It’s interesting how the word ‘courage‘ crops up a great deal when I talk about communication.

I frequently use it when considering what I believe communicators must do in organizations – the ones they work in or those of their clients – when trying to persuade others to a particular course of action, or persuade others to change behaviours.

It’s a word that has great significance when we talk about the future of communication as that future involves a great deal of change and will require courage of communicators who must take a leading strategic role in ensuring the successful outcomes of such change.

It’s a word that I believe is central to a primary role of a communicator in the foreseeable future – that of calculating risk in the context of digital transformation in the workplace.

It underpinned much of my thinking last week when I gave a presentation jointly with Silvia Cambié about the future of communication at the IABC EMENA Leadership Institute 2013 conference in London on November 4.

It was a pleasure working with Silvia as we share much thinking about organizational communication, its evolution and the changing role of the communicator. And it was a pleasure to be part of an IABC event again.

In a post she published prior to the conference, Silvia speaks of how corporate communication is changing thanks to social media and new ways of working that collaborative technologies are bringing to organizations.

A new era is dawning, she declares, a view I believe in as well.

So we shared some metrics with leaders from across IABC’s Europe, Middle East and North Africa region about trends, changes and events that we see all around us in business, in people’s behaviours and desires, in technology developments and the contexts of many of those developments.

We painted a picture of a landscape that is rapidly evolving and transforming, presenting significant opportunities and major challenges to organizations, their leaders and communicators – a landscape where people’s behaviours and their mindsets are huge drivers of change, and where technology is the enabler of change.

In my part of our session (the presentation deck I used is available for view or download from Slideshare), I outlined my belief on that risk assessment role I mentioned earlier:

The Communicator’s Role is to Calculate Risk

1. Recognise and understand change
   – In the workplace
   – In stakeholder behaviours
   – In your overall landscape, internal and external
2. Be attuned to trends and be able to interpret them
3. Take a proactive and credible lead to educate and counsel
4. Listen, learn, recommend

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Yet it’s complex and requires deep understanding of the organization of which the communicator is part, its vision and mission, its leadership personalities, and much more.

It requires courage to navigate the organization and effect change. When you examine the scope and scale of the opportunity and challenge awaiting the communicator in this new era that Silvia speaks about, it becomes very clear to see that courage really is the requirement of the communicator in the future we talked about.

• Additional reading: Steve Seager live blogged two of the other sessions in the meeting – RADA’s presentation skills workshop (we all took an interactive part in an excellent learning experience); and the keynote by Alex Aiken, the British government’s corporate communications mandarin.

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• Foundations for evolving relationships between people and machines
• Courage is what it takes
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