Sunday, October 25, 2026
Sunday, October 25, 2026
Mike Klein:
On October 16, I spent eight hours at the Communication Leadership Summit USA in Washington, DC. It was one of the most diverse groups of communication leaders I’ve ever convened. Internal comms heads and crisis specialists. Agency owners and measurement experts. Academics, a professional storyteller, and practitioners from defense, healthcare, finance, insurance, shipping, nonprofits and associations – from across the US and Canada.
No keynotes. No vendor pitches. An unconference: they set the agenda, and they did the work.
They did it against a backdrop that is genuinely existential for this profession.
AI is absorbing the tactical work many of us were hired to do. Private equity owners are cutting functions entirely. Layoffs have come uncoupled from performance. Trust is eroding while bots manufacture outrage.
There was lots for us to talk about. But the key to the day’s success was how we talked about it.
I’ll be honest about why we built the day this way.
I’ve come to loathe pay-to-play conferences – the ones where consultants buy their way onto the stage, or in-house teams present their case studies as if they were unique pieces of revealed wisdom.
Most case studies are developed in isolation, and most share the same basic elements. You sit, you observe, you leave with a lanyard.
So, together with IABC, we did the opposite.
Participants pitched topics in the morning. The room voted with its feet. Small groups sat around flip charts and argued, with someone taking notes and more than a few phones recording. At the end of each session, every group had to name its next steps – not just its insights.
The result was something you rarely get at a conference: practitioners talking to each other rather than performing for each other.
People admitted what wasn’t working.
They challenged each other’s assumptions. They shared stories they’d never put on a slide.
One participant said they’d started treating conferences like comedy shows – if 30 or 40% of it lands, it was worth it. By that standard, this one did rather better.
There were twelve breakouts across the day, on everything from crisis communication and AI to getting – and keeping – a seat at the table. A few moments from five of them give a sense of the range.
Measurement. The group swapped stories about what actually gets attention. One communicator had written subject lines as blunt as “If you do nothing, you will not have coverage next year” – and still watched people miss open enrollment. Then a note asking employees to book a new badge photo went out, and the inbox flooded. The lesson wasn’t about channels. It was about effort: people act immediately on what takes five seconds and postpone what requires thought, a conversation with a spouse, or a decision.
Keeping audiences central. I opened with the eight engagement personas from my forthcoming book, Unbreaking Engagement – from the archetypal loyalist to the mercenary, the grappler who challenges the organization because he wants it to be better, and the terrified compliant employee who will never take a risk. Treat a workforce as that mix, and chasing a 100% engagement score makes no sense. The room took it from there, into channel fatigue, champion programs, and the leader who assumes everyone lives in Teams when half the workforce is on a ship.
Culture and values. Participants compared value statements: four simple words on one company’s wall, versus seven values at another – including one, “see beyond,” whose meaning nobody could explain. One described a full-day workshop where employees confirmed their values, wrote down the behaviors that demonstrated them, then spent the afternoon telling stories of colleagues living them. Another described a culture initiative letting employees choose the name on their badge – which ran straight into a safety team that needs to know exactly who is on a train after an accident.
Truth and trust. A professional storyteller observed that America was the only country where audience members ran up after a performance to ask “Is that true?” Elsewhere, she said, listeners are taught to discern for themselves. A veteran ethics professor offered the line that stuck with many people: a value is not something you believe – it’s something you’re prepared to enforce, even at cost. The professor described a large company whose DEI communication team remains intact, even at the risk of losing government contracts.
Professional development for 2030. A university professor described standing in front of a class of 120 students whose parents have each spent tens of thousands of dollars on their education – and asking whether the curriculum is preparing them for work that AI is already reshaping. The group’s answer started with a simple idea: stop calling it “professional development,” and start calling it leadership.
What gave the day its depth was that people didn’t always agree with each other. Some of the best moments were genuine arguments.
