Solving "what do we need people to do differently".
I’m a behavioural economist and founder of Prologue Communications. We work with HR, Communications and Transformation teams to help people adopt new ways of working. A lot of my work sits at the intersection of internal communication, change and behavioural science. Rather than starting with “what do we need to communicate?”, I’m usually interested in “what do we need people to do differently?” and then working backwards from there. For me, IOIC membership is an opportunity to stay connected to the wider profession, learn from people approaching similar challenges from different perspectives, and hopefully contribute some of our thinking around behaviour change too.
From professional dancer to internal communication.
I’m not sure I ever made a conscious decision to pursue a career in internal communication, especially when I started my career as a professional dancer (one for another time!). I have always been interested in what makes people behave the way they do at work, particularly during periods of change, and internal communication became a really natural place to apply that thinking. What I enjoy most is that internal communication sits right in the middle of organisations. You get to understand the strategy, the leaders, the culture and, most importantly, how all of that is actually experienced by colleagues. I also love that there’s rarely one perfect answer. You’re dealing with people, and people are wonderfully complicated.
A network worth calling on.
One of the biggest things for me has been the people I’ve met. Through IOIC networking events and the Festival, I’ve built an informal network of brilliant comms professionals who I can sense-check ideas with, particularly when I’m developing a new framework or strategy for a client. I also met someone at the Festival who was moving from sales into communications, and I’ve ended up informally mentoring him through that transition. That sense of community has probably been the biggest benefit. I’ve met people I simply wouldn’t have come across otherwise, and having a network of people I can call, challenge ideas with and learn from has been incredibly valuable.
One career achievement I'm particularly proud of.
One of the projects I’m most proud of started with a whitepaper I wrote for the nuclear sector about turning ambition into action. There’s an enormous amount of ambition in nuclear, but one of the recurring challenges is translating that ambition into real behaviour and action. The whitepaper struck a chord and eventually grew into a two-day event in Miami, bringing together hundreds of nuclear leaders from around the world, as well as its own podcast series. For me, the proudest part is probably the journey behind it. I started my career as a dancer, so going from that to writing a whitepaper that helped drive innovation across the global nuclear sector is a pretty good reminder of how far I’ve come.
What's your advice for anyone coming into the profession?
Get really curious about people, not just messages. David Ogilvy once said, “People don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” Just because a message makes sense, doesn’t mean it’ll drive action. Great internal communicators don’t just understand messages. They understand humans.
