My boss often likes to suggest he taught me everything I know. My standard rejoinder is that he’s only taught me everything he knows. Such is the hilarious quip-foolery that makes working at WMW like an unending episode of Friends. Hellish.

But here’s an example of something invaluable I did learn from Our Dear Leader: the value of a silly question.

In my salad days, I would sit in high-powered meeting with clients listening to the jargon fly back and forth, desperately trying to keep up so I could at least chuckle in the appropriate places. My highest aspiration was to make a relevant (if anodyne) comment during a natural pause in proceedings.

I suspect it’s a feeling many of us will be familiar with.

Just occasionally, a more rational and less anxious part of my brain would pipe up with things like, “But surely they’re overcomplicating this?”. Or “Aren’t they rather missing the obvious?”. I would of course quash it instantly, confident (or the opposite thereof) that it was all well over my head.

But then an interesting thing would happen.

Our Dear Leader would calmly and confidently interject with a question just as naive as those posed by my own inner voice. He didn’t even have the common decency to frame it in suitably ostentatious language. The first time it happened I was actually a little embarrassed.

But then another interesting thing would happen.

Everyone would stop throwing around the corporate gerunds and blink. Then the whole register of the conversation would change into something more human, something more honest and – dare I say – something much more effective.

By asking the silly question, Our Dear Leader had given everyone permission to dispense with the highfalutin terminology and actually focus on the problem at hand.

I mentioned this phenomenon to a friend of mine who’s a Big Deal in the world of media planning. He told me about a little trick they find useful. When a problem is proving hard to crack by the specialists within the agency, they’d pull in someone who knows absolutely nothing about it. More often than not, that person would ask the silly question that everyone else was too clever to see.

They even had a name for such troubleshooters: Naive Experts.

Next time you’re in one of those meetings that are 5% conversation and 95% obfuscation, take a deep breath and try asking a silly question. Who knows? You might just get a sensible answer.

Secretly, I’m a nerd. I say ‘secretly’. I think my weekly Amazon delivery of sci fi books and videogames mean the creative team is on to me.

(Seamless segue approaching)

If you’ve ever bought a PC videogame, you’ll have seen two important pieces of information on the back of the box. The first is called Minimum Requirements. The second is Recommended Requirements.

They specify exactly how good your components need to be to run the game. Your graphics card, processor, memory and stuff.

If your PC meets the Minimum Requirements, you should be able to get it working. But you’ll have to turn all the bells and whistles off. And even if you do the game will stutter along joylessly.

But if it meets the Recommended Requirements, you can ratchet up the quality settings and everything will run smoothly – making for a much more enjoyable experience.

(Don’t worry. This is what’s called a metaphor. Watch…)

To my mind, employee rewards are much the same as Minimum Requirements.

(See?)

They’re fundamental. That is, they fulfil a basic expectation of every employee i.e. you remunerate me fairly for the hours and expertise I put in.

But they’re not important. That is, in the vast majority of cases, they are not the driving force behind people’s motivation at work.

They are the world of work’s Minimum Requirements. Few people would say the thing that excited them most about their job is the money. Sure, they’d be pretty miffed if they didn’t get any. But it’s not what truly stimulates them.

Despite this, organisations place a huge emphasis on communicating the tangible rewards they offer, instead of articulating their Recommended Requirements – the stuff that actually creates a great career experience.

You know. The Big Idea behind the organisation. The contribution you’ll make. The things you’ll learn. The people you’ll work with. The future opportunities. The lasagne in the canteen, even.

Get your rewards right, then get them out of the way. You might just find you’ve got more interesting things to talk about.

It was The Institute of Internal Communications Awards 2010 on Friday night (the artist formerly known as Communicators in Business). And, together with our talented chums from the O2 IC team, we were chuffed to pick up a gong for ‘Best Reward and Recognition’. Huzzah!

The night didn’t get off to the best of starts. Having manfully resigned myself to missing the England game, one of the O2 gang whipped out her iPhone and got the whole game live streaming. Magic. Except, as history will reflect, it wasn’t.

No matter. Shortly after the whistle was blown on that aberration, the world of spin’s most spinniest spinster, spinmeister-general Alistair Campbell took to the stage and delivered a blinding speech. I mean blinding in the most literal sense. By that point I’d consumed an ill-advised quantity of white wine and the stage lights were really bright.

Then the awards began. All 35 of them. To be fair, it was all conducted with ruthless efficiency. Nominees announced, winner declared, blast of contemporary popular music, shake Big A’s hand, pose for photo, jog on.

