Don’t get me wrong.  I like Liam Fitzpatrick and Sue Dewhurst.  And I love David Murray. 

But I still contend that there’s every bit as much value to be gained from taking apart what we do as internal communicators, putting it back together and looking for what’s missing as there is in perfecting the time-honored skills our profession has used so far.

There’s nothing wrong with writing good, approved, straight-to-the-point copy.  There’s nothing wrong with making sense of the channels that proliferate in organisations.  There’s nothing wrong with knowing how to write a good speech, design a better-than-average PowerPoint presentation, or even to prepare an easy-to-execute cascade.

And there’s nothing wrong with being good at training people to do all of those things. 

But equally, there’s nothing wrong with challenging the value of each of those activities and the whole mindset undergirding today’s internal communication.  For as far as we have come as a profession in the last ten years, our success in the next ten years may well result not from continuing to do our current work better—but in finding and emphasizing the work that really makes a difference and convincingly proves our worth.

We’re not there yet.  But for those of us who re-write the record book, there are those of us who need to rewrite the rule book.  And there are those in the middle who need to give both groups the support we need to keep doing what we’re doing.