Organisational clarity is a form of project risk reduction
A communications project is an expensive way to discover that your organisation doesn't agree on what it does, who its audiences are or what it wants to achieve.
I've recently been involved in discovery and stakeholder engagement for two very different communications projects. One involved a large international organisation with substantial resources and commercial desire. The other was on behalf of a much smaller organisation with a more socially-focused remit.
The smaller organisation knew exactly what it did, who it served and what needed improving. The larger organisation had ambitious comms aspirations but lacked clarity on the problems the project was supposed to solve.
It might seem obvious that a small organisation would have more clarity about its mission than a large organisation but the difference wasn't simply one of complexity. It was organisational self-knowledge. A lack of a shared internal vision that implicates cost, risk and the likelihood of success.
Stakeholder engagement versus leadership
The purpose of discovery and stakeholder engagement is often to establish what a project needs to achieve and how best to deliver it. So it’s not wrong to engage someone to help work through these problems. Stakeholder engagement can identify conflicting priorities, surface the consequences of specific decisions and help people reach agreement. It might confirm the original brief, challenge assumptions or expose problems nobody had previously recognised.
But a communications programme isn’t the right approach to determining fundamental business decisions; although it might be a useful tool for bringing an organisation with you once you have identified the next steps. Deciding which markets to pursue, which customers to prioritise or how services should operate is ultimately a leadership responsibility. When those strategic pillars haven’t been defined in a way that makes sense to the whole organisation their absence migrates into communications projects. The holes become disagreements about audiences, priority journeys, content, form, function and, crucially, how to deliver commercial or social impact.
Diagnose the problem before briefing the solution
In the larger project, the organisation's ambition was to strengthen its market position and win more business. It knew its website wasn't fit for purpose and assumed that the solution to many of its problems was a new one.
Subsequent conversations with teams across the business painted a rather different picture from the one presented in the brief and by those responsible for the project.
Some operational teams identified valuable customer groups that didn't fit neatly with centrally defined commercial priorities. Services that appeared consistent through the windows of HQ worked very differently in places hundreds of miles apart from each other.
Teams described problems with market recognition, enquiries, handovers and internal processes that no communications project can independently resolve. No one was wrong. In a complex organisation different perspectives are inevitable and can be entirely legitimate but the project had been prescribed as a treatment before underlying ailments had been diagnosed.
In contrast, the smaller organisation had a clear understanding of its purpose, audiences and services; which in many ways were significantly more complicated to deliver than those of the larger organisation.
Perhaps more importantly, its people understood one another. Teams knew how their work related to their colleagues' responsibilities and their accounts of what the organisation needed were remarkably consistent.
Discovery largely confirmed what I'd been told during procurement and onboarding. There were still details to resolve but few fundamental surprises. Stakeholder engagement certainly didn't eliminate the challenges of project design or implementation but it did do something more valuable. It removed lot of uncertainty before the work began. Because organisational clarity had already been established requirements could be agreed quickly. Decisions had a clear rationale. There was little risk of discovering halfway through the work that different parts of the organisation had been hoping for different outcomes.
If you don’t understand the problem, make understanding it the brief
I'm not arguing that every project needs an elaborate discovery exercise in order to reduce risk. In fact, to me, these experiences suggest almost the opposite.
When an organisation understands itself and its requirements, stakeholder engagement can be short, focused and reassuringly uneventful. When it doesn't, discovery may reveal that there is more work to do before meaningful decisions can be made.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that organisational clarity is a form of project risk reduction. It doesn't necessarily arise from size, budget or commercial sophistication. It comes from doing the work of understanding how the organisation operates, what matters and what needs to change.
Before commissioning a new comms project, make sure you're briefing a solution to a problem you understand, rather than hoping the project will somehow work it out for you. And if you don’t understand the problem, make that lack of understanding the brief.
