Proving Our Value – Conversations at Innovation Sprint London

Ask ten communicators how to prove their value and you will get ten different answers, most of them defensive. At Strategic Innovation Sprint London on 17 September, two tables were assigned the same challenge – demonstrating communication value and business impact – and worked on it independently, in parallel, for most of the day.

What is striking is not that they disagreed. It is how much they agreed, from two completely different starting points.

Table 1, made up of Anthony Monks (Director, ITPR), Rochelle Oakley (Internal Communications Manager, Beazley), Claire Newell (Director of Communications, Civil Enforcement Association) and Ana-Maria Melnicky Calin (Group Communication & Culture Manager, FEG), facilitated by Jon Gerlis of CIPR with mentor Richard Bagnall of CommsClarity Consulting, split the problem into two sides. One: practitioners do not feel confident enough to claim value in the first place. Two: organisations do not understand what communications can actually do for them.

The practitioner-side fix was refreshingly unglamorous. The group built what they called a CAP model – Curious, Accountable, Proactive – and turned it into a checklist for a practitioner’s first 100 days on the job: sit with finance, map the real stakeholders and learn how the business actually makes money before trying to explain your value in its terms.

The team argued, convincingly, that confidence is downstream of fluency. You cannot demonstrate value in a language you have not learned to speak, and communicators are not always taught, and often never fully learn, the language of the businesses they work in.

The organisational-side fix was more ambitious: a gamified tool the group nicknamed ‘CEO Nightmares’ – a wheel of senior-executive risk areas that a user hovers over to see, concretely, where communications can help.

The deliberate point of the tool was to push past the obvious answers (media relations, crisis response) towards the harder-to-reach groups that many communications functions never touch – a company’s deskless or frontline employees, for instance.

The group’s bigger idea underneath the tool: practitioners have spent years demonstrating value reactively, and it is time to generate demand for the profession proactively, ideally with professional bodies distributing the tool and peer executives making the case to each other, rather than practitioners pitching themselves.

Table 2 arrived at a harder truth from a completely different angle. Michael Curran (Group Media & Insights Officer, HSBC), Iman El Ghazouani (Manager, Insights & Measurement, Corporate Affairs, PMI), Elif Guvencer (VP Advisory, The RepTrak Company) and Katharina Auer (VP/Head of Global Internal-HSE-SD-SCM Communications & Communication Business Solutions, Hitachi Energy), facilitated by Laura Wall of PRII with mentor Orla Graham of CARMA, opened with what they called the ‘sour reality’: prevent a crisis successfully, and you have nothing to show for it. The profession, they argued, has drifted towards proving itself through what is visible and countable – media coverage, output volume – because outcomes and behaviours are harder to see and harder to claim. That is the real measurement gap, and no dashboard fixes it.

This table named four specific barriers: a skills gap in reading and speaking the language of the board, limited relationship capital that keeps practitioners a step removed from boardroom access, an attribution problem (comms rarely drives an outcome alone, and claiming full credit undermines trust), and discomfort with self-promotion that keeps good work invisible. Their answer was a circular working model: start from the business need, stress-test it with a ‘so what?’ question and a Toyota-style five-whys exercise, define what success actually looks like before setting KPIs, map and segment audiences, test and implement, then report back to each stakeholder in language tailored to them rather than using a single one-size-fits-all presentation. Close the loop, check whether the goal was met, and either move on or go round again.

Their sharpest recommendation, though, was linguistic rather than structural: retire the words ‘measurement’ and ‘reporting’ altogether. Both terms carry baggage – clinical, defensive, backward-looking – and neither actually answers the question a CEO is asking, which is ‘so what?’

The table’s proposed replacement? A shared approach built entirely around that question, paired with a genuinely uncomfortable practice: building planned, reported failure into communications objectives, so that three out of every five initiatives are allowed to fail as long as the team can explain why and what changes next.

Two tables, two vocabularies, one shared diagnosis. Confidence is a fluency problem. Value is a language problem, not a measurement problem. And the profession will keep failing to prove its worth for as long as it keeps trying to prove it in a language the business does not use.