The best story is rarely in the brief

Generative AI has made producing words easy. Finding the thing worth saying is another matter — and sometimes the process of looking for the story reveals far more than a communications opportunity.

In the age of generative AI, we are certainly not short of ways to produce words. Give an AI tool a decent prompt and it can generate a serviceable article, email or LinkedIn post in seconds.

That makes a different part of the process more valuable: deciding what deserves to be said in the first place.

My LinkedIn feed is full of chat about the role of writers during this transition to automated everything, and widespread fear that we’ll be replaced by bots. But actually, I think our journalistic training and decades in the trenches may be more useful than ever.

What we’re particularly good at:

• Finding the angle.

• Knowing which details are evidence and which are noise.

• Connecting with people and drawing out their knowledge — including things they didn’t even realise would be valuable to the rest of us.

• Recognising the sentence someone said offhand that should actually be the headline.

• Not being afraid to ask “dumb” questions until we truly understand the science or technology — or at least understand it well enough to spot what’s genuinely new, and know enough about the audience to understand why they should care.

Often, the most useful question isn’t What should we write? but What have we got here?

A customer result? A technical insight? An unpopular opinion? A difficult problem somebody finally solved? A founder who can explain something nobody else is explaining particularly well?

Only then do I decide whether any of those things wants to become an article, a case study, a launch campaign, a sales asset, a founder post — or perhaps nothing at all.

The best story is rarely waiting obediently inside the brief. You often have to go looking for it.

Sometimes the story changes the business

I can’t tell you how many times the job I was asked to do turned into something else

or, at the very least, something more.

An employee interview intended as a light-hearted social spotlight might reveal fresh insights into the technology or customer needs. That conversation can then inspire a more in-depth LinkedIn article for the employee’s personal page, a contributed article for a trade publication, a technical note, and additional social posts far beyond the original HR campaign.

In the process, it can do something else too: contribute to the development of the business itself.

One obvious example is the messaging framework. Challenging a leadership team to distil the company mission, define its main pillars, identify its key audiences and prioritise its messaging goals can be a useful way to revisit fundamentals they may not have considered closely since putting together the original business plan.

But the benefits don’t stop there.

When everyone is very close to a subject, they can stop noticing the parts that are genuinely interesting to everyone else.

And in our quest to understand the company, communications people often collect information the leadership team might not otherwise hear.

Employees may share more in a candid conversation with a friendly comms person than they would in a formal conversation with their manager. And when the interviewer is closer to a layperson than a technical peer, employees are often more likely to explain the technology in accessible terms.

There may also be aspects of their job that seem completely commonplace inside the company but fascinating to an outsider.

They may tell you about customer interactions that reveal unmet needs, recurring pain points, or novel ways the company is solving problems that nobody is really talking about, even though they could be major differentiators.

The strange workaround everybody spent six months solving shouldn’t necessarily be reduced to a bullet point, it may be a story in itself.

Employees can also offer useful perspectives on how the company brands and markets itself.

One question I often ask is: “How do you describe what you do to someone you meet at a conference — or at a bar?” Their answer may be very different from the messaging framework I’ve developed with the leadership team. It might actually be better.

And if that’s how people on the ground are already describing the company, it’s important to know.

Customer interviews are equally valuable and provide useful intelligence pretty much every time. You hear about pain points and positive experiences with the product or service, of course, but also negative experiences, unexpected applications and ways customers are using the technology that nobody originally anticipated.

Being able to gather that information and feed it back to the leadership team — without violating any confidences given — can help shape decisions and company direction in both small and significant ways.

Go to the source

Most of all, I love interviewing employees and customers because it gives me a much better feel for the company.

When you’re brought in as an outside communications consultant, your formal interaction may initially be with only a handful of members of the leadership team. The “company culture” posts you’re asked to develop for social media might amount to photos from the annual team-building event, accompanied by just enough context to cobble together a caption.

But if I want to understand what makes a company distinctive, I need to talk to the person who keeps the machines running. The one who fields the customer queries. The one representing the company on the road. The person who organises the bike-to-work initiative in addition to formulating assays in the lab.

It’s another version of one of my most important journalistic principles: Go to the source.

And the source is not necessarily the CEO or VP of Marketing, who may themselves have joined only a year or two ago. It might be the lab tech who was there on Day One and worked her way up to Director of Operations. Or the receptionist who has quite literally been the voice and face of the business for 15 years.

Those people know things. They know how the company really works. They know what customers ask. They know what has changed. They know which problems keep coming back. They often know what makes the place special long before anyone has tried to put it into a brand framework.

So my takeaway to CEOs seeking help with company storytelling is this:

Be prepared to follow the story wherever it leads. And let other people help shape it.

The brief may tell you where to start. It rarely tells you where the best story is.