Communications Philosophy

It’s communications philosophy time.

When explaining Communications (Comms), most people will go right to the sub departments or strategies/tactics where the outcome of Comms work is most visible: PR, Content, Thought Leadership, Reputation Management, Customer Experience, Internal Comms, Storytelling / Messaging, Branding, etc.

The problem with that is, unless you deeply understand those functions, you are not any closer to understanding what Comms actually is and its role within an organization.

Now I would – and often do – go off on the philosophical aspect of communication. Humans exist and continue to live on as a species specifically because of our ability to communicate in many different ways. As complex social creatures, communication is arguably the root of the human condition.

For the purposes of understanding Comms in a business setting, we can back off the philosophy a bit and say it’s a foundational function, similar to needing a thing to sell and people and processes to operate the selling of that thing. Until the robots take over, if you sell to or employ humans, Comms is not an optional function. It exists where humans are.

What’s insane is that a lot of organizations leave Comms to chance or a hope and a prayer that people are at least good enough at communicating to make something work. The bigger or more complex an organization gets, the more critical it is for Comms to be intentionally designed and operated.

Ok, so Comms is a foundation business function that … does what?

Communication is the exchange and shared understanding of information. It’s behind every decision, every idea that comes to life and every strategy used. If it’s not done intentionally, nothing will be reliably repeatable or predictable.

Here’s another way to think about it in the context of planning or bringing an idea to life at a business: 

We try to operate our thinking and planning in a linear fashion, because that’s clean and easy to mentally digest. Looks kind of like this:

Idea ▶️  Objective ▶️  Strategy ▶️ Tactics ▶️ Results

But without good communication …

💡 An Idea that isn’t communicated is just a dream

🎯 An objective that isn’t communicated will never be achieved 

🧠 A strategy that is not communicated will not be executed (and a strategy that can’t be executed is useless) 

⛔ Tactics and results won’t even exist without communication