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I used to be responsible for assuring the communications plans for each risk in the UK's National Risk Register. The risks it catalogues range from the hair-raising (“nuclear miscalculation”), to the familiar (“storms”), to risks you didn't even know you needed to worry about (“major outbreak of African horse sickness”).

This episode explains how government assesses and manages risks and what lessons it holds for communications leaders.

The best advisers are able to disagree with their CEO or Minister and avert bad decisions. Yet somehow they always do so with their reputation enhanced rather than diminished.

They don't just say ‘no’. In fact, they rarely say 'no' at all.

So how do they do it? This episode examines five practical techniques.

Frontier AI may or may not represent a threat to humanity. But there are more immediate risks for corporate affairs directors.

Those include the risk of falling behind on AI adoption, the risk that AI misrepresents your business, and the risk you’re not involved in decisions about how to deploy AI across your organisation.

Those risks are ones I expect most companies to encounter in the next three years. They are also risks corporate affairs directors can do something about.

In this series, I have argued that good communications leadership involves bringing clarity, capability, and confidence.

Yet, there is one other important source of advantage. The best teams do not simply execute the original plan: they look for a better route.

Continuous improvement is about creating a mindset in which everyone is thinking about how the team can do better.

In this third part of my series on the ‘four Cs’ of leadership, we look at how to build team confidence.

How can you create a workplace where people are willing to give discretionary effort and support each other? How can you build the belief to keep going when things get difficult?

This is the second part of my series on communications leadership.

This episode is about 'capability': how to identify what the function must be good at to deliver its strategy, assessing whether it can do those things well today, and closing any gap.

Over the next four weeks, I am sharing my thinking on the fundamentals of communications leadership. What is your job as a communications leader, be it of a small team or a major function?

My 'four Cs' of communications leadership are clarity, capability, confidence, and continuous improvement.

This week: clarity.

Far from having had enough of experts, it seems that we are in thrall to the idea that deep specialist expertise is what’s needed to succeed today.

But I’m starting to wonder: is everyone right? Do we really need more deep expertise, or, in a rapidly changing world, might the ability to operate across multiple domains actually be a good thing?

Should the next generation of communicators be narrowing their scope or broadening it?

When I was in government, we studied the data from thousands of social media posts and found that people tended to watch for only three seconds when content featured a government minister.

So is Andy Burnham rewriting the rules of social media? Should every CEO now front their company’s digital content and spend their Fridays rating pub snacks with their Chief Financial Officer?

Well, no. Here's how to follow the data and avoid the hype around what works on social channels.

COM-B is a behavioural change approach that helps you identify the real barriers preventing your audience from taking action.

It stands for Capability + Opportunity + Motivation = Behaviour.

This episode is about why it matters and how to use it.

There’s a famous parable in Daoist thought. A rock sits in a river with water rushing around it. Which is stronger? The rock or the water? It’s the rock, right? It stays completely unmoved.

Well, no. At least, not in this parable.

The parable is intended to illustrate the Daoist concept of Wu Wei or “action through inaction”. Properly understood, I think it is a massively overlooked approach to achieving change while protecting your resilience.

These are the questions that I hear most often about AI. Listen now to hear my answers.

1. Where should I start with AI?

2. Why do so many AI adoption programmes disappoint?

3. Why is the output I’m getting still so generic?

4. What AI tool should I use?

5. What is an AI agent?

6. How do I persuade sceptical colleagues?

7. What governance really matters?

8. What is GEO and how is it different from SEO?

9. What skills will matter most in five years’ time?

10. What will AI mean for communications jobs?

How does the Government's emergency response committee, COBR, work? What can communications leaders learn from it? And what did I decide was the most important element of crisis response after attending countless meetings?

One of the most superficially attractive arguments in corporate affairs is: “Don’t put your head above the parapet.” For most organisations, it is bad advice.

Keeping your head down does not only reduce attention. It also reduces the relationships, trust and visible backing you can draw on when you need them.

