Digital communications at work: Designing channels people actually use

Episode 174: Digital communications at work: Designing channels people actually use 

We actually need to address not just the technology and those questions of trust and judgement, but also foundations and governance. And I think we’re probably going through that hype cycle now, which is to look at all the things it can do, this is where it’s going wrong, what do we need to do to put that in place – and it is actually the essential but unsexy work of content governance and ownership.

Sharon O’Dea
DWG member alumna, author and co-founder of Lithos Partners

There is no ROI in launch. All of the ROI is in adoption, by which we mean you can spin something up. But if people don’t use it, you’ve just wasted all of the effort and the money that it’s taken to spin that thing up.

Jonathan Phillips
Author and co-founder of Lithos Partners

Nancy Goebel
For years, organizations have invested heavily in intranets, collaboration platforms, employee apps, email and a myriad of other digital workplace technologies. Yet, many employees still struggle to find information, stay connected and understand what matters most. In their new book, Digital Communications at Work, Sharon O’Dea and Jonathan Phillips argue that the problem isn’t the channels themselves, it’s how they fit together. Drawing upon decades of experience helping organizations build digital workplace and communications ecosystems, together they offer a practical guide for designing channels that engage employees and improve the employee experience.

Join me in this edition of Digital Workplace Impact for a riveting conversation with co-authors Sharon and Jonathan about these insights and more. This is Nancy Goebel, your host and DWG’s Chief Executive. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Happy listening!

Sharon and Jonathan, I’ve been looking forward to this day for just about a year now, when Sharon and I talked about the glimmer of an idea that you both had to sit down and write a book about digital communications at work. And so here we are. I feel like, given our history as industry colleagues – and of course Sharon, with you as a DWG member alum – moments like this are important. It’s key for us to come together and celebrate milestone accomplishments. And this is one. And so welcome, welcome to you both and congratulations.

Sharon O’Dea
Thank you very much.

Jonathan Phillips
Thanks so much. Delighted to be with you.

Nancy
And so, of course we have to ask about the origin story because that’s an important level set. Tell us what inspired the two of you to sit down and write Digital Communications at Work? And were there specific challenges or things that were really key for you to solve as part of this? And maybe Sharon, you can lead off.

Sharon
I feel like I ought to answer this question given the origin story.

Jonathan
It’s yours (laughs)!

Sharon
Yes, so there was an immediate problem and there was a long-term problem. The immediate problem was, I was speaking at something or other – and I’m British so I find the idea of writing about myself in the third person for a biography for this event absolutely mortifying! So, this was a couple of years back, maybe 2023, and ChatGPT had fairly recently been released. I thought ‘I’m going to ask ChatGPT to do it and see what it says’.

Like a lot of things, certainly the earlier versions of AI, it was unsettlingly good. It was about 90% okay. I’ve got two decades of work online of a relatively uncommon name, so it got most of the things right about me – you know, who I am, where I’ve worked. But it kept giving me slightly better degrees than the one I have, from universities I didn’t go to! But it also very confidently said that I was the author of two books – and one of them was something like ‘The Digital Workplace: A guide for leaders’, or something like that, and I was like, ‘Well I didn’t, but I would definitely read that!’

So that sent me down this rabbit hole of, okay, that doesn’t exist. So that then sent me down a further rabbit hole of why on earth does it think I’ve written that? And that got me to, okay, this is how LLMs work, but also, more fundamentally, this is how these models are already changing the way that we work. If ultimately, ChatGPT just assumed this is something that, based on everything it did know about me, could well be true, so it almost kind of hallucinated it into existence.

So anyway, I ended up writing a blog post about this for ‘Reworked’ and then a publisher got in touch and went ‘Would you want to write it though’? And, of course, yes, I did. Jon and I have been talking about and working in this space for years. I love writing work stuff. As you know, I write lots of blogs and I speak at lots of things, so actually the idea of capturing all of that in a book – especially one that doesn’t already exist – was brilliant. But actually, ultimately AI made it up for me, or at least made up the idea for me. It’s potentially the most productive thing it’s ever done for me! Or unproductive if you consider the impact it’s had on my work life!

But yes, there you go, that’s the origin story. Now, I guess going back to the other part of your question, and maybe I’ll leave this one for Jon, is the problem that we were trying to solve. Jon, do you want to pick that one up?

