Authenticity matters more than message discipline now
Talking to a former colleague who’d spent time at Number 10 in recent years, I was amazed to hear “the grid” remains so central to government’s way of doing comms. This guy told me it was the bane of his life - “you can’t announce that on Wednesday because Education are doing something that day” was a common response. It seems extraordinary in the 2020s that we are still stuck with methods that worked transformatively in rhe 1990s, but have long since become moribund in an entirely different landscape.
For years, the dominant model was built around control: the grid, the agreed “narrative,” the same three lines repeated until they stuck. It made sense in a world of fixed broadcast bulletins and next day print deadlines, where a small number of gatekeepers decided what the public saw and when.
That world is gone. News no longer moves in a single sequence you can plan around. A story can start on social media, get picked apart in real time and be reframed before your carefully scheduled announcement even lands. In that environment, message discipline doesn’t read as competence - and it even risks being seen as evasion.
The public has also got sharper. Theresa May’s “strong and stable” mantra didn’t become so derided because the line was badly written. It failed because repetition without substance is now easy to spot, and once spotted, it corrodes trust faster than saying nothing at all. One person after another using exactly the same phrase is a red flag to the public now - and it has been for years.
What works now is closer to the opposite: authenticity and consistency under scrutiny trumps message discipline every time. People earn trust by being transparent when tested, not by staying on script. Authenticity is not a soft add-on to a communications strategy, it kind of IS the strategy. It’s the only thing that survives contact with an audience that can fact-check you mid-sentence.
None of this means throwing away planning or clarity. It means recognising that grids, narratives and lines to take are tools built for a mainstream media, single narrative world which most audiences no longer interact with in the same way.
If your audience is on Tik Tok or reading the BMJ, it makes little sense to target them with content better suited to The Sun or the BBC. What you say and how you say it always depends on the intended audience.
The organisations getting this right aren’t the ones with the tightest grid, the sharpest narratives or the best press releases. They’re the ones willing to be honest, including about what they don’t know yet - to listen, and to go where their audiences are, cognitively as well as physically.
The instinct to control the story is understandable, as is the desire to have a script that is repeated ad infinitum in a way Peter Mandleson memorably described as “pressing the bruise”. But these are old tools for a landscape that has long gone. Audience, authenticity and active listening are the watchwords now.