Those who favour this approach miss three important things about how support works.

Who do people support and why? To answer that question we asked people to describe, in their own words, why they supported the companies they admire and what action they would be willing to take on their behalf.

The key drivers of support were straightforward. But the drivers of opposition were different. And there were some other unexpected findings too.

Saturday marks the 250th anniversary of the United States. There will be many essays written about Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. Communications leaders may learn more from Samuel Adams.

I’ve had an interest in Adams since I worked in Washington DC back in 1997. The only half decent beer available at the time bore his name, and every bottle carried the insignia “Brewer. Patriot”. He was both of those. He was also a dangerous, disingenuous and highly-effective propagandist. He fermented hops and fomented revolution.

He saw something that many leaders still miss today. A dispute is not won only by being right. The court of law and the court of public opinion ask different questions.

SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) is a poor starting point for setting communications objectives. It distracts people from asking the most important question of all: why are we communicating in the first place?

So what does a smarter way of approaching communications objectives look like? A technique borrowed from Toyota may form part of the answer.

Why did humans start to communicate?

The obvious answer is: ‘to exchange information’. Yet this may not be why language was so important to our ancestors. And the real reason might tell us something we often forget when communicating today.

Thinking about communication as a social act changes our view on what good communication looks like today.

Can a Japanese secret to long life help you live past 100? Probably not. But it might help you to identify what kind of communications roles are going to give you energy, be worth periods of strain and be a good fit for your skills.

“Germany calling. This is Germany calling.”

Throughout the Second World War those words echoed through the static of Britain’s airwaves. The clipped tones of William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, were broadcast daily from Nazi Germany with the aim of weakening Allied morale.

But in a conflict today, would we spot enemy influence so easily? What do foreign influence operations look like in a world of algorithmic recommendations and AI mediation? And as Europe boosts its defence budgets, should we also be spending more on protecting our information environment?

People are REALLY ANGRY because Gemma Collins appeared in a social media clip for the Department for Education. "Bizarre”, “tone-deaf”, “sickening” and “ridiculous”, said the critics.

Communications teams spend a great deal of time asking what they should say. They spend much less time asking who should say it.

So what does this row reveal about the importance of the messenger? Is it worth working with content creators? And if so, how can you avoid a backlash?

If you’re not measuring communications, you don’t know it’s working. Yet our profession has an evaluation problem: we’re counting the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

So what does good communications evaluation look like?

Why would giving a train passenger a quiz question make them more likely to accept an excess fare? And what can that teach us about how to communicate bad news more effectively?

Procedural justice is the ideas that the process - how decisions are made and how people are treated - is more important to public trust than the actual outcome.

What can a traditional Chinese painting, an Austrian psychologist, and a Roman Emperor teach communications leaders about how to manage personal resilience?

Recognising you have more power to choose your response to events than you might think can be a powerful and liberating insight that boosts personal resilience and performance.

Leaders generally want to communicate inside-to-out. They begin with the messages they want to tell people. Then wonder why nobody seems especially interested.

A narrative is different. It is a carefully structured argument rooted in what your audience cares about. It helps people understand you and the world differently.

Here's how to build one.

At one level it's straightforward. We recently invented a technology that creates language at almost zero cost. We employ people who write for us. Therefore, the new technology will replace those workers.

I have no doubt that AI is going to profoundly change communication roles. But replace us altogether? The more I work with AI the more I doubt this will be the case. At least, not for a while yet.

Here’s why.

Writing created the modern world. But today do we overestimate the importance of writing and overuse it.

It's worth remembering the limits of writing and the extraordinary power of speech.

And it’s worth considering that in a world of abundant text, in-person persuasion may have become more valuable still.

Measles is back. Not because we lack a vaccine, but because we lack immunity to misinformation.

So how should we as communications leaders respond?

We vaccinate against measles because prevention works better than cure. We should be applying the same logic to our information environment.

Pre-bunking measurably improves people’s ability to spot misinformation and reduces their propensity to share it.

