 Outgoing CiB chairman Paul Brasington gave the traditional speech at the CiB dinner on Thursday evening. In the talk he looked at the threats affecting internal communicators, and shows that in fact they aren't really threats at all.
He also told the only techy joke he knows– and showed the difference between the spoken and written word. In fact, when spoken it isn't funny, although it could be argued that it isn't funny when written down either!
Here is his speech in full:
“I’m going to talk a little about technology ... so I’m going to start with a techy joke. There aren’t many of them ... so you might have heard it. It’s the best techy joke I know. In fact it’s the only techy joke I know.
And the point of this joke is that you can’t tell it – you have to read it on the page ... so this is a doomed enterprise from the outset but I have a deeper mission so here goes
“There are 10 types of techy – those who get binary and those who don’t.”
(In binary, or base 2, “10” means 2 in case you don't get it.)
I’ll come back to the lesson of the joke in a moment
Last time I did this I talked a bit about the craft of writing ... Five years on and the fundamentals haven’t changed ... the things that worried me then still worry me, but I’m not going to go back over all that here.
The technology has however changed ...
I was part of a discussion the other day where someone suggested that new technologies would change the way things get written in the enterprise ... he was thinking particularly of speech recognition ... the likelihood that we’ll be doing without keyboards and speaking our pearls of wisdom for the computer to transcribe.
He suggested that this was another nail in the coffin of professional writing.
You just have to think back to the joke to see why this isn’t true. The joke highlights the simple fact that there’s a difference between speaking and writing, between hearing and reading.
To underline the point - executives have been able to speak to Dictaphones for years. It required its own technique, but it didn’t make them good writers, and one of the main reasons is that there’s a world of difference between the way we hear spoken words and the way we read.
When we speak we have volume and tone controls ... gestures to amplify and explain our meaning. But in written text tone becomes more elusive. Sensing this, people usually write quite differently from the way they speak ... they become formal, stiff, falling back on jargon and circumlocution ... I’m really glad about this because it means I have a job ... putting it right. The fact is that crafting the written word so it works on the page or screen takes skill, imagination and experience, and technology is not about to change that, even if it changes the media we read on.
Thinking about this I was reminded of another sweeping statement made at this conference last year, by an evangelist for social media. He was trying to be provocative but I’ve recently read the same observation from another senior manager in the same very large communication technology business. He claimed that social media set communication free within the enterprise, and make the role of the internal communicator redundant.
Now that’s a very curious thing to say ... It seems these people believe that the role of an IC manager is to control the conversations going on in the business. It’s true that knowledge has often been seen as power and managers have tried to exercise power by acting as gatekeepers to knowledge or information. But that notion has been in steep decline for years ... I’m not sure everyone gets it yet, but the internet really has changed that possibility.
But all social media does, at least in the context of this discussion, is change the place of the conversations that have always gone on ... and ensured that those conversations can go on across greater distances – gossip moves faster and further. It’s not the role of the internal communicator to control these conversations ... just to inform them as far as possible, and if social media makes these conversations more pervasive and influential, the role of the internal communicator becomes more important ... not less.
Brian Jeavons made the point this morning ... that role is a bridge function. As others have observed, it’s not about speaking instead of senior execs ... in a way it’s a consultancy role about helping people make connections across the organisation.
So I’m wondering where this notion of control has come from ... what it means ...
My guess is that it comes from the creeping influence of brand thinking, with its curiously old fashioned confusion of identity and homogeneity.
Homogeneity has a deep appeal to managers ... managers like to think they are in control and homogeneity would make things easier to control.
Now I’ve been working with brand thinking for at least 15 years and I fully understand the importance of identity ... I understand why it’s important that stuff coming out of a business should be quickly recognisable, and when a customer has any dealings with the company that the experience should reinforce the emotional things a customer likes.
But does this require homogeneity? Brand thinking suggests that it does ... which is why we get all the usual stuff about mission statements and brand values ... It’s why it’s sometimes said that the job of internal communication is to push that homogeneity on the individuals in the business... if you work here, so this thinking goes ... we have corporate values and you must let them guide you.
Now I wouldn’t deny for a second that managers should behave decently. I think that the best organisations have a coherent sense of identity, a shared corporate story. But these things don’t require homogeneity ... if your staff are going to be your brand ambassadors they will do it by telling the truth about the organisation, and not by parroting marketing speak ... and I don’t understand at all the aspiration common in brand work, that they should adopt a uniform corporate tone of voice.
