The answer for an unpredictably uncertain 2025? Time for some crowdsourcing and action

26 December 2024 Reading Time: 5 minutes

by Mike Klein:

“It is easier to create the future than to predict it.” – Alan Kay

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about anticipating and predicting trends for 2025.  Heck, there’s even been some debating about it – as you can see in the video of the #WeLeadComms debate on the subject earlier this month.

Following a year of global political change and turmoil which upended the establishment in many countries, leading most prominently to the upcoming inauguration of the second Trump era, we now face a coming year that seems unpredictably uncertain.

So, there are three things we as communication leaders can do to strengthen our position in the face of all this chaos:

1. Make comms risk seriously real for other stakeholders 

Even though many of us are finding it hard to see silver linings in the cultural and political clouds that seem to be gathering at the moment, a clear one is that communication and reputational risk can be made into a much bigger deal for the companies and other organizations that employ us.

In a polarized world, one misstatement can potentially result in the loss of half of your customers. In a world where people are feeling besieged, insufficient sensitivity to their needs can result in billions being knocked off share prices.

These are not matters to be left to someone being paid 40,000 a year, mainly for their Indesign skills and their agility with TikTok and Instagram.

A lot of #comms leaders, myself included, have focused a lot of time and energy on helping make comms leaders more agile with ROI business cases.  

Even with the best skills, it can be challenging to build ROI business cases for thousands of pounds, euros or dollars, much less millions.

But in this environment, we can credibly make risk-based business cases in the millions – and, credibly in some cases, in the billions.

What’s the missing ingredient?  

Enough documented examples of the shit that can go wrong if you don’t have experienced communication resource looking at what organizations need to do and say, both externally AND internally – and helping them avoid doing and saying stuff that gets them into big trouble.

This is where our collective action comes in.

Can we crowdsource examples of what hits the fan when you have inadequate or inexperienced resources handling billion-dollar risks?  

Not just macro-level risks like orchestrated boycott campaigns or getting trashed on TikTok or X, but also operational and organizational risks, like when the organization makes decisions that fly in the face of their stated values and disengage scores of employees and prospects.  

Or when managers pursue their own agendas instead of the actual organizational objectives. 

Or when the “resolution” of a quality problem provokes even more concern or derision from the market.

Each of us has a couple of anecdotal examples either of bad decisions that were made without decent comms support, or catastrophes that were avoided because we were able to make sure our organizations averted them.

We need someone to collect these up and publish an e-book now. Any takers?

2. Get comms leaders onto the same AI page

In parallel, recognizing that more than fifty percent of participants in the latest #WeLeadComms quick poll placed AI at the top of the 2025 trends list. We need to get on the same collective page about AI, what it can do for us, and what it can do to us.

According to Monique Zytnik in her excellent book, Internal Communication in the Age of AI, as of 2023, there were more than 6,000 AI tools with potential application in the world of business communication.

None of us has the bandwidth to try everything. And at the same time, none of us needs to be left behind because we can’t spend the little spare time we have playing with AI tools that are unlikely to withstand the inevitable shakeout as the range of tools consolidates.

Again, it’s time for a crowdsourced e-book, or perhaps some other kind of a common AI-experience-sharing platform.  

We need something that could allow comms leaders to share their recommendations with each other and guide each other towards tools we can use commonly to support our collective efficiency and effectiveness in a highly competitive marketplace.

3. Fight the deprofessionalization of our industry

I see a lot of very strong, senior, strategic comms pros on LinkedIn who’ve had their “open to work” banners up for a long time – and a number who are resorting to fairly desperate measures to put food on the table, much less stay in the game.

And I also see a lot of job adverts asking for exceptionally, indeed, ridiculously, wide skill sets for roles which should be senior in stature but being offered junior salaries.  

This is not just ageism. It’s worse.

It’s the structural deprofessionalization of our industry, and we need to fight it as such.

What happens when you hire someone junior with a lot of skills and prematurely give them senior responsibilities?  

You end up with a focus on getting things done that “look right”,but without any real focus on reputation and risk management.

You put a lot of pressure on that person to make it look like they are sufficiently qualified and competent – to the point that them hiring more senior resource to help out would expose their weaknesses.

You deprive your ambitious leaders of the resources they need to succeed in your environment

You risk that your comms person or team burns out under pressure and expectation that they’re not yet ready to handle.

One of the few positives that can come out of such scenarios is that senior leaders with ambition might seek their own resources (if they don’t see their in-house comms teams as being capable of supporting those ambitions).  

But stakeholder dissatisfaction alone isn’t enough to shift the dynamics of the talent market.

These stakeholders need to know there is capable talent beyond their firewalls and their current hiring systems.  They need to know where to go to find that talent, and they also need to have access to that talent in ways that can bypass or at least short-circuit their hiring and procurement processes.

Will this be tough?  Oh, yes.

Does the future of our profession – and the careers of many of our senior professionals – depend on it?  Again: oh, yes.

What do we need to do about it?  The first step is to get it on the table, which is what I’m attempting to do now, and generate some collective awareness and ownership of the problem.  

The next step?  I don’t know exactly.

Just as I don’t know exactly how we’re going to win on all three of these fronts.

But we’re communication leaders.  

We identify problems.

We raise their profile.

We crowdsource ideas.

We socialize those ideas.

Then we bring those solutions to life.

This is what we do.

We need to do this like our careers depend on it. 

Mike Klein is a senior communication consultant based in Reykjavik, Iceland. He is the founder of #WeLeadComms, the world’s largest recognition program for communication professionals, a Fellow of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and the Institute of Internal Communication, and is a frequently published author and commentator on the state of the communication profession.

Written by: Editor