This essay explores organisation-external communications, how to engage the world out there to impact how your peers and colleagues think and act, and how this process shapes our identity and what we might become. It forms part of research into my next book on organisational and human sensemaking.

This isn’t about how to craft a perfect presentation or article, garner more clicks and shares. Instead I’ll focus on more esoteric topics as: understanding the sharing platform hierarchy of influence, balancing public-and-private personas, and how public recognition can affect organisational dynamics. It will conclude with principles that have guided my decision of what to share, where, when and how. It’s built on 20+ years of sharing in the public domain, 100s of engagements with a few big successes and some definite duds.

Failure as stimuli for reinvention

I remember the first time early in my career when I was on stage in front of an professional audience. Asked to step in at the last minute at a university conference, I was ill prepared, froze, petrified in the spotlights, and spouted nonsense. The scars of that experience turned me from any public speaking for half a decade. My ineptitude would have haunted the audience too, although thankfully I doubt I left any impression.

A decade or so later, my research career was taking off, and I was on a stage in Bengaluru to give a talk at the Doors of Perception Conference. I love being in vibrant India, but on the way back to my hotel from a pre-conference workshop, a fever started to kick-in. Over the next two days I hunkered down in my hotel room as my body violently expelled anything and everything that could escape from orifice or pore. I survived those two days with bottled water and intermittent rest, until finally the fever broke.

On the the final day of the conference, I was ill-prepared to give my talk—being physically depleted and mentally futzed. Indebted to the hosts for the invite I ventured out of my room, nibbled on some plain rice—drunk perhaps an unwise amount of water—and headed to the venue.

That was only time in my career when I’ve gone on stage unsure of whether I could last thirty minutes without soiling myself.

Having lived through that experience—notably retaining a clean pair of pants—I lost all fear of public speaking. Tech not working? Ill prepared? Permalagged? Hostile audience? These pale in comparison to what might have been. It provided the perspective to take a breath, appreciate the opportunity of public speaking, and strive to become better.

 

 

A few years later, I was in Las Vegas to for a walk-on talk as part of the Nokia CEO’s CES keynote. In the intervening years I’d given over forty talks and keynotes around the globe, and had figured out how communicate something worth paying attention to, whilst balancing professional obligations with staying true to my self (more of which later).

However, I arrived at the auditorium for a practice walkthrough in a suboptimal state. One week earlier my daughter had been born. I was sleep deprived and emotionally exhausted, though naturally this is nothing compared to what her mother had been through.

I’d always written my own talks, but on this occasion I was working with the CEOs speech writing team, his body language coach, and various comms staffers. We had enough time for a single walk-through the day before the talk and once again I futzed the practice run. It was my first time working with this team, and it was obvious I was the weakest link for the CEOs main event. I returned to the hotel and for the first time in a week was embraced by what was, to this day my most glorious sleep.

The pressure to deliver for a walk-on part for someone else’s keynote is relatively trivial compared to the CEO whose words could potentially impact the job security of thousands of people. At the time Nokia had 40% global cellphone market share, and employed about 70k people—a misplaced phrase could affect market confidence, Nokia’s cost of borrowing and numerous other weighty issues.

My small role in the team’s success on that day, led to becoming a regular company spokesperson and taking on a more public role in addition to my regular research duties. It also opened up a world of opportunities and experiences, the lessons from which I'll collate to share here.

I've included personal, depreciating examples to acknowledge that the more polished version of me that you are more likely to have interacted with was shaped over years by extensive practice, and repeated, potentially catastrophic failure.

For individuals, sharing is about career evolution and advancement

How does the thought of presenting your work on the main stage of a conference make you feel? Dread? Anxiety? Excitement? Elation? All of the above?

How about sharing through other channels: through social media; with peers at a workshop; appearing on a podcast; being published in in a journal, or picked up by a widely read newsletter or mainstream media?

For some people, sharing is part of a deliberate, systematic process to build a public, professional persona, with clear goals and a strategy of how to achieve them. For others, it's reactive: not aspired to, but something which requires attention in order to fulfil professional obligations.

