Understanding Communications Performance

What determines performance? What determines whether organizational communications functions can achieve the results leaders and communicators need?

This site examines the conditions that shape communications performance — what enables it, what constrains it, and what organizations can realistically influence.

In most organizations, the success of a wide range of communication activities matters. However, we’re facing more challenges than ever in achieving results. Standard, conventional approaches are struggling to gain traction. It is rarely as simple as choosing a better message, channel or tactic, or just working harder. Good execution, though essential, no longer differentiates.

This site is intended to offer ideas and approaches for leaders and communicators to help figure this out in an era of uncertainty, risk, rapid change and socio-economic stress.

Why are these ideas needed?

Communications performance is affected by much more than the work and efforts of your communications functions and teams. That work is usually excellent, delivered by professionals who understand their practices and specialties very well. But it seems that it is no longer sufficient.

Look at your communications functions: branding, marketing, public affairs and public relations, fund development, internal and member communications, government relations, community engagement, advocacy. They all depend on the quality of your relationships with people, inside the organization as well as outside, and with many other organizations.

The lives of those people and the realities of those organizations have changed dramatically in recent years, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. Not only have their lives changed, but the communications landscape has shifted in some important ways.

The limits of traditional thinking of communications as persuasion are now emerging. Leaders and communicators are now engaged in something different, negotiating a new space that requires additional ideas and perspectives.

What does this site look at?

The material here explores questions such as:

Why do organizations struggle to get the results they need from communications, despite substantial investment and activity?

What organizational, strategic, technological, social and environmental conditions affect communications performance?

What can leaders and communicators influence — and what is largely beyond their control?

How do strategy, brand, marketing, communications, audiences and the wider information environment interact?

What does responsible, effective communication require when attention, trust and meaning are increasingly difficult to sustain?

What will you find here?

The site brings together ideas, frameworks, observations and practical questions about communications performance.