Listen to me, pretending to be all like, whatevs. My hoop was well and truly a-cocked when our turn came around and we got the nod. Less thrilled when I realised I’d been nominated to represent WMW in the twosome who would actually go and collect the award.

Possibly through our last minute booking arrangements, our table was located at the remotest possible point from the front of the room. At that moment, the path from table to stage seemed roughly equidistant to the path from Bag End to Mount Doom.

I staggered gamely towards the light with an amiable (drunk) grin plastered on my face and the whole handshaking/posing/leaving thing seemed to go okay. I didn’t fall over or insult anyone and I’m 90% sure my flies were in the appropriate position. Returning to our table, group hugs and multiple high fives ensued. Oh yes. We were classy in victory.

Congrats to all the night’s other winners and short-listers. If I met you on the dance floor, I can only apologise.

Favourite hazy flashback
Mr Campbell’s segue into announcing our triumph:

“And the winner is the entry the judges said had the wow factor – Fanclub!”

One of the competing category entries was called ‘The WoW! Factor’.

This is a personal view about engagement at work. I have a vested interest in it. I employ people.

To me, it seems that engagement represents a struggle between the bosses and the bossed. The bosses, by and large, see engagement as a management tool and for good economic reasons. Between 60% and 70% of the overheads of most firms is accounted for by salary. That’s massive. That implies strongly that it doesn’t matter how good your new tooling machine or how slick your social media marketing strategy, you’re still stuck with this huge lump of cost that refuses to behave efficiently. So it makes perfect sense to try and make this 60% – 70% of mobile cost units more efficient.

There are three means for doing this: inform them clearly about what they are paid to do; equip them with the resources and technical know-how to be able to do so; and fire them up with enthusiasm so that their attitude is right. (Incidentally, I mean attitude, I don’t mean behaviour. Behavioural issues are what teachers and parents have with children. It’s a word betraying a concept that should be razed from the business lexicon; but don’t get me started on that one.)

100% of employees with the enthusiasm to do the right thing in the right way with the right tools is engagement nirvana. Here’s why it’ll never happen. From the bossed’s point of view, they don’t live at work. Their family doesn’t live at work. They don’t go on holiday at work. They don’t go to work on Christmas Day (forget the exceptions, clever clogs). We all of us have a sense of self that we develop in childhood and which, by the end if not the beginning of adolescence, is pretty much set in its way. Work is the battleground where this sense of self is tested every day.

If I grow up dreaming I’ll be a footballer and I end up a footballer it’s pretty easy to imagine I’m going to be engaged with my job. If I grow up dreaming I’ll be a footballer and I end up in IC, I’m never going to be quite so thoroughly engaged because a part of me isn’t living up to my inner narrative.

With very few exceptions (generally, those who set up their own firms or become footballers) you’re never going to find someone who is totally engaged with work unless you run a cult which I doubt you do.

My four magic tricks for getting that 60% – 70% working efficiently aka engaged are as follows:

•    Accept that you’ll never get people totally engaged. It saves so much later disappointment.

•    Take the precaution of having a great leader at the helm because people, in the main, want to be led well and will put up with more than is sensible for someone they believe in. Even better, ensure that your organisation does something which can be construed as worthwhile. But if you can only have one, have a great leader.

•    Extend to people the courtesy of dealing with them with respect, while making it clear that how they are at work merits that respect. Since you can only do this through other people, make sure your managers can manage well. If they did, you wouldn’t need an engagement strategy.

•    Stop searching for a magic answer. There isn’t one.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Albert Einstein

Adopting undeserved gravitas by quoting one of history’s great intellectuals? Textbook bloggery, that is. Fortunately, it’s also apposite to the point in question. Our old friend ‘engagement’.

I recently stumbled across this article on RI5. ‘Engagement’ has become the bon mot of choice for HR professionals – and, by some happy coincidence, it’s also become the focus of all kind of highfalutin research. The overwhelming conclusion seems to be that engagement is A Good Thing. Sounds right. Better than being disengaged, almost certainly.

Which is fortunate because, according to the aforementioned article based on a recent study, “job satisfaction has been overtaken in importance by employee engagement”. Say it ain’t so!

(At his point, I suppose I should define ‘job satisfaction’ and ‘employee engagement’. The authors haven’t but this is doubtless basic stuff. By inference, I’d say that job satisfaction means being happy with your specific role plus the goodies that go with it, while ‘employee engagement’ is being happy with your employer and the overall experience they provide. That seems to be the gist.)