Whatever level of motivation we have for sharing, at a high level, we share work in public to evolve and advance our career. To some readers this will appear obvious, whereas others will push back—surely there is a more noble intent? I posit that the umbrella term “career advancement” can encompass a multitude of goals, such as to:

• find a tribe, with similar values and shared interests,
• nurture an established community, and position oneself within it,
• external validation,
• influence others, e.g. to direct attention to a topic or way of working, a call to action,
• project status, through association with the sharing platform, often explicitly called out in bios,
• financial gain, direct or indirect,
• attain the trappings of a celebrity,
• attract interesting conversations, people, opportunities,  or to,
• support the survival of the organisation.

If I’m honest, I’ve leaned into each of these at different stages of my career and in response to a range of opportunities.

We often associate the term “celebrity” with attention seekers, whereas my definition is more prosaic: “to be celebrated by one’s peers when one is not present”.

Celebrity status might be attained because a person pushes the boundaries of a professional domain, shapes the community’s narrative in an important new direction, provides inspiration, or demonstrates selflessness in the service of their community or tribe. By this definition, the main value of celebrity lies not in attaining an elevated status, but in an ability to attract interesting conversations that lead to near- to medium-term opportunities. These opportunities require significantly less effort to realise than when that status is not present. Thus, attaining “celebrity” status takes on the properties of a platform, which begs the question: “For whom or what should this platform serve?”.

Being celebrated is not always positive. It often goes hand-in-hand with a loss of privacy, inbound requests that have intents-unknown which need to be managed, and exposes the sharer to a wider range of prejudices and abusive voices, for which they may be ill-equipped to handle.

Over the long term, being celebrated for a moment or stage in one’s career can make it more challenging to evolve into new domains. Firstly, it leads to more work opportunities in the thing that one is known for, which becomes a repetitive loop that at some point stagnates a career. Secondly, as ways of thinking and doing evolve, the celebrity becomes anchored to a time and place associated with “the old ways of doing things”, regardless of how they might have personally evolved. The social and commercial value assigned to ideas and the people associated with them rise and fall. 

For corporations, sharing is about survival

Corporations have a different underlying motivation to share than individuals. 

At a high level, corporations share to increase the likelihood of their survival.

This can include to:

• support the mission, often by attracting users or customers, or to nurture stakeholder relationships—all of which make the organisation a viable ongoing concern,
• attract and retain talent, to maintain awareness of the organisation within professional communities,
• position themselves favourably for financial markets, by articulating achievements, outlining opportunities and why they are best suited in their industry to realise them,
• position new products, services in the marketplace, e.g. by providing a origin-story to why they came into being,
• lobbying, e.g. to make the case for a particular regulatory stance,
• harness the momentum of the prevailing industry or societal narrative, or more proactively to,
• manage an active or emergent crisis, e.g. to deflect attention to alternative, more advantageous narratives.

Given what is at stake, corporations invest in communications teams and other professionals whose sole purpose is to manage what is shared, when, and by whom. If you're wondering how that small agency was mentioned in [top tier media], its very likely that they've hired in outside professionals with established relationships to attain access to platforms and build exposure.

FIGURE 1: The intersection of individual and organisational motivations for sharing.

Corporations gravitate to choosing sharers from their organisation who (as a baseline) have good communication skills, are ambassadors of the organisation’s values, and who fit into the broader communication’s strategy (a topic that is unpacked in this article on Strategic Narratives).

As such sharing is a deliberate act. That interview you listened to? The opinion piece that was put out? The company that was mentioned in the service of a larger story arc? These are rarely the result of serendipity. Thus, for everything that is shared by the organisation we should ask “Why this content?”, “Why this messenger and platform?”, “Why now?” and “What am I missing?”. The answers are rarely what one first assumes.

The Audience Sentiment Arc

Everything we share has an audience. Not all audiences are equal.

Consider the many differences between peers reading a journal article, attendees at a talk hosted at an industry conference, or a mention in top tier mainstream media. Properties we might pay attention to include:

• the sharing platform ’s status amongst our peers,
• the quality of interactions such as comments, conversations or job opportunities,
• the attention paid by notable decision makers,
• its value to different organisational functions,
• other roles such as agents, selection committees, editors, or comms specialists who worked behind the scenes,
• whether money changes hands (in either direction), or
• bumps in social media follows;

A typical method to measure the impact of shared content is in audience engagement. This is often defined by views, clicks, shares and other interactions baked into online platforms where your content is picked up and shared. These metrics are superficial at best and implicitly nudge the sharer to produce new content that can compete in that metrics-driven environment. It often becomes a race to the bottom.

