Your problems are communications problems
Internal comms expert Joanna Parsons on AI, curiosity, and why communication isn't dissemination—plus a reading list for writing at work
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I helped Bek Ventures’ investment team surface a bunch of thinking about their work, and I often come back to the framework they use when a founder comes with an issue. One of the first questions the team asks is, “Is this a communications issue?”
It sounds simple, but I’d go so far as to say the majority of problems in organizations stem from a failure of communications—strategy not clear, expectations not spelled out, or information not shared between teams. The effect of poorly written emails and Slack messages can reverberate. This is why people who are great at internal comms fascinate me.
This week, I spoke to Dublin-based internal communications expert Joanna Parsons. She led crisis comms for Ireland’s national police force during the pandemic and developed an internal comms strategy for employees across 25 countries at Teamwork. She now runs her own consultancy and a membership community for internal comms professionals.
Key takeaways
Communication doesn’t equal dissemination. Sending something out is not enough. You have to understand your audience and have a clear objective to get employees to behave the way you want.
AI is more than a content marketer. Use it to stress-test your ideas, role-play as your leaders, turn data into stories for your boss, and set measurable goals.
Curiosity is the difference between someone tactical and someone strategic. If you’re not asking questions, you’re delivering purely what stakeholders tell you. Ask questions, and you can tap into what they really need.
Walk me through your career—how did you get into internal communications?
I didn’t even know internal comms was a thing until I fell into it. It’s the kind of profession many people fall into and then quickly fall in love with it—that’s certainly what happened to me. My background is in sociology, which turned out to be the best possible foundation for this work, even if I didn’t realise it at the time. Sociology is fundamentally about understanding how people behave in groups, how power operates, how narratives form. That academic background has been very helpful to me in the world of internal comms.
What’s your definition of internal comms, and what does it cover?
Internal comms is kind of the glue that holds a company together. If a company can communicate well and develop a shared understanding of what matters, then this can really help the company succeed. We’ve probably all worked somewhere that had crap communication, and it can be a huge problem in companies to the point where people quit, projects fail, and money is wasted.
“If a company can communicate well and develop a shared understanding of what matters, then this can really help the company succeed.”
What does good internal communications look like? What do companies get wrong about it?
Companies often assume that if we send something out, then the communication is done. Box ticked. But of course, communication does not equal dissemination. Communication requires audience understanding and action. So we need to be thinking about who our audience is, what we need them to do, what understanding they already have on this topic, whether they are likely to resist and why, and what we need to communicate in order to drive the desired behaviour change.
There’s a lot of good, deep thinking and planning that goes into comms, far beyond “just send it out”. Good comms starts with a clear objective and links to business priorities, not with tactics or tasks.
“Good comms starts with a clear objective and links to business priorities, not with tactics or tasks.”
What are the attributes of good writing in internal comms?
I’m not sure there’s one clean answer here because your writing will always be different depending on the audience you’re targeting. It’s easy to say “you should always write like XYZ” or “best practice is ABC,” but it’s nuanced and subjective in reality.
Some audiences will appreciate brevity, others want more depth and context. Some audiences won’t tolerate any acronyms, and others may think you’re dumbing it down without using their familiar acronyms. So again, it’s always about knowing your audience and thinking about how to communicate effectively with them.
How do you use AI, and how do you advise internal comms professionals to use AI?
Use it as a sparring partner or a thinking partner, get it to review your ideas and point out holes in your concepts. Get it to role-play as your leaders or members of your target audience. Use it to help set measurable objectives, annual goals, or reporting dashboards. Use it to turn your data into stories targeted at your boss or your leaders. It’s a whole world of possibilities, and I encourage everyone to experiment with it.
What skills do you think internal comms professionals need in the future?
Curiosity is the superpower I think all effective internal comms pros need to master. Ask questions, then ask some more. Observe deeply and get curious about what’s really happening and what the actual business need is. This helps you move beyond operating as a pair of hands and into the strategic space. Asking questions will help you shift from delivering what stakeholders want (“I want a poster”) to understanding what stakeholders really need (“I need employees to stop doing X and to do Y instead”).
Indulging your curiosity will make you more valuable and impactful in the business, and anyone can do it. You don’t need a budget, you don’t need to take a course, you just need a bit of guts to be the one in the meeting to say, “What problem are we trying to solve?” or “Can we clarify our objective here?”
“Asking questions will help you shift from delivering what stakeholders want (‘I want a poster’) to understanding what stakeholders really need (‘I need employees to stop doing X and to do Y instead’).”
🐳 Go deeper
Joanna's point that communication isn't dissemination got me thinking about how important writing is in getting the right message across. I think obsessively about how I’m writing for things as small as Slack messages, because it’s in those little interactions that information gets lost or our intention doesn’t come across. Here’s what I’ve been reading to write better recently:
Research has shown that articles that counter reader assumptions are seen as more interesting and hold attention; Joanna explains how to harness this in writing in the workplace.
Former Facebook exec Molly Graham (most famous for the “give away your Legos” framework) believes the most counterintuitive thing needed to scale past 50 employees is communications. Love this: “Always craft your comms for the person who just started this week.”
Entrepreneur Wes Kao lists the words to delete to make you sound more positive, authoritative, and warmer. Cannot agree more with her advice to delete “just”—I am hacking this word out of my messages to colleagues all the time.
Software engineering leader and writer Will Larson talks about Barbara Minto’s The Pyramid Principle as a path to clear business writing. (Fun fact: I met Barb at a networking event in London, and she chided me both for not being married and for living in Shoreditch.)
✨ One more thing
This week, I published a piece in Every about it’s more important to show true expertise as AI enables more automation. But how do you demonstrate that expertise? One answer is portfolios—think what creative professionals have always had, but for knowledge workers. Given the amount of feedback, the piece has struck a chord. Wonder what my readers think…Reply and let me know.