Where do Members of Parliament get their news? Which social media, news sites, and podcasts do they consume? And which AI tools do they use? A new report reveals all.

Most communications teams do risk management in ways that suppress candour, reward optimism and miss the things that actually bring a project down.

The pre-mortem takes a different approach. Instead of asking “What could go wrong?”, it asks: “Imagine it is 12 months from today. The project has failed badly. Why?”

This small shift in framing has a big effect on the conversation.

The Harness Distrust strategy doesn’t see a lack of trust as a problem to solve, but a fuel to burn.

For insurgents and challenger brands, tapping into grievance against the status quo is becoming the archetypal communications strategy.

Rather than seeking to win over the establishment, they are promoting their own agenda by railing against it.

Any challenger brand should be thinking about whether they can use it to their advantage. And any legacy brand should be war-gaming how it might be used against them.

Is it the job of a communications professional to ‘persuade’ people, or is it to ‘inform’ people?

In a low-trust environment, where even the appearance of self-interested persuasion can be counterproductive, this has become a false choice.

When trust in politics, the media and business has declined rapidly, the winning strategy may be to be disarmingly, demonstrably and visibly trustworthy. This is the Transparency Playbook.

Co-creating trust is not about convincing people you are right, but about giving them a seat at the table.

The principle is simple. People are more likely to trust something they have helped to create, and they’re less likely to attack something shaped by their participation.

Done well, it creates not just a more informed audience, but advocates who will defend, promote and trust your organisation.

The Borrow Trust strategy.

If you want reach and credibility, then work with those who already have it. Build partnerships with credible voices who share your goals and values and command your audience’s attention and trust.

The same media fragmentation that makes it difficult to cut through with traditional channels, has also created an opening: thousands of micro-communities with trusted messengers.

By partnering with those messengers you can create great content for them, relevant messages for their audience, and increased trust, reach and attention for your brand. And that is our second Winning Strategy.

In this series, I’m looking at five ways organisations are responding to our changed information environment and modernising their communications operations to build trust.

This first episode is the Delivery Playbook.

It is a strategy built on the insight that in a world of abundant content and fragmented attention trust can be built, through local, relevant, and useful experiences.

It is transforming how UK Government is thinking about communicating with a sceptical public.

When you aren’t trusted, even your best decisions won’t cut through.

This episode looks at why trust matters, why it is eroding across government, business and media, and what the evidence tells us about how trust is built.

It also sets up a harder question: how do you build trust when almost every feature of today’s information environment works against you?

This episode looks at five practical AI actions communications leaders should focus on this year: How to understand what AI is saying about you, train an AI model, use AI for dialogue not output, scale AI tools successfully, and prepare for an AI deepfake crisis.

Dario Amodei is the CEO and founder of the AI company Anthropic. When I was in Government Communications we chose Anthropic’s Claude large language model as our AI tool of choice, partly because we felt Anthropic took AI safety and security seriously.

So I was interested to read an essay Dario has just published on confronting AI safety and risks.

And having done so I want to strongly recommend it to you too. It is long, and knowing that people are time poor, I thought it might be helpful to share two short excerpts in full here. I hope they illustrate why I found the full article unsettling, even hair-raising, at times.

In this, the last of my series on how our media and information environment has changed, I look at AI and what it means for the future of communications.

Thanks for listening to Cut Through! please subscribe for free to receive new episodes and support my work.

The central argument of Cut Through! is that our information environment has changed more quickly than our communications practice. To catch up, we need to understand what has changed and why.

In this series I have argued that our information environment has become more: Democratised, Fragmented, Abundant, Corroded, and Concentrated.

Episode 3 looks at a change that was hardly noticed by social media users when it was introduced back in 2010, but which would fundamentally alter how we consume information, perhaps even how we perceive reality.

The central argument of Cut Through! is that our information environment has changed more quickly than our communications practice. To catch up, we need to understand what has changed and why.

Our information environment has become more democratised, fragmented, abundant, corroded and concentrated.

