A leadership team approves a new strategy. Two companies merge. An organization restructures. A major investment gets the green light. The business case is sound, the decision is made, and the communications team starts preparing the announcement.
That’s usually where the real risk begins.
In 2010, Kraft acquired Cadbury after publicly committing to keep Cadbury’s Somerdale factory open. A week after the deal closed, Kraft shut it anyway. The UK’s Takeover Panel found Kraft had made that promise without a reasonable basis for it, and the fallout led to a rewrite of the UK’s takeover rules. The acquisition went through. The cost, in credibility and in law, showed up afterward.
A decision can make complete commercial sense and still cost a business dearly in the execution. I’ve watched that gap play out from three different seats over nearly 18 years: inside a multinational agency, building campaigns for decisions other people had already made; in-house, as the client responsible for making a change stick inside a real organization; and now as a consultant, advising leaders from outside the business. Each seat taught me something the other two couldn’t. The risk almost never sits in the decision itself. It sits in the distance between what leadership has decided and what people are prepared, willing or able to do about it.
The announcement is a milestone, not the outcome
Most organizations bring communications in once the decision is made: write the messaging, prep the executives, land the announcement. Those are real tasks. None of them tell you whether the change will actually work.
The misunderstanding I run into most often, from leaders who are otherwise excellent at their jobs, is believing a strong decision explains itself. A packed town hall doesn’t mean managers can field hard questions. Good press doesn’t mean customers are ready for what’s different. And a clear rationale doesn’t mean there won’t be employee pushback once the decision meets people’s daily reality. The question worth asking isn’t “how do we communicate this change.” It’s “what has to happen for this to succeed, and do we understand the people who have to make it happen.” That second question only gets answered if communications is in the room before the plan is final, while there’s still something to change about it.
What a tactical advisor misses that a strategic one catches
Most of my early training was on the agency side, building the best possible version of a message for a decision the client had already made. That work matters, and it teaches real craft, but it doesn’t teach you to ask whether the message is the right fix. That question didn’t fully form for me until I sat on the other side of the table, as the client.
Leading communications at a global imaging and technology company, I worked on changes that never made headlines: new agency partners, risk-management programs, CRM and workflow overhauls, teams realigned across divisions, and a transition at the CFO level that touched finance, legal and nearly every function in the business at once.
That transition taught me something the smaller changes hadn’t: there is no single message that reassures everyone. Employees wanted to know what stability looked like day to day. Partners wanted continuity. Leadership wanted confidence the handover wouldn’t slow anything down. Treating all three as one audience, with one message, would have satisfied none of them. That is where my real education in strategic communications began, not in writing the announcement, but in working out what each group actually needed before I wrote anything at all.
I also watched, over several years in that seat, what consistent employee communication actually does for an organization. It wasn’t one campaign or one town hall. It was steady, honest, two-way communication sustained long after the news cycle around any single change had passed, and employees stayed because they trusted that leadership would tell them what they needed to know, not just what was convenient to announce. That is a harder thing to build than a single well-run announcement, and it only shows up as a result years later, not in the week after a decision is made.
A tactical advisor takes the decision as fixed and makes it sound good. A strategic advisor asks who actually has to behave differently, whether they’re equipped to, and what breaks first if they’re not. Often the answer isn’t a messaging fix. It’s a leadership alignment problem, a training gap, or a sequencing error that no single announcement, however well written, can paper over. That’s the counsel I bring into every engagement now: not better words for the decision, but a harder look at whether the decision can actually be executed as planned, for every audience it touches.
Trust is earned by answering the real question, not the comfortable one
When my son started daycare, he was nine months old and he howled as I left him. What came back in communications was a template update: a photo of the play area, a line about the sky being clear, a note about how much the children enjoyed the morning outdoors. None of it answered what I actually wanted to know. Had he stopped crying? Had he eaten? Was he sleeping? Was he playing? That’s the gap in some change work: leadership sends out the version of the update that sounds reassuring in general, while the people on the receiving end are asking something much narrower and more immediate.