But how do you separate the two? Are they seriously suggesting there’s no interaction between how much we enjoy our jobs and how much we enjoy the overall job experience? How can you possibly measure them as discrete variables? I think we both know the answer to that, dear reader.

The article goes further: “There’s also evidence that it’s possible to maintain levels of engagement irrespective of actual ‘satisfaction’”. Why, this is excellent news! Can’t afford to give your staff a decent pay rise? Don’t worry, just engage them. Sorting out a better personal development strategy too taxing? Nothing engagement can’t fix. All this time we’ve been getting too hung up how much people enjoy their actual jobs. Think big picture, people. Sheesh.

It’s not long before the mask slips. Apparently a key case study from a leading law firm “revealed the organisation’s intention to shift its focus internally away from employee satisfaction in favour of employee engagement”. A noble intent, surely. Perhaps not: “If nothing else, it leads to better scores in employee surveys!” <Titanic sigh>.

This last line reveals the big flaw in all this. Not the cynicism of the sentiment, but the danger that always presents itself when you try and abstract human emotions into mathematical absolutes – that the figures are the real world as opposed to a very limited approximation thereof.

You wouldn’t mistake a rough sketch on piece of paper for a living breathing person, would you? But that’s exactly what these studies ask us to do. Back to Einstein. People’s feelings definitely count. But, when it comes to counting them, they can be a right bugger.

That’s not to say applying scientific rigour to these questions is not valuable. It’s just that so many of these studies are neither scientifically rigorous nor provide any valuable insights. One way or another, they all arrive at the same core conclusion: people are motivated at work by more than just their day-to-day job and salary. Notice I didn’t ask you to sit down or check if you were of a nervous disposition.

Much like the siren simplicity of research data, the ubiquity of the term ‘engagement’ may be obscuring a more practical truth: that you don’t ‘engage’ people. You provide them with the best possible employee experience in every area. Whether that engages them or not is entirely their decision. Count on it.

People have a natural tendency towards anthropomorphism. Do what now? It simply means ascribing human attributes to non-humans. An extreme example would be the craze for pet rocks back in the 70s. A more prosaic one would be giving your car a nickname.

A friend of mine once made the mistake of buying a Suzuki Samurai. He would regularly resort to exhorting/coaxing/begging/threatening his underpowered steed “Hercules” to maintain momentum over a gentle hillock. I digress.

Commercial brands tap into this need to see the world in human terms. I’ll let you into a little secret. Shreddies are not really lovingly knitted by sweet old grannies. Ribena berries do not actually bounce enthusiastically into the bottle with a joyous squeal. That’s a silly suggestion. <Gazes at you incredulously>. They’re just fruit.

But, understandably, organisations feel us humble consumers will look more favourably on their product if it conjures up these comforting scenes rather than the less romantic reality of a factory production line.

The problem comes when brands try and cross what we might like to call the Credibility Gap. Ribena is a fruity drink for kids. It’s carefree, whimsical personality fits that positioning pretty neatly. But I’m not sure the same character would sit quite as comfortably with, say, my pension provider.

That doesn’t stop organisations trying to be something they’re patently not. Gorgeous, young, free spirits doing gorgeous, young, free-spirited things to an achingly cool soundtrack used to be strictly the province of certain mobile phone companies. These days, the pay-off logo is as likely to be a bank. Everyone’s a lifestyle brand.

But they’re not, are they? It’s just not credible, is it? I’m not sure it’s even particularly desirable. I don’t want the guardians of my hard-earned capital to be funny, cute or care-free. Po-faced, humourless and responsible is just fine by me.

Let’s wrap up with a practical tip: keep your eyes peeled for the Credibility Gap in everyday communications too. There’s no less effective way to ‘sell’ an idea than to blow it up out of all proportion. That new employee self service system you’re about to launch? It’s pretty handy. It does not, however, ‘usher in the dawn of an exciting new era that will revolutionise the way we live and work for the better’.

Three words to sum up 400? Keep it real.

If you didn’t catch it on The Hub, here are some pithy (ahem) thoughts on using 2.0 for IC purposes. Enjoy.

There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.
Here’s where we are. Web 2.0 has finally filtered through to the corporate consciousness and IC professionals are being told in no uncertain terms that they need to make it an integral part of their future plans. Trouble is, no one knows exactly how to do so. Not only is there a widespread lack of knowledge about how it all actually works but – more significantly – applications that deliver a measurable business benefit are currently all but non existent.

