Written by “We just need better messaging; no one understands this.”
If you are a member of the comms team in government or organisations, you have heard this many times. The decisions have been made, the policy set, the announcement is coming, and the strategic comms plan has been written. The first round of content has been deployed, and this is the first follow-up with the project team. And this is the feedback.
The problem is not the communication itself. It is the assumption sitting underneath it. That communication is a distribution function. The real work happens in all of the strategic planning sessions, and the comms team’s job is to package it up and send it out once the thinking is done.
Getting the communications team too late has a huge cost associated with it. It affects the quality of the decisions themselves.
This gets missed when communications is treated as the last step rather than the first. A story is not just a way of explaining what happened. It is a way of discovering what is happening. Present tense, not past. It is a tool for finding the human emotions and feelings underlying a policy, a program or a change initiative. Where the tensions and unspoken trade-offs lie. Connecting with the people most affected who are not in the room. Finding the language that will resonate by reflecting the actual language that is used by the people who are most impacted. And understanding what language will inflame them.
When you use storytelling as a discovery tool from day one, you find the change makers early. The people whose stories hold the truth of what this decision means in practice. The community members, the frontline workers, and the advocates who have been living the problem that the policy is trying to solve. Their stories do not just make the communication more compelling later. They make the strategy better now.
The problem with bringing communications at the end
Delaying the involvement of communications until after the research is finished and the strategy is finalised means treating stories as window dressing rather than qualitative data. Adding them at the end, after the most difficult challenges are already set in stone, creates a gap that is hard to close. The assumptions have hardened, the trade-offs are locked, and the narrative is guided by logic, not living, breathing human lives. Without a storytelling lens present to surface and synthesise meaning as it happens, the human truth of the change is lost in the documentation long before it ever reaches communications channels.
In my work with public sector entities and local councils, I have observed that community or staff sentiment regarding fairness, timing, or change-related friction frequently hardens before the first official sentence is ever composed. Even the most significant policy advantages struggle to alter a narrative that has already solidified. Not because they lack substance, but because no one was present to uncover the human truth while the story was still in its discovery phase.
When communications is embedded early, discovering more nuanced community and employee concerns is easier. Testing language before it becomes official shapes a clearer, credible story along with its stakeholders. Complexity is not reduced, but friction is. The story that eventually reaches the public or employees is clearer and more honest because it was built alongside rather than retrofitted after the work has been done.
The trust gap that data is already measuring
The cost of being heard late is not abstract; it is backed by data.
The 2026 Workhuman Humans at Work Barometer surveyed over 6,000 workers across ten countries and found a pattern they describe as a profitability paradox. 72% of workers describe their organisation’s profitability and growth as good or great. Yet 48% say work used to be a better experience than it is today, 51% feel more pressure than they did a year ago, and 48% end most working days mentally exhausted.
Organisations are performing well financially, and their people are paying the cost.
This gap between organisational success and human experience is precisely where trust erodes. And the erosion is happening quietly, in the space between what an organisation thinks it is communicating and their people’s lives.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer adds another dimension to this picture. Global trust in traditional institutions has weakened significantly, with net trust in leaders of national governments dropping by 16 percentage points and trust in major news organisations falling by 11 points. On the other hand, trust has increased among immediate, local circles, with coworkers and CEOs among employees, both seeing net increases. As fears rise, trust becomes highly localised.
This is significant for anyone working in communications, policy or organisational change. People are not totally withdrawing trust. They are redirecting it toward the people and institutions they experience directly. Organisations that invest in being present in people’s stories early, rather than explaining decisions after the fact, are operating within people’s field of trust.
Building genuine trust is not about having the most sophisticated communications plans. It is about creating the conditions to hear the real story early enough to let it shape what they do next.
Communications is not a translation service
The strongest practitioners I work with do not just translate decisions into plain language. We work together to design them with their people.
We pressure test the strategy by asking the questions that policy teams sometimes forget to ask. Who is most affected by this? Where will resistance come from? What behaviour are we actually trying to enable? What happens if this is misunderstood by the people who need to act on it?
That is not messaging work. That is policy design thinking that draws on behavioural science, service design and systems thinking. It sits at the intersection of narrative and strategy, which is exactly where communications should sit.
Stories need to be tested as they are discovered
A story is not a finished object you hand to someone. It is a living thing that changes depending on who is in the room, the questions they ask and what is reflected in their language.
The meaning of a story becomes clear when you put it out into the world and see how it lands. Which parts resonate? What is confusing? Which parts make people lean in and which parts make them look away? You cannot know that from inside the building. You can only know it from testing the story early, often and with the people it affects.
The best narrative strategy work happens continuously, in the discovery, design, and consultation phase. Then there is room to change something based on what the story is telling you. By the time a decision is announced, the story should already have been through several iterations in the real world. Not as a finished communication, but as a working draft shaped by the people who are impacted the most.
What this means in practice
If you work in communications, advocacy, policy or change management, the question worth asking is not how to communicate a decision that has been made. The question is whether you have shaped the story around that decision, and if it was early enough to make a difference to the strategy.
If you are not sure whether your story is ready, whether it is clear enough, specific enough and fit for the audience it needs to reach, the Story Fit Diagnostic is designed to help you work that out before you put it out into the world.
Have a play with it and start testing your ideas and assumptions early and often.
Take the Story Fit Diagnostic →
Sources
Workhuman 2026 Humans at Work Barometer — annual global study of 6,024 employees across ten countries, published April 2026. workhuman.com/resources/reports-guides/2026-workhuman-global-barometer-report
2026 Edelman Trust Barometer — survey of 33,938 adults across 28 countries, conducted October to November 2025. edelman.com/trust
Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations 