12.3 Communications Planning
Key Takeaways
- Effective change communication planning provides information, provides the context for change, engages people in change, and evaluates and gathers feedback
- Providing context gives people a map that helps them navigate what may otherwise be seen as chaos
- A change communication strategy contains background, overall aims and approach, stakeholder analysis and engagement, key messaging, channels, risks and measurement methodology
- Engaging people means allowing them to develop shared understanding, exchange ideas, relay concerns and contribute
- Evaluating and gathering feedback checks how communication is being received and whether it has been effective
Change communication that is impactful requires effective planning and focused effort all the way through change. CM3 sets out what planning must achieve and what the resulting strategy contains.
The four things communication planning must find ways to do
| Purpose | What it means |
|---|---|
| Provide information | Keep people updated with relevant and timely information, ideas and concepts |
| Provide the context for change | People need to understand the bigger picture surrounding the changes and be able to relate it to their own situations. This provides a map which helps them navigate what may otherwise be seen as chaos |
| Engage people in change | Allowing them to develop a shared understanding, exchange ideas, relay concerns and contribute to making change happen |
| Evaluate and gather feedback | Check how communication is being received and whether it has been effective |
The map metaphor in the second purpose is worth holding onto. Without context, a series of individually reasonable changes is experienced as chaos — one thing after another with no discernible pattern. Context does not reduce the amount of change; it makes the change legible, and legible change is far easier to absorb than the same volume of apparently random change.
The fourth purpose is the one most often missing from real plans. A communication plan that lists what will be sent and to whom, with no mechanism for checking whether it landed, has planned only the transmission half of the communication model. Given that meaning is constructed by the receiver, checking what was received is not optional refinement — it is the only way to know whether communication has occurred at all.
The change communication strategy
CM3 sets out the contents:
| Section | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Background | The change, its drivers and the communication context |
| Overall change communication aims and approach | What communication is trying to achieve and the broad approach — including the balance of tell, sell and include |
| Stakeholder analysis and engagement | Who the audiences are, their interest and influence, and expected levels of resistance |
| Key messaging | The core messages, developed around the challenge, what makes it worthwhile, where we are heading and how we get there |
| Channels to be used | The mix of lean and rich, one-way and two-way channels |
| Risks | Communication risks — misinterpretation, timing conflicts, leaks, message fatigue |
| Measurement methodology | How the effectiveness of communication will be assessed |
Where each section comes from
The strategy is largely an assembly of work done elsewhere in the syllabus, which is a useful way to remember it:
- Stakeholder analysis and engagement comes from the stakeholder identification, segmentation, mapping and engagement-strategy work
- Key messaging comes from the four key-message areas and the tell/sell/include decision
- Channels comes from the lean/rich analysis
- Measurement methodology connects forward to change analytics, where assessing the effectiveness of communications and engagement is explicitly part of a change analytics strategy
Risks
The risks section is the one people skip. Communication risks worth recording include:
- A message reaching one group before another, so people hear about their own future second-hand
- Announcements colliding with results, restructures or other programmes' milestones
- Message fatigue from volume — the amount of information barrier
- Predictable misinterpretation, particularly where euphemism is being used
- Key spokespeople being unavailable at the point of announcement
Communication planning is not a one-off
Effective planning requires focused effort all the way through change, not a plan written at initiation. In a continuous change cycle, communication planning is part of the loop: discovery reveals how messages are landing, ideas generate adjustments, prioritisation selects them, and action delivers.
The practical implication is that the communication plan should carry a review cadence, and that the evaluation purpose feeds it. A plan that is delivered exactly as written for twelve months, despite feedback, has failed at the fourth purpose while succeeding at the first.
What good looks like
A communication plan that satisfies all four purposes is recognisable. It contains fewer communications than a poor one, because each is targeted at a segment rather than broadcast to everyone. Each has a stated know, feel, do outcome rather than a topic. It mixes lean and rich channels deliberately, with rich channels reserved for the messages that need them. It names who delivers each message, respecting the two-source rule. And it has an explicit route by which the change team learns what people actually took from it — which is often as simple as asking a change agent network what their colleagues are saying.
CM3 says providing the context for change gives people something specific. What is it?
Which section belongs in a change communication strategy according to CM3?
A communication plan lists every message to be sent, its audience and its date, but contains no mechanism for checking how messages are received. Which of the four purposes of communication planning is unmet?