So, you’ve got two choices. Do nothing. Seriously. You could just keep your powder dry and wait two years for other people to be the guinea pigs for you. The other is to embrace the new opportunities social networking presents and accept that there will inevitably be some trial and error along the way.

Why you need to act now
If Web 2.0 was simply a technological advance, then waiting for other people to iron out the bugs would probably be the smart choice. Ask any of the early adopters who invested in one of the spectacularly fault-prone first batch of Xbox 360s. But social networking is not primarily a technological change. The top 2.0 players like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr did not reach pre-eminence through technological superiority – they simply came up with innovative new ways for people to harness the unique attributes of the web.

In reality, Web 2.0 is (or, in the case of most businesses, will be) a cultural change. Its significance lies in the way it’s changing people’s behaviour; they way they connect, collaborate and share their opinions, ideas and experiences. But why is this distinction so important?

Because technological changes are relatively straightforward. You finish work one evening. Overnight the IT fairies replace your clunky old file server with a leaner, meaner machine. Voila. Okay, that’s a slightly trite example. But the fact is that cultural change invariably takes longer and is far less predictable.

Take flexible working. For more than a decade we’ve been promised a revolution in the way we manage our work/life balance. The reality is that even now most organisations are struggling to adjust to the implications of this change, and flexible working is either a matter of swapping an hour here for an hour there or simply not an option.

We’ll look at the nature of the cultural change that Web 2.0 will demand of your organisation in a moment. The important point here is that if you’re going to be equipped to embrace the benefits of social networking when it matures, you need to plant the seeds of that cultural change now. Otherwise, when the time comes you’ll simply be giving people tools they have no interest in or ability to use.

Things are gonna change ‘round here
Even today, communication within an organisation overwhelmingly travels through the y axis: vertically, from top to bottom and – when a mood of egalitarianism takes us – from bottom to top. So, the Board tells the senior managers and the senior managers tell the line managers and the line managers tell the team members. Or the other way around. The IC team’s job is to manage this flow effectively, making sure the flood of information is channelled into neat little streams that (to extend the metaphor) irrigate the right people. It’s manageable. It kind of works. And, best of all, it’s a known quantity.

But here’s the thing. If we had a penny for every time an organisation told us that one of the most insurmountable problems face by their business was a tendency for people/teams to work in ‘silos’, we’d have retired to live the high life many moons ago. We claim to live in the Information Age, yet genuine cross-functional knowledge sharing is a remarkably rare best.

Our contention is that social networking has the power to add an entirely new dimension to the IC model – the much sought-after x axis of horizontal knowledge sharing. While peer-to-peer is not the only application of social networking – a CEO’s blog, for example, is a useful way for people to keep abreast of the latest developments – it is certainly the most credible and appropriate.

Giving Twitter feeds exclusively to the executive team, for example, is a woeful underuse of its potential. The power of micro-blogging lies in sharing a high volume of ‘snippets’ that can be searched, organised, redirected and responded to, revealing insights and trends that may otherwise have remained hidden; not as a forum for a limited number of individuals to espouse the company line.

This, of course, is antithetical to the ubiquitous command-and-control style that (to a greater or lesser extent) almost all organisations are built around. There are understandable anxieties about a lack of control of the messages that go out. But this control has always been an illusion.

Come for a drink with us after a bad day at the office and you’ll soon realise that people have always been able to communicate ideas the ‘Company’ may not approve of. The difference here is that, through social networking, these views – both positive and negative – can be harnessed to make changes for the better or stimulate innovation rather than being frittered away into the ether.

Put simply – and whether you like it or not – the future lies with those individuals and organisations that understand how to use social networking to connect with their colleagues and, indeed, the world outside the business. Influence is born of relationships, and increasingly social networking is where these relationships will be forged.

You better be ready. Because you know your competitors will be.

What not to do
We mentioned earlier that you could always take a step back and wait to see what happens. Who knows, maybe all this Web 2.0 stuff is a fad? You could just hop on the Web 3.0 bus when it turns up. But what you simply can’t afford to do is take the actively Luddite approach. By which we mean:

DO NOT BAN FACEBOOK

Or Twitter, or Bebo, or Flickr or Delicious or any Web 2.0 site. We understand the temptation. Why should your employees spend salaried time essentially chatting with their friends? The same argument was made when email become prevalent. While some still deprive their people of this tool, the overwhelming trend was for company after company to relent and end the email embargo. Let’s learn from history and not repeat our mistakes.