Jonathan
Yes, there’s one other really kind of cute angle, I suppose, Nancy, which is that Sharon and I, it turns out, are not particularly good starter finishers. We’re pretty good at the start and not very good at the close! And individually we have kind of understood this about each other. And so one of the joys of working with Sharon is that actually we sort of embarrass each other into finishing stuff. It’s like neither of us wants to be the person that lets the other down. And so that is the emphasis, that is the energy that actually closes things out for work and for clients, and as it turns out for a book as well.

So, the origin story was that hallucinating ChatGPT prompt, which was brilliant, but the energy behind doing that was recognizing that actually we needed each other to kick each other to get the stuff done and get it committed down to a piece of paper.

Nancy
(Laughs)

Sharon
Adding to that a little bit, no one gives you a manual in this space, right? So, lots of people come into communications because they like words more than spreadsheets. And then suddenly you’re like, well, I need a new intranet, a new app. So suddenly someone who came into this broadly because they liked writing has got a right business case; they’ve got to talk to HR, to IT. Someone said to me – and I think I ended up putting this in the book – I used to write press releases and now I’m digitizing parking spaces!

And actually, people sort of end up managing digital workplaces. Very few of us do it because we wanted to work in IT, but somehow we ended up there. So, the problem we’re solving here is really walking people through that process.

Jon and I, like a lot of people I imagine listening to this podcast, have sort of learned as we went along, which involves a lot of ‘faking it until you make it’. So, I like to think that what we’ve got here is almost like a step-by-step guide to all the things you never signed up to do, but somehow you find yourself doing. And not the actual writing and communications, because there are plenty of other books about that bit, but actually all the other things you need to make a success at your digital workplace because we realized that book didn’t exist and it turns out that ChatGPT realized that too and thought it really ought to.

Nancy
So, who knew that ChatGPT would be such a powerful manifestor, number one. And number two, when you think about the fact that this origin story has played out in the way that it has, it’s also a powerful metaphor for the importance of human connection. In your case, it’s the buddy system that allows you to be the finisher closers by relying upon each other. And so, there’s the art and science of tapping into the power of AI and at the same time the human dynamic that you described and it’s a ‘Yes and’ moment.

Sharon
Absolutely.

Nancy
In many organizations they’re contending with that, just the same. So, how wonderful is that.

So, one of the ideas that stood out for me is that organizations don’t often have a channel problem. They tend to have coherence issues. And that’s something that plays out importantly in the insights that you have to share. So, how do each of you define that problem? And why do you think it’s showing up so often? Jonathan, maybe we can start with you.

Jonathan
Hmm, yes. We reflected on this hard I think in writing the book, but in my view, internal comms isn’t simply a broadcast discipline, it’s an ecosystem opportunity. It’s about publishing, but it’s also about distribution, it’s about collaboration, it’s about discussion – and all of those things only work when they help to service each other and to reinforce each other, I suppose.

We need to make sure that the message is distributed and is ultimately communicated and therefore becomes of value to employees and to the organization. So, many organizations we found often respond to a communication problem by buying a new tool or investing harder in something that already exists when, in reality, it’s about making an ecosystem work cohesively. So, our argument is that this isn’t necessarily an individual channel problem. It’s about coherence and it’s about bringing those channels together to work with each other, ultimately to deliver that communication outcome that we all hope for.

Sharon
I think the other thing we find is that there is a tendency in this trade to just add more – so we just don’t have enough coherence across the channel mix and understanding of how those channels relate to one another, how they’re managed, what is necessary to make them work effectively. And that’s rarely about the technology and it’s almost always about the people and processes that sit around them.

So this book is really grounded in how to make a success from the technology with all the things that aren’t the technology.

Nancy
Yes, and so from your respective vantage points, how do you think leaders then need to start thinking about communications as an ecosystem as opposed to a collection of channels or, you know, a disconnected set of tools?

Sharon
Should I pick this one up?

Jonathan
Yes, go right ahead.

