THREE OUTCOMES:
Most organizations do not have a communication problem. They have departments describing the same problem in incompatible ways, and a decision that keeps being relitigated.
Alignment
I find the real disagreement, put it in front of the people who own it with a shared set of facts, and help them decide. Then I build the rhythm that keeps them decided.
A provincial health authority was rolling out a new IT system to unionized staff who did not want or trust it. Rather than another awareness campaign, we trained champions from the unions and put them on the floor in blue “Ask Me” shirts. The rollout landed 30 to 40 days ahead of leadership’s expectations and saved $25 million in the first year.
Trust
Trust is the operating asset in a public body. It is spent faster than it is earned, and it is usually lost in the gap between what leadership has decided and what everyone else understands.
An international deep-water port with 25,000 workers had a climbing injury rate that no campaign had moved. We made custom work gloves, “think safety” on the left wrist and “act safely” on the right, so the message sat in a worker’s hands at the moment the decision was made. All communication stemmed from that message, and so did incentives based on learned behaviour. Leadership set the return at eight dollars for every dollar spent, and the injury rate fell.
Delivery
A strategy that stays in a deck changes nothing. I build the systems that keep an organization aligned after the attention moves on: issues registers, approval and escalation paths, plain-language standards, and measurement that reports outcomes rather than output.
A 50,000-employee organization acquiring an 8,000-employee one had real concerns about culture, purpose, vision and alignment. We built a private, internal podcast that ran for two years. It cut onboarding costs by nearly $20 million and brought attrition in ten percent below forecast.
HOW I WORK
I interview people. I run focus groups and surveys. I collect stories anonymously so people will say the “true things” rather than the “safe things.” Then I read across those narratives to find where departments describe the same thing differently, because that gap is usually the real problem.
I bring the people who disagree into a room with a shared set of facts, create the conditions for trust, and help them agree on what happens next. I can bring technology into that process, and I do, but the judgement stays with people. Technology in the loop, humans at the helm.
WHAT A PUBLIC BODY ASKS OF YOU
I am comfortable with accountability to a board and a ministry; unionized and distributed workforces; access-to-information and records obligations; plain-language and accessibility expectations; and the reality that in a public body the process has to be right as well as the outcome.
That last one is the part that outsiders underestimate. A correct answer reached by a process nobody trusts is not a correct answer in this world.
WHAT I OWN
Change and employee communications. Stakeholder and executive relations. Customer and client experience. Strategic projects that nobody else has the bandwidth to carry from idea through to completion.
THE SHORT VERSION
People who have worked with me call me a peacetime consigliere. It is a polite way of saying I am the person you call before it becomes a problem.
