The Underlying Strategy
A 5-step framework for building communications strategies that adapt and endure.
Most communications strategies falter before they are ever written.
The planning is solid. The team is capable. The intentions are good. And yet, six months in, the strategy is already drifting.
In my experience, the root cause is almost always the same. The wrong question was asked at the start.
The first question is never “What is the narrative and what are the goals?”
It is always: “What is actually driving this organization right now, and does everyone agree on that?”
Here is how to discover the answer.
Step 1: Research
Dedicate time for a clear historical assessment of the organization’s strategic direction. Does a current strategy exist? What is its time horizon? Is it under review? Was it a continuation of past efforts or a significant shift? The most important question follows:
How does communications map to the broader organizational strategy?
The answer reveals far more than a job description. It shows the role communications is truly expected to play and whether you are being handed a mandate or are being asked to compensate for strategic ambiguity. Recognizing this difference early is critical to your success and your team’s.
Step 2: Internal Stakeholder Interviews
Meet with senior leaders individually, starting with directors and progressing to the C-suite. Your primary goal is to understand their needs, perceptions, goals, and challenges while conducting a reality check. Your secondary goal is to gauge how communications is currently viewed: its perceived strengths, weaknesses, and place within the organization.
Inquire about funding, priorities for the next one to three years, and the concrete results they expect.
Listen closely to how they respond. When answers are vague, gently press for specifics. When questions are turned back on you, allow the conversation to flow before guiding it back. The greatest insights almost always lie in the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what directors are experiencing on the ground.
Step 3: Landscape Analysis
Turn an objective eye to the communications function itself. Set aside its internal reputation and assess it clinically: technology, processes, vendor relationships, team structure and capabilities, and most importantly, its level of integration with the rest of the organization.
The goal is not to obtain the best vendors, the largest budgets, or the most celebrated talent. Instead, it is the most effective combination of talent, tools, and resources for where your organization stands today that will help you build a foundation for sustained growth.
Stay rigorously honest with your findings. Do not reshape reality to fit your initial vision.
This is also the stage to incorporate external research, including competitor positioning, sector trends, regulatory shifts, and the broader stakeholder landscape. These elements help ground the strategy in the real operating environment.
Step 4: Strategic Plan Development
Synthesize your research, interviews, and landscape analysis into a coherent plan.
Align it with top organizational priorities, ensure consistency across divisions, and reflect on historical communications performance.
The plan should not be developed in isolation. Involve your team early, share drafts for input, and brief key stakeholders, including governance bodies and major funders or shareholders, before finalization. Strong internal positioning reduces resistance during implementation.
The deeper work at this stage is identifying misalignment between the strategy on paper, what the CEO states publicly, and what you are hearing from division leaders. Where gaps exist, raise them. Your responsibility is to discern the organization’s actual, living strategy and build communications support around that reality, not the aspirational version.
Step 5: Measurement and Revision
Measurement and revision are two disciplines universally acknowledged as essential, yet rarely practiced with consistency.
Define from the outset what will be tracked, how data will be collected and analyzed, reporting frequency, and target audiences. Build the infrastructure and data fluency within the team before it is needed.
I have seen too many strong strategies undermined when leadership requested performance insights and the systems or skills to deliver them were not in place. A strategy that cannot defend itself with evidence quickly loses credibility.
Revise proactively when the data indicates a need. Treat the strategy as a living, breathable document; one that evolves in step with the organization and its operating environment.
This five-step approach focuses on the essential foundational work: decoding whether there is true alignment between the strategic vision on paper, what leadership believes it to be, and what the organization is actually experiencing day to day. Get this foundation right, and the rest of your strategic plan development flows naturally with far greater clarity, buy-in, and resilience.
I work with leadership teams to develop strategies that deliver real impact. If you are facing challenges with your current strategy, I would be happy to connect.