Where your best stories lay hidden
A meeting with the editor, a landmark speech for the CEO, refining messages for the Chair ahead of the upcoming AGM. We are often off our feet tackling the communications challenges of today that we rarely find the opportunity to pause to consider whether the story we are telling is the right one.
Sometimes we do get that chance during the planning period, where together with our team and our stakeholders we take the time to reflect. We revisit the challenges facing the business and the outcomes that our internal leaders are asking us to help them solve.
This is an important process as it allows the Communications or External Affairs function to properly consider what the business is seeking to achieve and determine where with limited resources what the priorities need to be. Our function needs to be business-led, and to be seen to be business-led in the way we approach our planning.
And that is often where we can make our first mistake. Not because of what we are doing, but because of what we have left out. If we start planning our communications and external affairs agenda without considering the audience, or our external stakeholders’ interests and mindset, our efforts will be muted, and the outcomes flawed.
What if we turn this around? Why not when looking to refine our approach to telling a company’s story, we try starting not with the story the company wants to tell, but instead with its audiences?
This approach to defining and determining a company’s story is not only revealing, but it can be the most interesting, surprising, and rewarding part of the work we do.
When you work as a team to explore what your audience needs, the days are filled with discussions and debates about the perceptions that people (forget the term audience for a moment) have about a company, why they think of a company or its products in a particular way, and what their critical needs are.
The conversation moves from being about ‘me’ to being about ‘you’. It is in of itself an approach that reflects the desire to be honest and genuine in our dealings with people.
It reveals challenges and opportunities to improving an understanding of a company that were often not considered or thought to be irrelevant.
Moving to the surface are themes and threads to a story that may have laid at the bottom of the river, integral to the culture of a company and its narrative. But never told.
