There is an inherent tension in the nature of corporate communications: between an organization that is directionally geared towards achieving goals and resource efficiency and the collaterally effective ability of people to communicate, which is a natural characteristic that eludes all-encompassing control. In the roughly one hundred years of development into a modern management discipline, the focus has nevertheless always been on the instrumental, goal-oriented aspects of communication. If we as representatives of our profession today confidently claim strategic approaches for ourselves, then we are also meeting the increased expectations of the reliable transmission performance of corporate communication.
The key dimensions of the strategic orientation of corporate communication – situation analysis, strategy formulation, implementation of measures and evaluation – were not developed with a specific focus on communication but reflect a rational-analytical management approach that developed between 1950 and 1970 and was described in detailed case studies in the 1980s by authors such as Peter Drucker and Michael Porter. Following hese approaches, corporate communication has successfully established itself as a control function for achieving communicative goals, as evidenced by the considerable increase in human and budgetary resources in recent decades.
However, this maturation took place in an environment that the renowned risk researcher Gerd Gigerenzer describes as a “stable world”. In such an environment, there are of course still risks and uncertainties about the future, but the fundamental principles, rules and patterns of development remain stable. In contrast, we have been experiencing an unstable world for some years now, in which principles are being called into question, momentum is growing, and pattern breaks are becoming a recurring event. Radical uncertainty takes the place of calculable risk. Organizational researcher Karl Weik convincingly argues that in such phases, the systematic management of known complexities is replaced by the “adaptive management of the unexpected”.
The competencies required for this – e.g. adopting an outside-in perspective, finding solutions in incremental “muddling through” (a “science” according to Charles Lindblom) and organizing “meaning-making” in a confusing environment, as described by Karl Weik – all draw on communicative competencies such as relevance management, opinion-forming and empathic dialogue skills. Thus, in addition to the strategic-instrumental orientation of the communication function to achieve communicative goals, an additional strategic-oriented performance contribution can be made, which is primarily provided in three competence dimensions: Interpretation, validation and calibration of past, present and future self-perceptions and perceptions of others of an organization.
The aforementioned orientation skills are each developed on the basis of a decidedly communicative perspective and, using specific methods of communication management, develop effects such as forecasts of the present, alternative future projections and contextual management offers, which represent a significant contribution of corporate communication not for, but in the strategic decision-making process of management.
For this to succeed, communicators should not rely solely on algorithm-based data analysis or even the use of AI. If the future is structurally different from the past, then past data provides little guidance or can even lead people down the wrong path. When it comes to communicative validation for strategic decision-making, extrapolating from the past alone is therefore of little use – not least because the human behavior remains a wildcard in the calculation for the time being. An additional exploration of the future is therefore always required. Abstract aggregate data is helpful for the design of such a retrospective view of communicative effects from a future perspective, but only in combination with concrete experiences of human affects and reactions is target-oriented orientation actually possible.
The result is what Karl Weik has coined “thinking in the second future tense”: “If one is able to treat a future event as if it had already passed, then it is presumably easier to write a specific history based on past experience that could have brought about this specific event”.
