Learning to Notice

One of the things I have come to appreciate about communications is that very little of the job involves communication.

I know, it sounds absurd. After all, as communications professionals, we spend our days writing, speaking, presenting, advising and explaining. We create content, draft statements, prepare leaders for interviews and help organisations navigate difficult conversations. On the surface, communication appears to be the entire job.

Yet over the past decade of working in communications and leadership, the more convinced I have become that much of the role is simply learning to notice.

The best communications professionals I know are not necessarily the best writers. Nor are they always the most creative people in the room. More often, they are the people who notice what others overlook. The tiny details that often slip through the cracks, the shift of tone in an email, the slight change of a media landscape.

They notice the question that keeps resurfacing in meetings. They notice when a previously engaged colleague suddenly becomes quiet. They notice when leaders believe they have been clear but confusion continues to spread.

To most, these observations can feel insignificant. A passing comment. An awkward silence. A question asked twice. A concern raised by someone who rarely complains. But organisations, like people, tend to reveal themselves in small moments long before they reveal themselves in large crisis control rooms.

One of the most common misconceptions about crises is that they arrive without warning.

The challenge is that they rarely look like signs at the time. They look like minor frustrations. They look like uncertainty. They look like a question that nobody quite answers. They look like an issue that keeps being deferred until next month.

Only in hindsight do they appear obvious.

The same is true of trust.

People often speak about trust as though it is something that suddenly appears or disappears. In reality, trust tends to move gradually. It grows through consistency. It erodes through accumulation. Long before trust is lost, there are usually indications that confidence is weakening.

The difficulty with trust is that it rarely announces when it is due for departure. It simply becomes a little thinner each day until someone eventually notices it has gone.

Leadership often works in much the same way.

Earlier in my career, I assumed leadership was largely about direction. Setting a vision. Making decisions. Solving problems. While all of those things matter, I increasingly think leadership is also about attention.

Every organisation contains more information than any one person can process. There are always competing priorities, competing pressures and competing demands. The challenge is deciding what deserves attention before it becomes urgent.

Urgent things have a way of demanding to be noticed. Important things are often quieter.

Whether it is a difficult relationship between teams, or a growing sense of uncertainty amongst the organisation. These things rarely arrive with flashing sirens attached.

They require observation, curiosity and above all, somebody paying attention.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons communications sits in such an unusual position within organisations. Good communications professionals spend much of their time moving between different groups of people. Leadership teams. Staff. Stakeholders. Partners. Communities. Journalists. Trustees.

Because the role requires an understanding not of how decisions are made, but how they are experienced by people not involved in making them, over time, we develop a habit of seeing the organisation from multiple perspectives at once.

The gap between intention and experience is where many organisational challenges live. Leaders intend one thing but sometimes, people hear another. Sometimes an organisation believe it is being transparent whilst others experience silence. Often, a strategy appears clear to those who sat around the table and created it, but is left in the hands of confused people trying to deliver it.

The signs are often there long before the consequences emerge.

You simply have to notice them.

Looking back, I think some of the most valuable lessons communications has taught me have very little to do with communications itself.

I have learned how to pay attention, listen carefully and above all stay curious. To the questions that keep resurfacing, the discussions that happen in a whisper, the shift in tone of a journalist enquiry.

Most of the important things in organisations announce themselves long before they arrive. The challenge is whether anyone is paying attention when they do.