Ah, tone of voice ... if you think about it it’s a pedantic, clumsy phrase – and it seems to me that it speaks of a command and control culture ....
I’ve yet to see a set of tone of voice guidelines that didn’t come down to little more than good writing practice. I’m all in favour of good writing practice. I think it’s incredibly important to make people realise that all written communication is a form of behaviour ... and there’s good behaviour and bad behaviour ... and everyone should be thinking about that ...
I think this is very important, but I don’t see what’s gained by dressing this up as “tone of voice” The suggestion that this could work like a visual identity is just bogus .. I don’t believe people will ever look at a piece of text out of context and say “oh yes that comes from Vodafone”. It gets worse ... since in those generic good practice guidelines you’ll usually find a pressure to avoid jargon ... but what is “tone of voice” or indeed “brand” if not marketing jargon?
Corporations create products, but they are not “products” themselves. They are quasi-organic constructs, and if they are to be true to themselves they need to be allowed to breathe.
What we’re seeing is an unreflective intrusion of marketing speak and thinking in an area where it has little place. It’s funny because until recently I was thinking that the PR outlook ... the generation of spin ... was the worst threat to effective internal communication. But I guess PR itself – by which I mean primarily media relations, is facing its own crisis as media fragment, and increasingly sophisticated audiences demand honest speaking.
It’s a nice irony that Armando Iannucci’s film “In the loop” should come just as the MP expenses crisis broke. The film excoriates the spin culture that has sadly been so much part of this government, obscuring the many good things it’s done (which is ironic in itself) – but I think the expenses crisis finally brings something the corporate world has been facing for ages to bear on government – the fact of transparency – the fact that you can get away with very little. Perhaps we’ve really come to the end of the age of spin.
So perhaps the PR world itself is having to move beyond spin, not least because the media world is changing. Although newspapers are by no means without influence, that influence is waning and the big public conversations that PR has always addressed are being influenced by a much wider range of things ... in that sense the job of the PR professional may become more like that of the IC professional ... it’s not about spin about reality ... and about making sure the reality is understood ...
So perhaps IC has things to teach PR ...that’s quite a reversal ...
Where marketing fits into this... I’m not sure, because things are changing so fast. It’s interesting that the advertising model that sustained both newspapers and commercial TV is close to meltdown ... it may be that the understanding of community ... of how you communicate within known communities which is very much part of good IC practice ... maybe that has things to teach marketers too ...
But if IC people are going to do this, they need to merit and claim peer respect. That’s one of the big reasons why the IoIC is so important... bringing it forward has been my preoccupation this year, and so I’d like to finish by describing where I think we’re going ...
We were determined from the start that this should not be a cosmetic change, but something which could transform the practice of internal communication in the UK (and influence it elsewhere). There are three real strands to the transformation.
The first is professional development. We are putting in place a comprehensive, flexible and robust framework for developing and accrediting the skills and knowledge required for good IC practice. To get this off the ground we have already launched a level one qualification. Level two should be launched soon. And there will be two further levels of achievement, also to be rolled out as soon as possible. The IoIC will become the guardian of this curriculum, accrediting commercial and academic courses that can contribute to the required sum of knowledge. Candidates will be examined rigourously at each level to gain the qualification. This is a hugely ambitious project, but it will change practice and it is already underway.
The second strand is thought leadership - We need the more active involvement of senior practitioners, from the corporate and agency worlds. We want to create a space where they can get together regularly without commercial pressure to exchange ideas and experience. Where exciting new ideas emerge we can help spread the word. We will build on our existing national conference and regional seminar programmes to take this knowledge further.
The third strand is advocacy. We will continue to develop our awards and events activity, shaping them explicitly to recognise the different areas of best practice in IC today, and promoting them so they are recognised by non-IC audiences. As a professional institute we will be more strongly placed to speak for the importance of good IC in the media and other professional platforms. We will be seeking active and constructive links with other professional bodies.
This could and should be our future. Five years from now we should have significantly increased our membership, allowing us to boost the resources through which we serve that membership. We will be understood across the business world as the place you go for knowledge and support in any area relating to internal communication.
We are right at the beginning of this journey ... there will be a chance to raise questions and air views at the fringe meeting tomorrow afternoon. Come along if you can, and whatever you do we hope you’ll be with us in this exciting time.
Thank you.” |
