Driving Strategic Communications How you communicate changes matters at least as much as the changes that are made. We work with organizations to clarify fundamental messages and tailor a communication plan for the various targeted audiences.

With decisions and changes taking place everyday at all levels of the organization, members and teams need to be able to maintain a high level of coordination and convergence between their activities so as to support the overall mission and objectives of the business and present a consistent face to the external environment. Communication naturally plays an important role in allowing such level of coordination and convergence. One thing we have learned in our work with over a hundreds of organizations is that how you communicate decisions and change matters at least as much as the decisions and change itselves. Whether the change in question is a new strategic direction, a new design, the acquisition of another organization, a new leadership team, or another type of change, we work with our clients to clarify the fundamental messages and tailor a communication plan for the various targeted audiences.

Example. A combination of low engagement scores and highly public customer relationship management issues prompted the COO of a healthcare organization to task his new Head of Communications to diagnose the current state of the Communication function and come up with concrete solutions to implement in the short and long-term. We conducted interviews with 35 key business stakeholders and ran a wider reaching survey to better understand the issues at hand and surface suggestions for better communication practices. We fed back the interview data at a 2-day offsite with the Communications Management Team and engaged them through several rounds of action planning which resulted in a 3-month action plan to redesign some aspects of their unit and introduce new communication practices (e.g., personal network management) and deliverables (e.g., business unit-specific blogs and portals).