Curation is seen as a core competence for contemporary communicators (forgive the alliteration). What we usually mean by curation is the process of sorting through vast amounts of material, of selecting a context and then annotating and presenting relevant content in a meaningful and organised way around a specific theme (thanks to blogger and not-for-profit specialist Beth Kanter for that summary).

As I peer in bewilderment at the piles of magazines, books, links, articles and peer recommendations (“You must read this, Steve”) all competing for my own finite attention, I conclude that curation is actually a survival skill for anyone living in our times, faced with an overload of otherwise unfiltered input. Just as the Japanese tsunami shocked our senses as a tide of trees, cars, boats, bridges, houses and a myriad other mangled objects surged from our screens, so the constant storm of input keeps many of us fearful of drowning in data. Some handle this more comfortably than others. I love the variety but struggle with the volume. Probably as a defence mechanism, I’m now acquiring a taste for uncluttered simplicity that my younger self could have barely contemplated.

The beauty of information is what it can teach us, how it expands us, what it enables us to do and the potential it brings us. Its curse is how it can weigh us down, bloat us with irrelevance and blind us to what’s really of value. We need sluice gates on the raw, relentless flow of input to filter out superfluous data and leave us only with what’s useful. But we rely on those filters not only to shut out the noise but also to let the right notes in. We can also lose our own personal ‘tuning’ and risk missing signals and opportunities by not being directly exposed to the input. It’s rather like only listening to the one radio station, visiting the same news site every day or relying

on a single trusted advisor. We may have selected them according to our own snapshot of preferences but eventually they mould us to a particular way of seeing the world and potentially deprive us of other perspectives.

So it’s best not to follow any one curator, blogger or guru slavishly or ‘always accept cookies’ from them without evaluating the merits of what they’re telling you every time. So I hope you’ve stayed with me up to this point and are now thinking “Interesting... but is he right...?”

Three items I’ve ‘curated’ for you this month. The first was found on Twitter, via a very tireless IC curator, Jenni Wheller, who shared “What the most successful CEOs know: How internal CEO communications shape financial performance” from the Grossman Group. This is a well-referenced white paper linking the impact of effective IC on financial performance. Look it up. If your key decision- makers need convincing that good IC delivers dollars (all other major currencies accepted), show them this. The second is from the European Communication Monitor 2013 which Dejan Verčič showcased at the Croatian PR Association’s excellent PR 2020 conference last month. It offers some fascinating findings about the desired communication skills of CEOs. Again, look it up. Finally, after a live band entertained the conference’s delegates well into the early hours, barely a handful of people made it in time for the next day’s first speaker. They missed an insightful and entertaining presentation by Susanne Senft on reputation and measurement.

On the latter, I leave you with Susanne’s wry observation from Winston Churchill: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” 

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell and @ioicnews