If that doesn’t persuade you, here are three practical reasons why a light touch beats a heavy hand:

1. Unproductive people are unproductive people – if they aren’t on Facebook, they’ll be fashioning increasingly large rubber band balls. On the flip side, productive people are exactly that, and deserve your trust anyway.
2. We’re talking about changing your culture to embrace the benefits of social networking. So, why would you prevent your people from becoming experts in it?
3. Like email, social networking is rapidly becoming seen as a ‘basic right’ as the lines between company time and personal time continue to blur. You might not agree – but are you willing to disillusion your existing staff and alienate potential recruits?

Test the waters
The adoption of Web 2.0 doesn’t have to be a binary decision – ‘you’re either in or you’re out’. Like anything new, you might like to dip a toe before diving in. A simple way to do this is to ‘borrow’ some of the core mechanics of a social networking application and use them for a specific, limited (and therefore controllable) purpose. Here’s an example.

We recently worked with O2 to conduct a company-wide cultural ‘temperature check’ to uncover 11,000 people’s views on everything from their working environment and remuneration to their understanding of (and engagement with) the brand strategy.

One of the research tools we developed was an e-zine where employees could post short comments on a range of questions that were updated throughout the two-week research process. These comments were then dynamically posted to the e-zine so everyone could see what their peers had to say on the key issues.

We ultimately garnered a large volume of bite-sized views on a variety of issues ranging from the day-to-day to the big picture. Does all this sound familiar? Our ‘Twitter Lite’ adopted some of the conventions established by social networking sites to enable us to gain a more textured and human understanding of O2’s culture – enriching and complementing the insights gathered through more traditional research tools.

“Our brand is all about helping people connect, so exploring the benefits of social networking is a logical progression for us,” explained Jenny Burns, Head of Internal Communications at O2. “This project may have been only a small step forward, but it’s provided an invaluable demonstration to the business that these applications can be harnessed for internal communications.”

Another example of incremental adoption is found closer to home. One of our web slingers recently spent his lunchtime embedding our office Spotify playlist in our website (wmwuk.net/musichall). Visitors can see what we’re listening to and even add their own choices to the mix. The day will surely come when an impatient client uses the William Tell Overture to chivvie us along.

All this hints that the immediate future of social networking within organisations may lie in proprietary applications that offer a greater degree of control then their full-blown counterparts. This will limit the impact of Web 2.0 in the short term, but that may be no bad thing at a time when we’re yet to understand the implications of untrammelled peer-to-peer communication.

Don’t panic
If all this seems a little overwhelming, take solace from this:

Your skills as a communications professional are as relevant today as they’ve always been

Remember when everyone said the internet would herald the end of newspapers? Or e-readers would be the death knell of the printed book? In the same way, perhaps it’s best to look at social networking as simply a toolkit of new channels – they are supplementary, not a replacement. Yes, we’ve all got plenty to learn. But all of it will be founded on the skills in empathy, clarity and information management that happily you already have.

In fact, dig a little deeper and you might just find that social networking will empower you like never before. IC has always been just as much about listening as it is about talking. And Web 2.0 comes equipped with a growing set of tools to help you filter, analyse and digest what’s being shared across the social networks in your organisation.

For example, tools like Trendrr will enable you to measure and compare words and phrases being used so you can, say, identify hot issues being discussed by employees. Twitter allows you to search through a seemingly overwhelming volume of tweets to distil a list of contributions on a specific topic of interest. And semantic tools continue to improve enabling you to unearth more textured insights than those that can be achieved by basic word of phrase searches.

So, instead of picturing yourself sat on the sidelines as a hailstorm of uncontrolled messaging rains haphazardly throughout the organisation, imagine yourself sitting at the centre of a web, plucking useful tidbits as they flow past and redirecting them where needed. It’s exciting stuff.

Just one more thing
If you only take one thing away from this little treatise, then let it be this:

We’re all in this together

Whatever anyone might tell you, no one yet knows how to most effectively use social networking tools for internal communications (though it should be noted that plenty of progress is being made on the recruitment side of things – get in touch and we’ll be happy to share it with you).

Perhaps the best first step you can take is to sit down with your agency of choice and simply explore the possibilities of cross-referencing your business and IC challenges with the functionality offered by Web 2.0 tools.

Understandably given that it’s all still in its infancy, people still seem to be getting to grips with the features of social networking. It’s high time we all joined forces to explore the benefits. And those benefits will only emerge from a combination of business-specific insights, communications expertise and functional understanding.

