I recently witnessed a senior manager at a very large organisation express a vague vision for a communication programme and then watched as his staff frantically held a series of planning meetings to ascertain what they have been asked to do. They had not been provided with an end-state, were given no boundaries as to what the manager would find acceptable, but they were provided with a series of activities that the manager intuited 'would probably work'. The following are (hopefully) obvious observations of what was wrong with this process:
1. It is incumbent on a manager to provide a clear intent for their staff to achieve. Suggested activities that may lead to success can be useful to contextualise your intentions, but use them as a guide, not something that unfairly fixes your team before anyone truely understands the problem.
2. If you trust your staff then they should be afforded the space to innovate. Don't be prescriptive before you even understand the problem, otherwise you are limiting a project's activity to your imagination and wasting the creativity of your staff.
3. Using intuition is not a bad thing, but it should not be the exclusive driver behind a communications project. Suggesting a strategy before you have completed your audience insight is a rookie error that prematurely narrows your team's thinking - avoid it!
4. The manager holds most of the blame here, but the staff left the manager's brief without knowing what was expected of them. I respect staff who speak up if I haven't expressed my requirements properly, especially if it saves them working for hours on an approach that is not in keeping with what I need.
Most communication agencies/ consultants will use a process based on something like this diagram. It is staggering how often I see this, the most basic element of a communication plan, being ignored. The good news is, if you are the person doing the basics right, you're likely to succeed more than most.
