This morning, The Work Crowd and Hanson Search co-hosted a panel at The Ivy Club on strategic communications in a fractured world, chaired by Madeleine Weightman. The panel brought together Katie Simpson (Managing Partner, Hanson Search), Mona Patel (Director of Corporate Affairs, Premium Credit), Madeleine Hallward (Non-Executive Director, House of Lords Management Board and Office of Rail and Road) and Andrew McConnell (Deputy Director, Communications and Engagement, Civil Aviation Authority).
Four different vantage points, one consistent message: communications can no longer be a delivery function. Here's what each panellist had to say.
Madeleine Hallward made the case that narrowing the room under pressure feels efficient, but produces worse decisions:
“We are the experts at spotting conflict, predicting conflict, and then helping to resolve it... we're the people who will beat the crap out of you in practice before you step into the ring.”
Her point was that comms brings in the internal and external perspectives that get lost when a decision-making group is kept deliberately small. Left out of the room, comms ends up executing a strategy that's weaker than it needed to be.
Mona Patel was unambiguous about reporting lines:
“I think corporate affairs should report into the CEO. That's it. That's my answer... corporate affairs should never report into the CMO, the CFO, the CPO, random letter O.”
Her reasoning: an exec team that doesn't understand what corporate affairs actually does will only bring it in reactively. Getting a seat at the table isn't just about influence, it's about giving the CEO and the wider exec a working understanding of reputation and its value before something goes wrong.
Drawing on her experience at Metro Bank during a crisis, Mona also offered the clearest illustration of what good comms actually looks like in a report:
“I introduced a couple of new slides to our evaluation deck... entitled 'what you didn't see.' I mocked up the headline that would have been in the Telegraph had corporate affairs not intervened, and on the other side I showed what actually happened. And sometimes it was blank... the output is there's nothing, because I stopped all these things from happening.”
The takeaway: the real value of comms is frequently invisible, and that's exactly why it gets underestimated.
Katie Simpson brought the recruiter's view: candidates are now screening employers on structure before they'll even engage with a brief.
“The most senior strategic candidates that know their worth will ask me about that reporting structure before they'll even see the brief... no seat, no conversation.”
She also pointed to the wave of management consultancies and law firms, Alvarez & Marsal and Shillings among them, moving into reputation and crisis advisory work once considered the preserve of comms agencies:
“Reputation is no longer made purely in the boardroom or the courtroom. It is made and unmade in the court of public opinion at extraordinary speed, with little margin for error.”
Her reading: this isn't a threat to the profession, it's the market confirming the work matters enough for everyone to want a share of it.
Andrew McConnell, regulating quantum computing, drone taxis and satellite constellations at the CAA, made the case for getting comms involved at the earliest possible stage of technical decision-making, not just at the point of public explanation:
“Get around that table, listen, be inquisitive, ask the questions, even if they sound like stupid questions, because those stupid questions can really, really help.”
He also spoke candidly about the pressure of operating as a regulator caught between independence and political scrutiny, recalling being summoned to the Treasury alongside sixteen other regulators over the Christmas break:
“It wasn't peace on earth. It was regulators, you need to give us five things.”
His broader point: comms in a regulatory environment can't always tell the story as freely as a commercial business can, which makes trusted relationships and plain language even more important, not less.
Chairing the panel, Madeleine Weightman left the room with a single question to take back to their own businesses:
“Is communications in your business shaping decisions, or just explaining them? If it's the latter, that's not a communications problem, it's a business risk. And it's one every leader in this room has the power to fix.”
Thank you to Katie, Mona, Madeleine and Andrew for such a rich discussion, and to everyone who joined us at The Ivy Club this morning.
The Work Crowd and Hanson Search