Comms over the years
I began pondering on all that has changed in my now 28 years of working in comms – for better and for worse – and I realised that you could split the timeline into very specific phases. For example for the couple of years from 2001 onwards I describe as the ‘fat years’. As the economic, political and social situations changed so did our landscape and the challenges we communicators have had to rise to. We have had the ‘austerity years’ and the covid years’. What comes next? The Labour years? The AI years?
Other pressures and opportunities entered the fray during these earlier phases – multiple rounds of transformation, centralisation, restructures, cultural changes. Income generation opportunities emerged too, from online ads to selling our services.
My senior in-house time was spent in local government and national NHS and which saw me tackling these first hand. And as a consultant for the past almost nine years I still work with teams grappling with this never ending comms side-wash.
So when I hear people say ‘our comms team isn’t strategic enough’ it does grate a little. There is no way on earth we could have traversed this landscape without us being as strategic as we could be.
Now, I may well have missed things off the visual* because they haven’t been a part of my experiences or knowledge. But that is partly why I wanted to visualise all of this - you know, a picture speaking a 1,000 words and all that.
I’m no designer but I definitely know what I like and how I want something to look. So the lovely people at Alive with Ideas took my unslightly attempt and turned it into a little boster of a visual.
It’s a great reminder and it’s also a storytelling spark. It’s easy to forget what we have done and where we have come from.
A resource to help us
I’m hoping this visual might be a practical resource to help us when we’re talking to our leadership teams, colleagues and customers. So that when the next time someone says “ooh, you should do XYZ”, you can politely point out that you have tried that before, when you did, what happened and in the process explain to them the wider context of the landscape in which we all operate.
Here’s the visual as a PNG file.
Let me know if it’s useful to you
Darren
*Thanks to Alive with Ideas for creating this visual for me