Sharon
Right, there’s a model that we use in the book, and I think I posted this on LinkedIn maybe about two years ago now, which is – and, you know, we go around the houses with all of this – but ultimately, whether you use an employee app, or you have something custom-built for your complex organization, these channels and platforms all broadly do the same set of things. The question is ensuring that you have the full mix covered. So let me try and remember. We call it now our five layer model, which is Plan, Collaborate, Publish, Distribute and Discuss – and actually, all communication channels broadly work in that way. So, you normally have something which is how do we work out what we’re going to communicate, why, who to, how we’re going to measure it, that kind of thing.

Collaborate is how do we create that communication – that’s your approvals, your sign-offs, the actual creation of your video, your text, whatever it may be. Publish is putting it somewhere – and that could be all sorts of things; it might be an app, it might be an intranet. In fact in one organization we worked with it was an Excel spreadsheet – they built an entire intranet in Excel; it was very creative, but I digress!

And actually, distribution is where we see the most divergence. Most organizations will have a variety of distribution channels to suit either a broad audience or an audience with divergent needs. Most organizations have at least two, maybe tens of distribution channels. And then there’s the discuss layer, which is how we do that sense-making, how we create feedback loops. What that mix looks like will be different for different organizations, but broadly needs to do those five things.

So, what we found is that often the disconnection happens where you have confusion in any layer – if you’ve got competing publication channels, then people just don’t know where to look; and if your distribution channels are mismatched to the needs of your organization, if one of those layers is missing. So what we find is not that there’s one tool that’s better than the other, but it’s true you’ve got coherence across the mix, but all of those different needs are met and there is clarity in each of the layers.

So we were looking for a degree of simplicity and often, you know, you’ll see on forums like Reddit or whatever, ‘What’s the best platform for your internet?’ The answer (and I would say this is, I’m a consultant!), is always ‘It depends!’ – because every organization is different and your needs are different, and needs also vary over time and even within the same group. But broadly, where we see that disconnect is when either a layer is not served at all or over-served, and there are gaps in between, or a lack of clarity.

Jonathan
Mm-hmm. I think there’s another element which we often see and I want to come back to. If we take the example of a communication role, you know, what is the job? And without sounding too trite, the purpose is to communicate. And that means we have changed the way someone feels or the way they behave or the way they think about something. You can’t do that unless you’ve distributed your communication. So, what we found with our research and building that model is that in a lot of organizations, it ends at publishing; it ends at Step 3. Publishing doesn’t equal communication.

You have to go further than that. You have to distribute. So, as Sharon said, what we found in building that five-layer model was that we don’t have coherence across the piece. Lots of organizations don’t have applications within each of those five boxes. Maybe they have multiples, which is confusing elements from a publishing point of view or even from a collaboration point of view. And sometimes the process doesn’t step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Often it stops at a certain step of that process and then we’re not communicating effectively.

And I think if there are two bookends of that – the planning side and the discussion end – that tends to be where we see the weakest of capability. So, in discussion, we’re not seeing people open up their content for feedback, or they’re not using sentiment analysis. They’re not asking people how this piece of content has landed or served their particular user need. And at the planning end we’re not seeing that kind of air traffic control approach. We’re seeing individual channels or individual communicators communicating for individual audiences without that holistic overview as to what is landing or where it is landing, be it an inbox or an intranet homepage. So, yes, that piece of research that developed that five-layer model was kind of instrumental in our thinking around the book, but it also happens to be a really useful mechanic to understand exactly how people are using the communication capabilities within their organization.

Nancy
I have to say I love the fact that this five-layer model includes the discussion element because all too often a piece of communication rolls out and then it’s on to the next. And so, to understand whether you’ve impacted how people think, feel or do, meaning taking action, that discussion layer is critical. And I think one of the things within that discussion layer is, of course, understanding the proof-of-value element within digital communications. And in our industry it still tends to be one of the weak spots. And so, you know, I think that’s part of why we see the power of the benchmarking inside the DWG circle come to life. And so, I’m curious to tap your minds vis-a-vis metrics that really matter in helping to facilitate that discussion and next-stage thinking.

Jonathan
So maybe I can start and then Sharon can pick up the threads on this one.

Look, the first thing to say is that I feel that in communication it’s almost one of the last numerical or non-numerical functions within an organization. If you look at marketing, you look at finance, procurement, if you’re a factory manufacturing widgets, Nancy, there are numbers galore around there, whereas I think communicators have often been quite shy to understand the mechanics and the metrics behind what they’re communicating and how they’re communicating it. And, as a result, it feels possibly even immature still at this stage. And yet, in digital comms, which is where Sharon and I hang out all the time, we’re awash with numbers, but are we awash with the right numbers that actually genuinely define and alter the way that we work?

