Most organizations approach change communications the right way. They start at the wrong moment. The work that determines the outcome begins before drafts circulate and before language is debated. It depends on a set of questions leadership has to answer while the decision is still taking shape. In most organizations, that work never happens.
The issue is not carelessness. It is timing. Communications is often brought in after the decision is set and the timeline is fixed. At that point, the work shifts to packaging, because leadership assumes the thinking is complete. Communications is then expected to translate it.
That is not strategy. It is execution under constraint.
The pattern is familiar. An announcement goes out before the implications are fully worked through, and a hard question follows in the town hall. Leadership answers it with a confident, polished non-answer that tells the room everything it needs to know. People leave with a clear sense that leadership has not thought through the implications.
The Work That Has to Come First
Real alignment requires more than agreement on direction. Leadership has to decide what the change means at the level employees will experience it, not just how it is described in the formal rationale. The question every employee asks is simple: What does this mean for me?
Most leadership teams do not answer that question with enough precision. They align on the strategic logic, but not on how to respond when someone asks whether their role is at risk. They do not define what managers are authorized to say or what requires escalation. They do not establish a consistent view of what success looks like in the weeks following the announcement.
That lack of clarity becomes visible quickly. It appears in the announcement and carries into the town hall. It continues in the manager conversations that take place in the first 48 hours. Within weeks, it begins to influence behavior in ways that are harder to track. By the time it is reflected in attrition, attention has already shifted elsewhere.
What the Work Actually Looks Like
Preventing that outcome requires a different kind of communications work. The work is not about drafting language. It is about forcing clarity before language is written. Someone has to ask the questions that expose where alignment breaks down and stay with those questions until the answers are usable.
In practice, the work is specific. It examines how different groups will interpret the same decision and identifies where explanations are likely to fail. It clarifies what managers can say without hesitation. It prepares leadership for the questions that will come once the announcement is public.
None of that can be improvised in a live setting. The answers must be worked through in advance.
At JPMorgan Chase, I led communications that reached more than 50,000 employees across 60 countries. The visible work was the announcement. The work that determined the outcome happened earlier, in conversations that never left the room. That preparation is what separates a transition that people can move through from one that creates lingering damage.
When This Work Has to Start
The decisions that shape how a change is received are made before a communications plan exists. They happen while leadership is still finalizing direction. They are reflected in how trade-offs are discussed and in what leaders are willing to address directly.
When communications is absent from that stage, the gap carries forward. Employees recognize it immediately. The effects appear later. They are often attributed to something else because no one connects them back to the source.
Organizations that handle this well do not treat communications as a downstream function. They bring it into the decision-making process while alignment is still forming, where it has the most influence.
That is the work I do. I partner with leadership teams before the announcement, when there is still time to resolve what will otherwise become visible later.
If a transition is approaching, the issue is not whether you have a message ready. It is whether leadership can answer the hardest questions without hesitation or contradiction.
If the answer is unclear, or if the announcement is already creating friction that no one can fully explain, we should talk.