This is the second in a regular series of blogs on Lessons from Communication Reviews where Westco’s Director of Communications, Simon Jones, analyses key issues that have cropped up in Westco’s 40-plus audits across public services. This week, he looks at the importance of establishing a clear narrative and vision.

 

In my first blog, The Importance of Communications Leadership, I discussed the importance of a confident communication skipper at the organisational helm to navigate the choppy seas of reputation and trust. Alongside this, which we often find is missing, is the significance of a clear narrative and vision when charting the course ahead.

 

The power of narrative and vision

 

I think of a narrative and vision as a kind of organisational glue. The more powerful the vision, the stronger the glue, and the more effective the organisation is because it has a clear set of priorities that everyone can unite behind and collaborate on. According to the latest LGA survey, four out of ten councils do not have a corporate narrative. 

 

Even when one is in place, it’s often internally rather than externally focused. One of the reasons why a corporate narrative is so important is that it can help to form a strong brand identity that reflects the organisation’s mission and purpose, which in turn breeds confidence and trust.

 

For communications, the clearer and more distilled the organisational vision, the easier it is to set a sensible work plan that makes the best use of available resources. Without this (and it’s something we often see), comms teams are constantly being battered by endless, uncoordinated demands from various services without any organisational prioritisation. 

 

Bridging the gap

 

For comms teams, it can often seem like an endless merry-go-round that risks communications being about the process of ‘delivering stuff’ rather than focusing on tangible outcomes. So, why does this happen? Because, by their nature, councils and NHS organisations can easily operate as a collection of five or six different business areas with their own statutory demands and expectations. 

 

It requires very strong organisational and political will to unite them. The absence of this is reflected in corporate plans with too many loosely defined priorities grouped around a few ‘strategic areas’. This means that there isn’t really any prioritisation at all. In communications planning, our role is to help distil those priorities into something more meaningful. 

 

A good test to set is asking organisational leaders to agree on 10 priorities (rather than 30), which communications could play a meaningful role in helping to deliver. 

 

Streamlining corporate plans

 

The second role we should play, which is often overlooked, is translating the corporate plan into something understandable that the community, partners, and staff can engage with. This is a surprisingly challenging task because the process of translation and, therefore, clarification, often forces us to confront difficult questions about the true meaning of what we are doing – something that the original vague language avoids.

 

The process of producing a ’public version’ of the corporate plan is usually much more interesting to politicians which can bring its own complications and is probably one of the reasons most councils are reluctant to do this.

 

Yet, the point is that the more involved communications are in helping form public-facing priorities by asking those awkward questions and by aligning politicians and officers on the same page, the more influence we’ll have when it comes to dictating the work plan and the resources that sit within it. 

 

For more insight from our work in the public sector, download our full report on Lessons From Our Communication Reviews.

 

 

Author: 

Simon Jones is the Director of Communications for Westco. He is a former Chair of LGcomms and worked as Director of Communications for London Boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham and Haringey over ten years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the second in a regular series of blogs on Lessons from Communication Reviews where Westco’s Director of Communications, Simon Jones, analyses key issues that have cropped up in Westco’s 40-plus audits across public services.