And let me give you a good example. We are aware of somebody, and I’m not going to name them, who was working within a multinational organization, who was set a target for the number of homepage views that their intranet gained inside a year. And, on the face of it, the idea behind this target, I’m sure, was that: look, if you maximize the number of homepage views, this is a proxy for an intranet which is adding value. More people go, more people view, therefore it’s of value. We know that what this person did was to set up 50 tabs on their browser, homepage load on each one of those, and code each one of those homepage browsers to renew themselves once every two or three seconds. And their homepage view target of, for argument’s sake, 3 or 4 million homepage views for the year, was hit within about 48 hours!

So here we have an example of a metric set in good faith as a proxy for good value or for a good intranet, that actually is ultimately meaningless. And so, we come back often to the view that, if it’s a metric that I individually can dramatically alter, then it’s not a good metric to hold. But what we ought to be measuring ultimately is outcomes and to align ourselves with the outcomes and the purpose of why we are communicating or distributing something rather than the proxies around views and so on, which are very much more in the output view. So, we think this is an emerging space still, even now. I still see lots of dashboards out there that are measuring things that I don’t think are actually telling the right story. So I’m encouraged that we’re having this conversation. I’m sure there are many more books and many more papers and blog posts to be written on this topic. But yes, we’ve seen it all. We’ve probably been guilty of some of it! But our thinking is that we need to be focusing much, much more, on the outcome side.

Sharon, I know that you’ve probably got some build points.

Sharon
Sure, I have.

I think the major one for me is – and I know I’ve been guilty of it and gosh, we see it all over – is being driven by what the platforms can provide rather than what we actually need. So, you know, we’ve all seen beautiful dashboards produced every month sent to the same board or set of leaders that show green arrows going upwards. That just shows you what the channel can provide and often they can be quite impressive looking, but it doesn’t tell you the difference between healthy channel activity or just noise, energy.

What we always advocate and of course there is a chapter about this in the book – I think it’s Chapter 10, but correct me if I’m wrong there, Jon – which is really start with what it is that you’re trying to change; what do people need to know, feel, do – and measure that. Measure less, do it better and also don’t measure something if you’re not going to do anything with what you learn to improve the way that you manage your channels, your professional practice.

Actually, this is an area – and I’m sure we’ll talk about AI at some point, at least twice in the rest of this recording – but this is an area where it genuinely can help. As Jon said there, a lot of us came into this because we liked words more than numbers actually, and a lot of people are scared of graphs and spreadsheets. AI can do this stuff really well. The tools have got a lot better at it. Our ability to do analysis is better than it’s ever been. Take those numbers and understand what am I measuring? Why am I measuring it? What does it actually show? How am I noticing value and what patterns are out there? It’s easier than ever to do analysis rather than data collection, and they are very different things in our space. Ultimately, I think it’s that point you made there, what’s generating value for our employees and for our organizations? And measure that!

Jonathan
Yes, yes.

Nancy
I think, you know, this is a discussion that is so spot on. And I think that the power of AI certainly will help communications leaders and teams level up. And I dare say we’re starting with the rear-view mirror view of things at the moment, but what will come next is the predictive side, the anticipatory side. Think of the power of that when it finally lands in true form.

But I think the most simple thing that people can take away from a conversation like this is something you mentioned earlier, Jonathan, which is purpose. And so, if you think about your measurement strategy as grounding your story and demonstrating that purpose, it will help you really hone in on what you need to measure. So begin with the end in mind. Where are you trying to get to? What is your purpose and did you fulfil that mission? Because the vanity metrics are easy hurdles to cross in terms of speaking about volume or penetration – you know, staying power on a page. But ultimately, we really need to make sure that we’re purpose-driven and impact-driven in all that we do. And I think, whether you’re looking at it on a digital communications level, as in this conversation, or you’re sort of rolling back to the topic ‘du jour’, which is AI everything, there’s still a focus on these vanity metrics. and that’s part of the maturation process. Early on, you want to see that people have landed and are tapping into whatever the ‘it’ of the moment is. But once you get past that honeymoon window, you need to shift over to that purpose and impact-driven approach to things. And so, we’re very much kindred spirits in our thinking!

