The Ten Places a Strategy Lives or Stops

About this collection

When internal communication feels difficult, there is rarely a single cause. Several distinct problems tend to arrive together. A message that is clear at the top can lose its way in many places on the way down and across. - It can be understood and still not change behaviour. - It can be well written and still not carry authority. - It can be right for one market and wrong for the next. Treated as one task, this feels unsolvable, and it leaves a lean function carrying more weight than any team should. The load is heaviest when an organisation is changing on several fronts at once: structure simplifying, accountability moving closer to each unit, coordinating layers thinning, systems and cost programmes landing together. Communication is then asked to hold direction, protect trust and reputation, and keep people aligned, often through broadcast channels that inform well and translate poorly. We work internal communication as ten distinct capabilities, so a challenge can be located precisely and the right voice brought to that exact point: - 1. Behaviour change: communication that changes what people do, not only what they hear. - 2. Communication craft: speaking with clarity, compression and presence. - 3. Credibility and authority: how competence becomes recognised influence. - 4. Strategy translation: how a decision at the top becomes a behaviour in many teams. - 5. Strategic and change communication: designing internal communication that lands and holds through transformation. - 6. Team alignment: helping teams align behind a direction and rebuild trust after disruption. - 7. Multi-market communication: making one intent land usably across very different country operations. - 8. Presence under pressure: why capable people freeze in the rooms that matter, and how to steady them. - 9. Trust and reputation: holding communication credibility through scrutiny and change. - 10. AI and communication: keeping an organisation's voice human and trusted as intelligent tools enter the work. Naming the ten is useful, but the naming is not the work. The work is Speak So You Are Heard, which turns any of these dimensions into capability rather than information. It brings ten to twelve people from across levels and functions into a cohort that works one real challenge together over ten days, 30 min each day. They learn to communicate with clarity and presence, apply it immediately to live work, and build a network of trust across the silos. In mountaineering there is a name for a group roped together on the same climb, each person's footing secured by the others. That is what a cohort becomes, and it is the connective tissue a large, decentralised organisation needs. Run one dimension per quarter, the ten become a year of durable capability rather than a series of events. It has been run this way with several leading corporates. The voices below each carry one of the ten dimensions and sharpen the thinking on it. They are the icing. The cohorts are the cake.