In this episode we look at two product launches from the 2000s - Facebook and the iPhone - and the consequences for communicators today.

Why does communication feel so difficult today?

Our information environment has changed more quickly than our communications practice. To catch up, we need to explore what has changed and why.

Over the next four weeks, Cut Through! explores how communications has changed through the stories of four technological breakthroughs that reshaped our world: Google Search; the iPhone; the Facebook News Feed; and AI.

This is Part 1: The Wizards of Menlo Park

Christmas isn’t Christmas until you’ve listened to at least one version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Here is my humble contribution to the genre…and a cautionary tale for communicators.

In my final months leading UK Government Communications, people often asked me whether Keir Starmer’s communication should be more like Donald Trump’s.

So what are the lessons for government and communicators from how Donald Trump deals with the media and communicates with the American public?

An important skill for any communications leader is presenting ideas with confidence. Yet most of us feel nervous when doing so. Maybe we even have a voice in our head telling us the audience is going to see through us.

In this episode of Cut Through!, I explore what a Spanish chicken farmer who fooled the Nazi High Command can teach us about presenting with confidence and I explain why you should be more confident than you feel.

The number one rule of great communications is: know your audience. Yet most communicators still design messages for how they wish people thought, not how they actually do.

Decades of behavioural science research reveal that most human decisions are fast, emotional and unconscious - so why are so many communications campaigns still written for the slow, logical brain?

Here are ten behavioural science principles every communicator should know.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings. Being "emotional" can even be a term of abuse, but the truth is human beings do not make decisions by weighing up the pros and cons of each option. We rely on mental shortcuts known as heuristics which let us make decisions quickly but also introduce predictable biases.  

In a high-speed media market, the competition for attention is being won by communicators who know how to harness these dynamics.

How prepared are you for a crisis? I have led the communications response to plane crashes, terrorist attacks, bankruptcies, riots and wars. Yet every time a crisis hits, I still get a sinking feeling in my stomach and a taste of adrenaline in my mouth. However prepared you think you are, you know that this is the moment when communication matters most and your skills are going to be tested to the limit.

In this episode, I explore five steps for an off-the-shelf crisis plan.

In today's episode I reveal five common communication strategy mistakes to avoid:

1. The everything, everywhere, all at once strategy.

2. The self-justification strategy

3. The platitudinous truisms strategy

4. The shooting for the moon without a rocket strategy.

5. The Christmas tree strategy.

My new blog, Cut Through!, aims to define a new model for modern communications leadership. In other words, to identify the essential skills needed to deliver great communications today.

Before I dive into the detail, I want to share some early thoughts on what we might cover.

I have identified seven thematic areas that I think matter most in a world of disruption and change. In fact, the faster things change, the more important they become.

I would love to have your feedback on these themes and to know what would be most useful to you:

1. Understanding what’s changed and what hasn’t

The digital and technological breakthroughs of the last thirty years have turned communication upside down. Communicators today navigate a fragmented landscape, where attention is scarce, trust is low, and relevance is hard-won. But how did we get here?

To respond effectively we need to understand the root causes. What caused the big leaps forward in the way we consume information and what are the consequences for communicators?

Just as importantly, we need to remember what hasn’t changed - the fundamentals of human behaviour that are hard-wired into our DNA.

While our tools have changed rapidly, our brains are still wired the same way they were tens of thousands of years ago. We haven’t had a firmware update. So we shouldn’t abandon communication techniques which are rooted in how human beings think, feel and act.

The future of communications belongs to those who can adapt to what has changed, while recognising what hasn’t - and I want to explore both in Cut Through and draw out the lessons for communicators.

2. Designing new strategies for this changed world

What are the winning strategies in this new media landscape? When trust in politicians, business and the media is at historic lows, how do you cut through? I want to examine the strategies that organisations are pursuing successfully.