Sharon
I’m sure we are.

Jonathan
And maybe I can tie those two things together. Sharon helpfully mentioned those kind of platform dashboards and they exist aplenty, but I often think that they serve the vanity of the vendor. They’re there to show how well their platform is performing, which isn’t necessarily the things that we need to show as communication professionals inside an organization. So yes, to snap out of those dashboard approaches and to look more deeply about what it is that our end internal customer needs and to measure that; that’s what we need to get to. You know, maybe we forget, but it’s important to say, that sending is not the same as opening is not the same as reading is not the same as actioning a communication – and those are the things that actually really matter.

Nancy
And so, Sharon, you mentioned that invariably we’d talk about AI. And, of course, we launched into that at the start of the conversation.

Sharon
Nice and early, yes!

Nancy
We came back to it in the measurement frame. And so now, let’s pull the thread a little bit further and talk about the role of AI in the world of digital communications today. And, I’m curious to hear from both of you how you think generative AI is changing the way organizations are communicating and maybe even venture into what leaders should be careful not to lose sight of because that’s probably a juicy conversation for us to have!

Sharon
Shall I start on this one?

Jonathan
You go right ahead.

Sharon
I will do, I’m sure I could speak for a solid hour on this alone and maybe we could do that another time!

I love AI. I use it every day, but we should be using it for speed and scale. And I’m genuinely excited by the possibilities that this creates for the way that we communicate. That actually, we’ve all got so much going on, and AI applied thoughtfully and with the right foundations, enables us to do things like personalization at scale, to drive relevance. And, to the point you made earlier, to anticipate what people need when they need it and provide it in the format in which they should best receive it.

But actually, that hugely changes the role we have as communicators. If you’re a similar vintage to me, you’ve almost certainly at some point in your career, you know, spent hours in a room arguing about whether you should use this phrase or that, wordsmithing specific statements. Actually, those are now read as a little push alert on your phone as a single sentence. The way that we create communications and the way that it is consumed and received by others has fundamentally changed and that will continue to happen. So where we used to write a single statement, perhaps someone will be receiving that on the front line as a podcast in Spanish because that’s their primary language. But that is the thing that will enable it to be received and ultimately acted upon, adding that value. So it is going to change the way they communicate and not simply in the way of ‘Can you write a statement for me?’, but actually creating more relevant communications that create impact for the people that we work with.

But, that doesn’t come without risks. So that is things like tone drift, hallucination, before you know it, you’ve accidentally written a whole book. We should be using it, you know, for speed, but not for judgement. You still have to own what is said. And the further that gets away from human intervention, the harder it is to control.

The other thing that I think is interesting, worrying, is – and we’re doing a lot of this at the moment in our client work – is actually looking, potentially, at the role of agentic. Quite a lot of our communications now are written both for humans and non-humans. We will ask things to go and answer questions for us, to carry on the work for us. But that means that we have to have a really sharp focus on the really dull but important side of this, which is governance. If you cannot fundamentally trust your corpus of content, all the AI does is multiply the risk. What we have – I know from so many organizations – we never throw anything away, but we also never label it correctly. There are some organizations that we’ve worked with over the years that had 15-year-old content hiding on their intranet. And when you start to apply AI to that, it starts to uncover things that you’d forgotten were there in the first place, but it recreates them while giving the confidence of being new. It doesn’t give you any of the visual signals that it’s wrong, outdated. So, all of these things mean that we actually need to address not just the technology and those questions of trust and judgement, but also foundations and governance. And I think that we’re probably going through that hype cycle now, which is to look at all the things it can do, this is where it’s going wrong, what do we need to do to put that in place – and it is actually the essential but unsexy work of content governance and ownership.

Sharon
Sorry, I probably could have done another 45 minutes straight, but I’ll pass on to you, Jon.

Jonathan
You’re good. You know, I was going to build and just go a tiny bit practical, then maybe it’s just worth circling back for 30 seconds. I think when GenAI became a consumer tool – ChatGPT or Claude, whatever your AI tool of interest is – for a lot of people, the very first job we did with it was got it to write something: draft me an email on…; write me a something. And so, I think, as communicators, we often feel a very existential threat from AI because it is remarkably good at writing and it will get better at writing. I suspect if we’re not at the moment already, AI is capable of writing every bit as well as any communicator in any organization that we can speak of. The truth is, as Sharon said, that this is a broader question around governance and around judgement, which AI can’t do for us.