Trust isn’t built by deciding what will reassure people. It’s built by finding out what they actually need to know and answering that.
When the organization isn’t the one driving the change
My work in Canada’s post-secondary sector showed me a different version of the same problem: sometimes leadership is navigating as much uncertainty as everyone else, forced into a decision by policy or funding pressure before the implications are clear. Employees, students and partners still expect answers leadership doesn’t have yet.
The skill here isn’t optimism. It’s knowing the difference between what’s known, what isn’t, and what you’re not yet in a position to promise. Get it wrong and a partner walks, a government relationship cools, or the institution spends years rebuilding ground it lost in one news cycle. Sometimes what stakeholders raise should change the decision, not just the explanation of it.
What AI adoption is exposing
AI is the clearest live example of comms being asked to solve a problem it can’t solve alone. Companies are setting ambitious adoption targets and leaning on communications to drive uptake. But an employee with a real question about job security or data privacy doesn’t need a better announcement. They need an answer. Skip that, and the cost isn’t a quiet rollout, it’s shadow use leadership can’t see, a workforce quietly working around the tool, and a trust problem that surfaces publicly the first time something goes wrong.
Strategic comms changes the decision. Tactical comms explains it.
Here’s the distinction I apply on every file:
| Tactical response | Strategic counsel | |
| Starting question | How do we explain this well? | Will this actually hold? |
| When it’s used | After the decision is final | Before the decision is final |
| What it fixes | The message | The plan |
| What it catches | Nothing it didn’t already know | Risks leadership hasn’t priced in |
Brought in after the plan is locked, even the best communicator can only manage the fallout of a decision nobody tested. Brought in before, that same person can change what leadership decides to do in the first place.
A recurring employee question can mean unclear accountability, not unclear messaging. Customer confusion can mean the rollout wasn’t ready. Stakeholder opposition can mean the plan itself has to change. Strategic counsel means working with operations, HR, legal and government relations to pressure-test that, and sometimes telling leadership something it didn’t want to hear.
In 2008, Tata Motors abandoned a nearly complete car plant in Singur, West Bengal, after sustained opposition from farmers whose land had been acquired for the project. The company relocated the entire factory to Gujarat, a move that cost years and a significant sum it hadn’t planned for. The commercial case for the plant was never the problem. The absence of resolved consent with the people living next to it was.
I saw that same risk pressure-tested directly in Crestview’s data centre simulation exercise, where colleagues from our international offices worked through a major approvals fight before any real client faces one. I played the lead advisor to the proponent, with a clear mandate: get the project approved. Two days in, my own team concluded that pushing the approval through on the commercial case alone was the wrong call, and we recommended deferring the project until community commitments could actually be verified, against our own stated objective. That’s the discipline strategic counsel requires: being willing to tell leadership the commercial case isn’t enough on its own, before the decision goes out the door, not after.
What strategic communications actually measures
the change did. I want to know if employees understand their new responsibilities, if managers can support their teams, if people are actually using the new process, and if the same stakeholder concerns keep resurfacing. Communications doesn’t own every one of those outcomes, but it should be the function connecting what’s happening on the ground back to the decisions leadership is still making. The real measure of our counsel isn’t the campaign. It’s whether leadership made a better-informed call before the cost of ignoring a risk became expensive.
The announcement tells people what’s decided. Strategic counsel tells them what it will take to make it work.
I’ve seen change from the agency chair, the client chair and the consultant’s chair: M&A integrations, brands built from nothing, technology adoptions, policies retired, institutions navigating forces outside their control. The questions never change: what is the organization actually trying to achieve, who has to live with the change, what hasn’t been tested, and what is leadership willing to do differently once it finds out.
If your organization is heading into a decision like this, building an organizational change communication strategy before the announcement goes out is the conversation worth having, not after.
Anu Naveen Sharma is a Senior Consultant at Crestview Strategy and President of IABC Ottawa, part of the International Association of Business Communicators. She brings nearly 18 years of experience across Canada and India in strategic communications, corporate reputation, issues and crisis management, and stakeholder engagement.
