Communications As Craftsmanship
How Communications Professionals Can Rise Above Banality
Greetings, Comms-rades,
The communications profession can be more than a job well done. If we want and try, the comms professional can achieve a level more often associated with handicrafts. Communications can be craftsmanship.
Artificial intelligence, limited budgets and resources, cookie-cutter templates, and half-hearted work are threats to the quality of work and to our profession at large.
The first essay (below) in this eight-part series is free to all readers. The subsequent essays are reserved for Mister Editorial’s paid members.
Let’s rise to the occasion.
This series is inspired by Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Pye died in 1993. He was an architect, industrial designer, and craftsman. For many years he was also the Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art in London. In Workmanship Pye explores the meaning of skill and its relationship to design and manufacture. I’ve applied his philosophy to the work of professional communicators.
Communications As Craftsmanship
How Communications Professionals Can Rise Above Banality
Chapter 1. Consultants Propose. Professionals Dispose.
A consultant is a person who decides on and conveys the “plan,” what is to be done. (In other industries, this person might be called a “designer.”) Consultants typically come from external agencies, but they can be inside the company too–we typically refer to them as “internal stakeholders.” Sometimes the role of the consultant is also played by the professional who ends up doing the work.
By “consultant” I simply mean the person who is generally at a remove from doing the actual work.
Steve Jobs on consulting
In this series I distinguish between the “consultant” and, for lack of a more artful name for the counterpart, the “communications professional.” (It’s less artful because consultants are also professionals.) The distinction is between the designer and the doer.
Why am I distinguishing consultants from comms professionals? Because, in practice, the consultant hopes that the work (the comms plan, effort, and outcome) will be good. But in the end, only the comms professional decides whether the work will be good. On his or her decision and action depends a great part of the quality of the output.
When an organization like the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) bestows its prestigious Gold Quill award, they are unconsciously paying tribute to the high-quality work of that plan. It is a great plan because the comms team has made it so. A well-designed plan is useless without the work.
Agencies that win Gold Quills do so because they are able to exploit what their counterparts on the in-house comms teams have set up, created, and done. With many awards programs (not just the IABC’s), the in-house professionals who create, write, publish, distribute, archive, and measure the winning communications programs, as well as wrangle the many internal stakeholders, learn and struggle with the technology, fight for budgets, and take the heat for any mishaps, often remain in the shadows.
The Limits of Consultation
There may be within the business an entire domain of quality work for which the consultant likely has had no role. Indeed the consultant is in debt to the comms professionals, for most of their lot has been cast by the in-house team. The intranet or the newsletter tool or the dashboard or the website or the headcount don’t just magically appear. Such materiel is the result of hard-fought battles and years of struggle and success by someone else. The consultant is lucky to have such resources around which to design a program.
A reasonable person can argue that a consultant can take credit for great work and shift blame for bad work. When a comms plan is supremely done by the comms professional, external consultants will embrace the effort and submit such work for an industry award. But…a consultant will not and cannot be held responsible for shoddy work. They can lament it and point it out and even wash their hands of the affair. But short of embedding themselves or their representatives into the company’s comms team, they can’t improve the work.
There are limits to consultation. In theory every precise element can be defined. The word count, exact time of publication, hex codes, font sizes, decibel levels for the music playing over the b-roll, and on and on. But that would be too onerous for the consultant and would slow down the professional immensely as they strive for exactness. Therefore interpretation by the professional is needed. “Some materials promise far more than others,” says David Pye, “but only the workman can bring out what they promise.”
Ideas and plans and strategies are given the limelight. But what is a winning content strategy without the stories? What is a winning crisis comms without the precisely sent communique? What is the winning intranet rebuild without the IT team?
Consultants need the interpretation and work of the comms professional. This work must be elevated.
What Is at Stake?
There are two threats to the comms profession and neither one of them has to do with consultants (directly, anyway). The first is ever-present and the second is on a not-too-distant horizon.
First, budgets. Communications is an overhead cost. In a recession or in a bad market, technical and sales talent will get the money. Marketing, HR, and Comms are among the first to get cut. We are always at the mercy of conditions beyond our control. This is an existential threat insomuch the existence of the position is up for consideration.
Second, artificial intelligence and cookie-cutter comms. More and more news stories (journalism) are being written by bots. It’s only a matter of time before AI technology is regularly used for corporate communications. Similarly, templated (cookie-cutter) comms, like those built by newsletter companies, are kind of like the technologies now present in grocery stores. The self-checkout systems can do the work of six people, but require only one person to oversee the operation and troubleshoot. AI and cookie-cutter enabling technology are existential threats insomuch the meaning of the work is at stake. This is my main concern.
This series does not go into detail about either of these existential threats. For argument’s sake, let’s accept the premise that the existence of our jobs is under constant threat. The best way to survive is to distinguish our efforts and to elevate and deepen the quality of our work and professionalism in ways that markedly distinguish us from the alternatives.
What is at stake is diversity, agility, ingenuity, innovation, depth, nuance, creativity, cleverness, wit, charm, and all those things that engage the employee in ways that can’t be achieved by algorithms, hacks, and amateurs.
The flattening of the comms industry isn’t inevitable. Communications professionals must be recognized for the deep quality of our work or we will lose to banality. Preserving our profession begins with us.
Next week: Chapter 2. Craftsmanship, Certainty, and Risk
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Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I am the editor-in-chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research. The views in this newsletter are my own.