But if I come back to our five-layer model. We think about the five layers of being of planning, of collaboration, of publishing, of distribution and lastly of discussion, AI will impact every single one of those levels, not just the collaboration piece around that co-creation that we’ve talked about. That’s the obvious one. We can point an AI engine at ‘Write me 500 words on x’. But how will it help with some of the things that as communicators maybe we feel less interested in or maybe just aren’t genuinely as skilled at?

So, how can it help us with planning? Well, we can get down to with an AI engine the idea of microplanning. So, you know, we don’t have to have audiences of every employee or subsets of. You could almost get down to the point that Sharon likes her communication at 6:30 via a mobile app, whereas I like my communication in podcast form at 4 pm in Spanish. We can plan to that level of degree with AI.

The collaboration piece, I think we’ve discussed; from a publishing point of view, we can start to publish in exactly the channel to exactly the moment on exactly the right piece of glass for every employee. From a distribution point of view, we can get it out into the right channels.

Lastly, from a discussion point of view, we’ve discussed – ironically – how important discussion is. AI can really help us with understanding the feedback from employees. How do people feel about this? Was this positive? Was this negative? How are the comments landing? How can we use that information to improve the next communication? So, look, getting super-tactical, I could not be more excited about how AI will change those five and the difference that it will make to communicators. But ironically, the one that everyone thinks about, which I think is that creation of content piece, is the one that I think is almost the least exciting of all of them. We’ve already seen that. It’s the other areas where I think we can really bring AI to the fore and multiply communication productivity and really have a true impact for employees.

Sharon
Can I just do two builds on that one? I think that we talked about that shift from writer to orchestrator. That doesn’t mean that we’re not still going to need some of those skills around political antennae, how we navigate our organizations and understand what people need. But I think, related to that, is also how AI is fundamentally changing the nature of work. And that, in turn, will change what people need from their channels, from their communication, from their employee experience. So we talk in the book about structural forces that are shaping how we work. Technology is one of those, but that in turn is changing things like our relationship with our employer, the need for us to be able to coordinate human and non-human resources, which you’re seeing in some organizations now. So actually, AI is both a tool for communications – for communicators to change our professional practice, the way that we deliver, the way we serve our audiences – but it’s also fundamentally changing our workplaces. And that, in turn, creates a need for greater infrastructure for change, better communication channels, but also changing the relationship between people and employers, and people and institutions. So there’s so many forces at work here and AI is changing a lot of them at the same time. Broadly though, I’m finding it all very exciting and it’s not simply about asking Copilot to create you a little bit of text.

Jonathan
(Laughs)

Nancy
And, you know, I live in that shared excitement. At the same time, I also think that as leaders we’re all being called upon to ensure that, you know, there’s a level of responsible and appropriate use of AI. During our DWG member meeting, in June in London, there was an awful lot of conversation about how organizations are equating the introduction of AI at scale in the enterprise with just cutting heads. And so that’s shaken the foundations of trust between employers and employees. And so, at a time when you can effectively push a button and have a beautifully sculpted piece of communication come out, let’s ensure that we don’t lose the authenticity in communications as well. Because those trust foundations have been shaken in a myriad of ways with the introduction of AI, when I think about people and culture, that’s a piece that I want to make sure we factor into this conversation as well.

Jonathan
But I think I if I can pick up on that, look, I absolutely get the sensitivity around that area and it is something that I know a lot of colleagues are deeply thinking about right now in the organization – about what their role could be in an AI-led enterprise. But I want to pick up on the point that Sharon was making earlier. We worked with an organization some years ago, and they had, oh gosh, it was like a million documents or a million pages on their intranet, and it was such a horrendous mess. The content went back years and years and years. If you plug in an AI engine on top of that particular content heap, you are going to get an awful lot of nonsense that comes out. Why do I say that? What I mean is that we have with an AI prompt, any AI prompt, the ability for an employee to say, ‘Tell me what the news is in my organization – and tell me it in this style, with this tone and this length on this platform.’ So we already have the ability for an employee to be able to essentially craft their own communication. And yet, on the other hand, we also have communicators who are spending a huge amount of time and energy thinking super hard about what the standfirst is, and what the headline is, and which verb they ought to use, and the adjective and the structure of their document, at a point where it almost isn’t necessary. What is necessary is that we seed that AI engine with precisely the right content. And this is still a communicator’s art.

