Strategic Internal Communication
Internal communication becomes strategic when it helps an organisation make better decisions and achieve better outcomes — not simply when the communications plan becomes bigger.
For more than 25 years I’ve worked in and around internal communication, leadership and organisational change across organisations including Virgin Trains, National Grid, Carlsberg, Jaguar Land Rover, Amazon and Deloitte.
Different organisations create different communication problems. But one pattern has followed me through most of them: the request for communication is often not the same thing as the problem that needs solving.
Someone asks for a campaign. A leader wants to raise awareness. A change programme needs engagement. A team wants another channel.
Sometimes those are exactly the right answers.
Sometimes they aren’t.
Start with the outcome
My starting point is simple:
What are we actually trying to make happen?
That means separating the organisational outcome from the contribution communication can realistically make to it.
If a business wants people to adopt a new process, for example, communication cannot deliver adoption on its own. The process has to work. Leaders have to behave consistently. People need the capability and opportunity to use it.
Communication may help people understand why the change matters, know what is expected of them, make sense of uncertainty, ask questions or feel confident enough to act.
Those are meaningful outcomes.
“Send three emails and hold a town hall” is activity.
The distinction sounds obvious. In practice, it changes almost everything.
Diagnose before you communicate
One of the most useful things an experienced communicator can sometimes do is question the brief.
Is this genuinely an information problem?
Or is it a leadership problem, a process problem, a trust problem, an incentive problem, a capability problem — or some combination of them?
The answer matters because communication can easily become a substitute for fixing the underlying issue.
A beautifully written message cannot compensate for a poor decision.
A campaign cannot create trust that leadership behaviour continually undermines.
And another channel rarely solves a problem created by too many channels.
Strategic internal communication therefore starts with diagnosis rather than production.
Communication should shape decisions, not simply explain them
Internal communicators are often brought into a conversation after the important decisions have already been made.
The role then becomes translating, packaging and distributing those decisions.
Sometimes that is necessary.
But the greater value often comes earlier.
Communicators see organisations from an unusual position. They hear what leaders intend to say and what employees actually hear. They see where strategy meets operational reality. They notice contradictions, patterns and unintended consequences that can be difficult to see from within a single function.
Used well, that perspective can improve the decision itself.
That is why I think the strategic role of internal communication is increasingly about sense-making, judgement and influence, not simply content production.
Be proportionate
Not every problem needs a campaign.
One of the easiest traps in communication planning is to assume that visible activity demonstrates strategic importance.
It usually demonstrates activity.
Sometimes a complicated intervention is justified. Sometimes the right answer is a conversation between a manager and their team. Sometimes three channels really will do.
And occasionally, despite everything above, the answer genuinely is:
send the email.
Strategic communication includes knowing the difference.
What AI changes
Generative AI makes producing competent communication dramatically easier.
That is useful. But it also shifts the interesting question.
If producing the first draft, presentation or campaign content is no longer the difficult part of the job, where does the value of an experienced communicator move?
Increasingly, I think it moves towards judgement.
Understanding the organisation. Framing the problem. Recognising what is missing. Challenging assumptions. Knowing which context matters. Deciding when communication can help and when something else needs to change first.
These questions are now part of my independent research into professional judgement and generative AI.
I’m particularly interested in what experienced professionals notice, how that judgement develops, and what happens when AI begins to perform some of the work through which people traditionally acquired experience.
Related thinking
My writing explores these questions across internal communication, leadership, organisational change and AI.
Some useful places to start:
I tried to teach AI what experience had taught me — professional judgement, expertise and how experience develops.
Don’t Let the Robots Write Alone — what humans contribute when AI can already produce competent communication.
The Thinking Leader: Metacognition in the Age of AI — why understanding our own thinking becomes more important when machines participate in it.
What AI Is Teaching Us About Organisations — what patterns of AI adoption reveal about culture, leadership and how organisations learn.
Speaking, research and advisory work
I’m open to selected speaking engagements, research collaborations and advisory work around strategic internal communication, organisational change, leadership, professional judgement and AI.
If you have something worth exploring, please get in touch.