are great at that. And here’s why:

As a Communications professional, 1- you have to understand language. 2-You have to understand people and 3- you have to understand the landscape or environment you’re working in. Then, we connect all those dots together, which makes us pretty primed to solve any sort of issue that people are having.

We’re also particularly good at solving problems that people don’t even really know how to talk about yet. Some of the craziest things I hear a lot of times in business are these massive, ambiguous things that execs say like ‘oh, our marketing’s not working” or  “We just need employees to be more productive.”

 Okay, well, what does anyone actually mean by that? 

A Comms person is going to hear something like that and say, all right, let me do some investigative sleuthing here on what this person actually means or what actually is going on. And it’s never some singular, tactical fix. It’s always some human behavior, team dynamics, or process/systems misalignment issue that’s going on. It’s always fixable, but it’s not like “oh well just send an internal newsletter and it’ll clear itself up.” (It’s never that.) 

Also, Comms people are experts in language. A big hurdle when it comes to problem solving is knowing how to talk about them. Being able to accurately describe a problem, articulate the various connection points within an issue, and clearly describe a desired end-state are difficult skills to master. They require exceptional use of language and message delivery, and the ability to prioritize information to the various people involved.

Seasoned Comms people do this naturally. It’s how we are trained to approach things.