We’ve just finished one of our Seven Deadly Sins writing courses with a great group of IC experts from a large risk management company (who I won’t risk naming).

So, I thought it would be worth sharing a few of the feedback comments. Neil – today’s copy coach – would do so himself but his bluff Northern humility precludes him from doing so.

“Brilliant course, highly recommended, many thanks!” enthused one.

“A fun and valuable exercise,” beamed another.

“When I publish my first novel I’ll add an acknowledgment,” promised someone else.

“Room was a bit echoey,” noted a fourth.

Ah well. There’s always ‘room’ for improvement… What’s that? I should attend the course myself as a matter of some urgency? Well, maybe I will.

If you’d like to join me (or more realistically either join a scheduled session or have one designed specifically for your requirements), you can find out more here.

Isn’t humour funny? Get it right and you’ve a tool to create something truly memorable. Get it wrong and there’s no better way to look like a wally. For a painful example of the latter, just ask for my ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ funeral story.

So, does humour have a place in the serious world of corporate comms? Done right, the answer’s a resounding yes. Something I was reminded of today when one of my half-arsed Google searches culminated in a couple of very entertaining, but very different, videos.

First up’s a Microsoft training video from 2004.

Admittedly, it does help if you’ve got a couple of million hanging about to splurge on some big name comedians. But you can do it on the cheap too; and why do the all the work when you can get your people to do it for you? Last year, Deloitte launched a project asking employees to make short films that addressed the question ‘what’s your Deloitte?’. The results weren’t half bad. Take a look at this one.

Both are great examples of how to create some engaging comms by not taking yourself too seriously.

When Ronan Keating crooned his version of Overstreet and Schlitz’s schmaltzy classic, he probably wasn’t trying to evoke misty-eyed agreement from yours truly. Had he been, he would have failed. I don’t really like the song. Quite honestly, it just popped into my head a moment ago as a neat way of encapsulating the topic of this post. Such is the way of headlines – catchiness so often trumps incisiveness.

As it turns out (almost as if I planned it, dear reader) this rambling introduction also serves to introduce aforesaid theme; that too much information can be a dangerous thing. Or, at the very least, a confusing and wearying thing. As I imagine you’re beginning to appreciate…

As the world-class IC experts our website so confidently proclaim us to be, we get asked a lot of questions about the practicalities of communication. What’s the best way of doing X? How can we make Y more compelling? Is it at all possible to get Z done in the next hour if I send you a chocolate rabbit? (The most popular answer to the final question, incidentally, is “Yes, but please don’t mention the chocolate rabbit in front of the creative team.”)

But it’s amazing how rarely anyone asks us whether they should do X, Y or Z at all.

“Eschew surplusage,” quipped Mark Twain. “Cut out the noise!” implore comms professionals. But, time and again, we’re told by employees at companies of all shapes and sizes that they’re bombarded with too many contradictory/irrelevant/plain silly messages.

So, the people doing the communicating understand that less is more. And, in turn, the people being communicated to say they’re being overwhelmed. But still the machine continues to grind out more and more strategies, visions, frameworks, manifestos, initiatives, schemes and critical updates like a demonic press with an MBA and a proclivity for contrived acronyms.

Is it all just a sign of the times? We live in the much-vaunted Information Age, after all. For thousands of years we were stymied by an inability to get our hands on what we needed to know. For instance, the World Cup victory in 1966 wasn’t celebrated in Yorkshire until 1971 (okay, that’s not true). But what was then a drought is now a deluge.

Within seconds, I can now discover exactly how many No.1 UK hits my idol Ronan scored during his illustrious career. Six with Boyzone, three as a solo artist, if you’re interested. I’m certainly not. And that’s kind of the point. Information has no intrinsic value beyond how it can be usefully applied. Knowledge sharing is a vital component of modern business – but that is not the same thing as simply disseminating information as widely as possible.

I won’t pretend there’s an easy answer. One of the biggest gripes you’ll hear from employees is “I’m never told what’s going on.” The other is “I’m drowning in irrelevant information.” Delightfully perverse, isn’t it? To slide the cigarette paper between the two, you need the power to say ‘No’. Everyone thinks their message is vital – but someone needs to take a step back and decide what’s relevant to whom and bin the rest.

Of course, you could always ask us. We’re independent and we like to think we can be pretty brave when we need to be. Our outside perspective coupled with your business insights will allow us to prune your overgrown comms plan into a beautiful bonsai. And just imagine the thrill of approaching an agency with some billable work only for them to say you’re better off saving your money.

I feel a song coming on…