Helping people navigate change using communications

The goal of change communication is to ultimately, help people understand what’s happening, make sense of what it means for them and navigate what comes next.

More information doesn’t automatically create more understanding

There’s a deeply ingrained idea in change that if people don’t understand something, we simply need to give them more information. So we explain the change again, and again, and then we put it into a different format, because surely an infographic will do the trick. However, information and understanding are not the same thing.

Sometimes people genuinely do need to be told what is happening. If a decision has been made, clarity matters. People need to know what is changing, why it is changing and what they need to do - but that’s only one part of the job.

Sometimes we know where we need to go but haven’t worked out exactly how we’ll get there. Sometimes decisions are still being made or the people closest to the work have information that leaders and project teams don’t have. In those situations, pretending we have all the answers only creates suspicion.

Be clear about what you know… and what you don't

One of the most useful things we can do in uncertain change is to get comfortable saying, “We don’t know yet.” As a communication strategy, we can say something like: Here’s what we know today ,or here’s what we’re still working through. Here’s what might change or here’s when we expect to know more. Plus, here’s how we’ll keep you updated.

That kind of communication doesn’t magically remove uncertainty, but it’s a heck of a lot better at giving people something to work with. Not to mention it also helps manage expectations, and expectation management is becoming one of the most important parts of change communication. When everything around us is changing constantly, promising certainty we don’t have is a pretty good way to lose credibility.

People are going to talk anyway

Unfortunately, you don’t control the conversation. Sure, you can control what you put out and you can create clear messages, provide useful information and give leaders the tools they need to communicate consistently. However, once that information lands, people will interpret it the way they see fit. They’ll talk to their colleagues, compare notes, ask questions, speculate,  fill in the gaps and, sometimes they’ll get it spectacularly wrong. That doesn’t mean the answer is to shut the conversation down though, as the conversation itself can actually be useful.

If people are saying, “I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” that’s useful. If they’re asking, “What does this mean for my role?” that’s useful. If everyone seems to have the same concern, that’s very useful. Those conversations are telling you something and giving you a window into how people are experiencing the change - which is ultimately data you can use.

Your audience is probably thinking about the risk before the reward

Another mistake we make is jumping straight into the benefits with headlines like: “This is an exciting opportunity”, “This will make things easier”, “This will create a better employee experience” or  “This will set us up for the future.”

Great… but while you’re talking about the future, your audience might be thinking: What does this mean for my job? Will I have to learn something new? What happens to my team? What am I going to lose? What aren’t they telling me?

They can see when a change is being packaged up as sunshine and lollipops while everyone around them is quietly wondering what the catch is. So, do the opposite and address the elephant in the room. If you know people are worried about something, talk about it. If there are difficult aspects of the change, acknowledge them. If there are things you genuinely don’t know yet, say so.

You don’t have to make people more anxious, but you need to demonstrate that you understand why they might already be anxious.

Stop pretending the messy middle doesn't exist

We’re often pretty good at communicating the beginning and the end of change with things like “Here’s what we’re doing” and “Here’s what success will look like”, but what about the messy middle? Not so much, and that’s the bit people actually have to live through.

The new system doesn’t work quite as expected, or a process needs to change. Someone needs more training, a decision gets revisited, a team is frustrated, a leader doesn’t have the answer or people take longer than expected to adapt.

So if your communication only talks about the shiny future, you create a credibility gap between the story you’re telling and the experience people are having. Good change communication makes room for the messy middle and prepares people for the fact that there will be bumps. It tells them what support is available and acknowledges that not everything will go according to plan. Importantly, it gives people permission to say when something isn’t working.

Communication needs to be involved before the change is baked

There’s another shift we need to make if we want change communication to have more impact, which is that we need to get involved earlier. Far too often, communication is treated as the final step, which at that point, communication becomes an exercise in explaining decisions that have already been made.

So, what if communicators were involved before the change was designed? What if we were asking: How are people likely to respond to this? Where will the uncertainty be? What are they likely to worry about? What will they need to understand before they can adopt this? What could we change about the design itself to make this easier for people?

AI makes this even more important

Plus, AI can already produce an enormous amount of communication content. It can draft your email, write your FAQ, create your talking points, summarise your consultation feedback and build your first version of a communication plan.

So if our value as communicators is primarily producing those things, we have a problem. The solve? We have to move further upstream and into the human side of change. Our value is increasingly in our judgement, our ability to read a room, our understanding of organisational culture, our relationships with leaders and employees, our ability to ask the awkward question, our ability to spot when something isn’t going to land, and our ability to listen to what people are saying and understand what they actually mean.

AI can help us produce the artefact, but it can’t take responsibility for whether the change actually lands.