On executive pay and privacy. In the culture session, one participant asked who communicators are to tell a billionaire founder he can’t own a yacht – and suggested some employees are a bit entitled about what executives should or shouldn’t have. Another pushed back hard: the issue isn’t one yacht, it’s that people inside these companies are struggling to pay their bills while the gap keeps widening. Communicators, they argued, have to read the social, political and economic environment their messages land in. A third offered a middle path, describing a company that turned its value of “empowerment” into financial planning support for employees, alongside its push for a livable wage. Nobody fully resolved it. Nobody pretended to.
On whether executives need different rules. An agency leader floated an idea they admitted wasn’t fully thought through: perhaps the CEO of a large company needs an additional set of expected behaviors, as the organization’s most public representative – not exemption from its values, but extra obligations on top of them. Others countered that you can’t have it both ways: employees say they want to know their CEO as a person, then judge every glimpse of that person’s life.
On what truth even is. In the trust session, a storyteller who studies the neuroscience of memory said truth had become less morally clear to her over the years. Others insisted that there is one truth, and that what people call “my truth” is really perception. An ethics professor drew the most useful distinction: true statements, lowercase, are not the same as the Truth, capital T – and most reputational damage happens in the leap from one to the other.
These weren’t side arguments. They are the arguments communicators have to manage inside their organizations every day. It was useful to have them with peers who could disagree well.
At the end of the day, we pulled the chairs into one big circle, and we explored the question that had been running underneath every breakout: what is a communication professional actually for? Not what we do. What we’re for – the part that AI can’t do and a restructuring can’t easily absorb.
The answers came quickly, and they were good ones:
It’s a strong list. It’s also a list that tells you something about where the profession stands – which is where the three themes of the day come in.
Look at that list from the closing circle again: judgment, connection, truth, courage.
Nobody said leadership until I mentioned it.
That gap is the story. Courage is what you need when you don’t have authority. Leadership is what you exercise when you do. All day, people described acting as the organization’s conscience and its forcing function – mostly without a formal seat, often at personal cost. The room was clear about what’s missing: business literacy, data we create rather than inherit, and the willingness to stop waiting for permission.
The most candid conversation of the day was about our own house. Holders of the same accreditation called it “a wonderful experience” and “largely worthless” within minutes of each other. Professional development is abundant and directionless – the same AI webinar from five organizations, little for senior people, and employers who’ve stopped paying for any of it.
The room landed on one word: requires. Prosci and PMP matter because contracts require them. Until the people who hire us require our credentials, those credentials are essentially conference ribbons. And with the profession’s associations involving 3% of the profession, whatever comes next has to reach the other 97%.
AI is stripping out the production layer of communications. What survives is what machines and spreadsheets can’t do: judgment, truth under pressure, real knowledge of audiences, and knowing who people actually listen to.
But essential value only survives if it can be seen.
That’s why the quiet devaluation of measurement worries me most. When communicators report opens and reach because that’s what’s easy, they’re measuring exactly the work that’s easiest to automate – and handing out reasons to cut rather than keep. Measurement isn’t a reporting chore. It’s how the profession proves it belongs.
None of these are new conversations. What was new was the room – people from so many corners of the profession, willing to be candid with each other, and coming out with common ground and concrete ideas rather than another list of grievances.
Some of it is already in motion. In the closing session, the room agreed that the first step on professional community isn’t building yet another one – it’s mapping what already exists and cutting the duplication. I’ll be picking that up with colleagues at IABC and with the founder of a network for senior communication leaders. Ed Davis of Agency X, whose support made the day possible, made the case that conversations like these should be happening on this side of the Atlantic regularly, not once. I agree, and we intend to make it so.
Over the coming weeks, Strategic will publish pieces focusing on each of these three themes, drawn from what was actually said in those breakouts.
My thanks to everyone who came, to IABC for co-producing the day with us, and to Ed and Agency X team.
These are unforgiving times for communicators. On the evidence of one long Friday in Washington, the profession has people capable of meeting them. Now it needs the will.
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