“A lack of rigour in evaluation continues to be IC’s Achilles heel”

It’s been an interesting month involving trips to several locations. And yet I hesitate, lest you fear reliving the horrors of a leader’s blog where she or he discusses Tarquin’s gap year in Borneo or the senior team’s own executive retreat to some wellupholstered country estate. Some years ago it proved impossible to convince a multinational client about the risks of infringing the law of unintended messages. Alas the client was intent on sharing with the wider workforce a film clip of the senior team bedecked in Hawaiian shirts while sipping off-duty cocktails during a no doubt well-earned break from their leadership conference – in Bermuda. Rarely has the phrase ‘wrong on so many levels’ seemed so apt. In fact there was no uproar, such was the phlegmatic outlook of many of its employees, although one wryly observed at the time that such events were apparently never held in Bradford or Barnsley.

So for our own travels, let’s just say that IoIC has moved to a bright new office, though we haven’t forsaken Milton Keynes. IC practitioners looking for guidance will also welcome the publication of two new books, both showcased at well-attended London launches, Internal Communication: A Manual for Practitioners by Liam FitzPatrick and Klavs Valskov (Kogan Page) and From Cascade to Conversation by Katie Macaulay (AB).

In the north, around 90 people came to the Government Communication Service (GCS)’s networking group launch event at Manchester’s Mechanics Institute (itself a historic setting in the world of workplace organisation as the birthplace of the TUC). Many north westbased government IC practitioners have gained IoIC’s qualifications and we were pleased to be in at the birth of this valuable group, which follows the launch of GCS South West, GCS Scotland and Cymru Comms, no doubt with others still to come.

There’s an evident sense of energy and ambition around the GCS and it seems to be creating a genuine esprit de corps among the practitioners within its remit. Ultimately, that’s all of them, including those who work for arms-length bodies (ALBs – there’s an acronym for everything) as well as for the classic government departments and local authorities. The GCS has also made the professionalization of IC practice one of its early priorities.

Verbally cutting the ribbon to launch the new group, GCS boss Alex Aiken underlined some familiar themes in his characteristically entertaining delivery. Alongside the added value of stories about ‘cockroaches the size of rats’ (from a visit to the British Antarctic Survey) and the differing personality traits of Downing Street’s cats, Alex drove home some behavioural home truths for communicators, “Your problem is you’re too nice. You need to be tough.” This was less (in fact, not at all) about aggression but about being prepared to speak up, challenge and fight for what communicators knew to be right, but only on the basis of good, hard evidence. Communicators had to demonstrate the impact of communications. Illustrating what happens when they can’t, he recalled events in 2010 when the spend on communication was halved and 2,500 government communicators lost their jobs. There was a need, he said, to prove the value of what we do.

It’s my own estimation that a lack of rigour in evaluation continues to be IC’s Achilles heel and that we will only be respected as a hard (rather than soft) management discipline when we routinely produce evidence. No better luminary with whose words to end this column than the father of quality management W Edwards Deming: “In God we trust, all others bring data.”

Steve Doswell is chief executive of IoIC