AI is not going to write the seed, but it can generate the content from the seed. So, Sharon and I have been thinking deeply about this, and I think our collective view at the moment is that there’s still a place, not even a place – it’s even more critical than ever – for communicators to write that seed.

How can we structure a three-point piece that is so perfectly unambiguous and factual and detailed that every AI prompt that jumps on it can create every news article you need from it? So, I come back to that point. We can still get AI to write stuff, and I do foresee a point in the future where honestly this will be user employee forward, not communicator back. So the employee themselves will be generating the content that they need from that source. But the source needs to be accurate, on point, beautifully written, on time every time, in order to make sure that larger engine is working as it should.

Nancy
Well said. And so, my thought to tie this whole conversation up was to ask you both for one lesson from digital communications and work that you would want to leave as a gift for this audience. This seed idea is quite powerful, but you may have another thought that you want to plant as a parting call to action.

Sharon
I suspect we’re going to go for a different end of the scale – and it’s not something we‘ve touched on so far in the discussion, but actually by starting grounding whatever your choices are about your channel mix in a deep understanding of who people are, what they do and what they need. Any good, well-functioning digital communication ecosystem begins with discovery, with doing research and understanding your user needs, what people need, when do they need it, what are the contexts in which they’re working and design for that. Too often we find communicators are trying to start with the platform and how they make it work, and try and retrofit it to, you know, get people to adopt a channel. If you start with understanding what people need and provide an answer that users need, channels will be adopted, they’ll be used, they’ll create value and they’ll ultimately deliver what’s needed for the business. So start with discovery.

Jonathan
And actually I’m going to build on that. Nancy, it’s not well known, but my background is, I’m a geologist by training. And you may well, in a separate podcast, want to talk about why geology and digital comms link together I promise you, I do have a long and collective answer, but it does, it does ultimately join up! One of my geology lecturers, I think on the very first field trip that I was on, said, ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.’ And to us we translate that in our digital communications world to the point that Sharon is making around discovery. Time and effort, energy, money, whatever it is, invested in discovery and good user discovery will ultimately help you build the channels and the processes, the people skills that you need to be successful in this space. So I absolutely agree.

The other takeaway, I think, from me, and it builds on the point that Sharon is making, is that there is no ROI in launch. All of the ROI is in adoption, by which we mean you can spin something up but if people don’t use it, you’ve just wasted all of the effort and the money that it’s taken to spin that thing up. How do you drive adoption? Well, yes sure, you can communicate and you can train, but ultimately adoption is about utility, and utility is about that discovery piece. So it’s not something you can retrofit. It is something you almost have to start with right at the top of the day to understand truly what your user needs are, what your enterprise needs are, and build to those needs and then work adoption from that basis. So, if you have tools that are genuinely relevant, you have functionality that genuinely adds value, information and content that is utility to every employee, your adoption will work from that point onwards. And if you don’t have that, you won’t have the ROI that you need.

Nancy
Well, that’s a powerful set of takeaways. I’ll add one final ‘yes, and’ that is bringing us back to the idea that you begin with the end in mind. And so when I think back to your five-layer model, picking up on your point, Sharon, about discovery, you know, I’m seeing a very clear visual that Plan, Collaborate, Publish, Distribute and Discuss is actually a loop.

Sharon
Mm-hmm.

Jonathan
Right. Yes, yeah.

Nancy
And the discussion piece has an arrow taking you back to the beginning so that you’ve got a spiral of conversations that are facilitated through this model. And so, that was my final thought to add to the mix. this has been an absolutely riveting moment. I have thoroughly enjoyed talking with you both as a backdrop for celebrating your new book – wishing you much success as you launch deeper into your virtual book tour and we’ll continue to follow your good stories and learnings as you go along. But for now we’re out of time. So thank you for stopping into the studio for a wonderful chat.

Jonathan
Thanks, Nancy. Much appreciated.

Sharon
Thank you.

Nancy
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