For example, the Government’s New Media Unit is seeking to earn trust through authentic, relevant, and hyper-local stories of delivery; brands are increasingly borrowing trust, by working with content creators who already enjoy high trust from their audiences; and Trump has created the playbook for how to position yourself as an outsider and ride a wave of distrust.

3. Not losing sight of the timeless fundamentals

There are some building blocks of great communication that are as relevant today as they have ever been - strategy, storytelling, behaviour change, evaluation.

Strategy is the foundation of effective communication. To drive real outcomes, communicators must be able to prioritise, allocate and align resources behind clear, measurable objectives. Yet too often, I see meaningless truisms masquerading as genuine strategic choices, such as “we will develop a clear and robust plan”.

By utilising behavioural science, communications can influence behaviour and drive business outcomes, not just build awareness. Yet, compared to marketeers, not many PR professionals spend time on social psychology or behavioural economics.

Good evaluation, embedded from the start, is critical for learning what works, improving over time, and demonstrating impact. And yet, I have seen more self-justification dressed up as evaluation rather than appetite for genuine learning.

4. Navigating a modern crisis

How should you communicate when the pressure is highest and the stakes matter most? We should begin with an often overlooked truth: the single biggest determinant of success in a crisis is how well prepared the organisation is beforehand. That means exploring proactive brand and reputation management, as well as how to identify risks early and judge which issues could escalate.

I’ll also look at what a great crisis plan looks like in action, drawing on real-world examples to explore the importance of grip and leadership, message discipline, and anticipating how a story will evolve.

Finally, I’d like to look at the latest techniques for building resilience to mis and disinformation, such as inoculation theory or ‘pre-bunking’.

5. Engaging employees and shaping the voice of leaders

Employees feel overloaded and seem to expect employers to have a view not only on company strategy but on global politics.

Great internal communication creates clarity, builds trust and drives performance. So why do so many internal communicators feel they’re treated as a notice board rather than a driver of organisational success? How can internal communicators complete the journey from broadcasting messages to fostering engagement and driving performance?

I’d also like to explore the evolving role of the CEO, not just as an internal leader, but as a visible public figure. CEOs are expected to be storytellers and presenters as well as strategists, and this doesn’t always come easy. Communicators need to help their principals find their voice, acting as both counsel and co-creator.

6. Leading and managing your own resilience

Leading communication functions in this complex, changing environment requires Four C’s: Clarity, Capability, Confidence, and Continuous Improvement.

Clarity means having a clear plan and ensuring everyone understands their role in delivering it. Capability is about the skills, structures and resources needed now and in the future. Confidence means creating the conditions where people feel empowered, supported and motivated to perform at their best. And Continuous Improvement is the mindset that asks not just “what worked?”, but “how can we do it better next week?” Together, these four pillars create the conditions for a high-performing communications function and I will explore each of them.

I’ll also be expanding on my recent LinkedIn series on how communications leaders can manage their own resilience and wellbeing under pressure and how you can get a seat at the top table in the first place.

7. Fostering innovation

Finally, we need a blueprint for a new AI-driven communications operating model. Traditional models have become obsolete almost overnight and leaders must respond. That doesn’t just involve “adopting AI” but reimagining the entire operating model for comms. We will look at how fostering a culture of innovation, experimentation and improvement has become a defining part of the communications leader’s role.

Drawing on my own experience developing the UK’s first cross-government GenAI tool, I want to make the case for a human-led approach to adopting new tools: one that starts with user needs, builds trust through transparency, and actively mitigates the ‘hidden risks’ that emerge when decisions are outsourced to opaque systems.

I believe the result can be a roadmap for embedding innovation as a safe and strategic collaborator.

What else?…

What would you add? Which of these seven skills feels most urgent in your world? What’s missing? Leave a comment below and I’ll prioritise the most-mentioned topics.

So, let’s get into it properly next week! I’m going to start with strategy and, more specifically, five common mistakes that add up to bad communications strategy.

Until then thanks for watching, reading or listening.

Please subscribe if you haven’t done so already and please share with other communicators who want to lead with clarity and cut through the noise.

Simon

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