Internal Communications Should Shape Decisions, Not Just Explain Them

Credit: Rich Baker

Internal Communications Should Shape Decisions, Not Just Explain Them

Note: I first wrote a version of this piece earlier this year. Revisiting it recently made me realise the argument deserved tightening. What follows is a clearer articulation of the same idea.

There is a moment in organisational life that anyone working in internal communications will recognise.

It usually happens late in the process.

The decision has been made. The structure is set. The trade-offs have already been absorbed somewhere upstream.

And then someone asks:

“Can we sense-check how this will land?”

By that point, the most important moment has already passed. Because how something will land is not just a communication question. It is a design question.

If a decision creates confusion, overload, or tension once it reaches people, the issue is rarely the wording of the message. It is the assumptions built into the decision itself.

Thinking about communication only after the decision is made is often an attempt to manage the consequences of something that should have been examined earlier. The questions employees ask are rarely about the words anyway. They are about the reality underneath them.

What does this mean for my day? What just became easier? What just became harder? What is being asked of me now? Does the organisation see the same reality I am living in?

Those are not communication questions. They are experience questions.

And they matter for leaders, not just communicators. Decisions that make perfect sense in a meeting room can feel very different once they reach the people expected to carry them.

Internal communications sits unusually close to that point where organisational intent meets lived experience. It hears the questions that never make it into the formal FAQ.

It notices when a sentence is technically accurate but emotionally off.BIt sees when a message is having to work unusually hard to reassure people about something that has not been fully thought through.

Over time that proximity produces something valuable: pattern recognition.

You start to notice when the same concerns surface again and again, just phrased differently. When communication is being asked to carry too much emotional weight. When a decision creates friction not because it was badly communicated, but because it is harder to live with than it appeared when it was first discussed.

That is why internal communications should not just appear at the end to help explain a finished decision.

At its best, it helps organisations understand how a decision will actually be experienced before it is finalised. When that perspective is present early enough, the conversation changes. The question is no longer simply:

“How do we explain this?”

It becomes:

What will this actually ask of people?

Where will the friction show up?

What assumptions are we making about time, capacity, clarity, or trust?

Will this work in practice, or only on paper?

Those are not communication questions. They are leadership questions.

And organisations are usually better served when someone in the room is equipped to ask them.

Of course, internal communications does not look the same in every organisation. In some places the role is primarily about transmitting information – writing messages, managing channels, and helping leaders explain decisions clearly.

But in others the function has evolved.

Because it sits so close to everyday employee experience, it can often see how organisational choices will actually be interpreted and carried once they leave the room. When internal communications operates at that level, its value is not just in explaining decisions well. It helps organisations make better ones.

That perspective rarely arrives as a neat recommendation. More often it arrives as a question.

Who is going to carry this change?

What does this assume about people’s time or capacity?

Where will the pressure appear once this moves from slide deck to real life?

They are operational questions about how work will actually function. And organisations benefit when someone in the room is paying attention to them.

Because language has limits. Communication can clarify a difficult decision.

It can humanise it.

It can add context.

But it cannot rescue a bad one.

As one senior leader I recently worked with told me:

“You can’t communicate your way out of every decision.”

If the underlying reality is muddled, contradictory, or overloaded, no amount of careful wording will remove the strain. People can understand a decision perfectly and still feel worn down by it.

This is why I have never found the phrase “a seat at the table” especially helpful.

Influence in organisations is rarely granted because a function simply asks for it. It is earned through the perspective that function brings to decisions. Writing clearly is not enough.

The real value appears when communicators help leaders see how decisions will actually play out once they leave the room.

Because by the time internal communications is asked to sense-check how something will land, much of the experience has already been created. The more useful question comes earlier.

Not “Can we explain this well?”

But:

“Have we designed this well enough to be explained honestly?”

That, to me, is where internal communications is at its most valuable.

Not as the team that appears at the end to make things sound better. But as a function that helps organisations make better, more human, more workable decisions in the first place.