The Audience Sentiment Arc takes an alternative approach, prompting us to think about issues such as different types of audience, the properties of each, and their sentiment to the sharer and what they are sharing.

 

 

FIGURE 2: The Audience Sentiment Arc, early in the sharer ’s career. 

An individual's career will likely span many different audience types. However, it is fairly common early in one’s career, is to initially share with our professional community, including peers with whom we have direct, reciprocal, supportive relationship:

• Professional community. Generally supportive, with a shared interest in the subject matter, but as yet no strong opinion for or against what you share.
• Supporters. As content that adds value to the community is shared, and you form a unique point of view, supporters emerge to interact, and propagate your content though other channels.  Support is often assumed to be reciprocal. Supporters enable sustained (commercial) offerings such as books, training or subscription newsletters.

As our thinking evolves, and our stance for and against certain issues becomes more opinionated, we start to attract a wider range audience types, as shown in figure 3. 

 

 FIGURE 3: The Audience Sentiment Arc, for an established career

 This includes: 

• Neutrals. Have a passing interest in the content, with little or no understanding of the person who produced it. This audience is commonly reached from exposure to more mainstream media.
• Constructive critics. Critics demonstrate a willingness to invest in the sharer by understanding their content and context, before presenting alternative views—a valuable gift of someone else ’s wisdom. Meaningfully engaging constructive critics—for example by providing them access to your platform and network—has the potential to make them long-term allies. Ignoring them may nudge them to become dissenters.
• Dissenters. Have reached the conclusion that your position goes counter to their world view and the wellbeing of people and things that matter to them, and that you are unwilling to acknowledge their point of view. Any new content you share is assumed by default to be tainted by past experiences. Hence, dissenters seek to undermine the narrative put forward by the sharer. Addressing dissent is challenging for the sharer who is unlikely to be privy to these conversations, which are often voiced in smaller, closed, like-minded groups. However, it is well worth attempting—interactions with dissenters can reveal the limitations of one’s position, identify hard edges of how far your ideas might travel, and of course the dissenter’s position may be more worthy of adoption than your own.
• Fans. Some supporters evolve into fans, who proactively seek out and evangelise your content. If things you do are for sale, they will be amongst the first to buy it—and as such they are often the bedrock of commercial offerings such a books or events.
• Stans. Uncritical, they wholeheartedly buy into the sharer’s worldview which they proactively propagate wherever possible. Their vibrant defence of the sharer’s position can be perceived as irrational by others—and if not addressed—to the detriment of the sharer’s position within their community. They can also be highly demanding of the sharer’s attention, which if not sated, nudges them to become dissenters. Your stan may also be another person’s troll.
• Trolls. Hold a real or perceived grudge, and will persistently, proactively seek to undermine the credibility of the sharer. The adage “do not feed the troll” is the only long term strategy that works, until they become bored and move onto another target.

Having one’s content propagated to new audiences can be a raw, jarring,  experience triggering emotions that can prove counterproductive to a sustained role in the public arena. What and whom to pay attention to or ignore? How to stay grounded if things achieve virality? Whose opinions to trust? Which egos to manage?

In the next update to this essay, I’ll unpack the process of building an audience, the risks associated with quick-hits successes, and how to maintain one’s “sense of self” when organisational and audience expectations are pulling you in all directions.

 

Footnotes

The next instalments to this essay will be announced via the Radar mailing list.

If organisations share to increase the likelihood of survival, surely this could also apply to individuals? For some, yes, but, that would pre-suppose all individuals frame their life goals in terms of their career, which is a generalisation too far.

A request: I’d love to hear about your experiences—challenges and how you overcame them, seemingly small moments that turned out to be milestones, and your hard-earned wisdom—for consideration in my next book. Please drop them here. Thanks—Jan.

Photos:

• Storm clouds over Lhasa, Tibet.
• Exiting the valley near Daocheng Yading, China.
• Precarious crossing, close to Lhasa.
• Shibuya rooftop, Tokyo.