Before you say anything to anyone, know what you’re actually trying to say.
My first journalism job was at Bloomberg News in Washington, during the Clinton presidency and the impeachment trial. The stakes were high, and the deadline pressure was even higher. New reporters at Bloomberg did time on what was called the speed desk. It was a wire service built to deliver news that moved financial markets, so the goal was simple: clarity and speed. I struggled with that. Writing under that kind of pressure did not come naturally to me.
One day, staring at a blank screen, I looked up at one of my editors, a seasoned political reporter, and asked in frustration: How do you make it look so easy?
His answer: “I just tell it to my Italian grandmother.”
I needed more.
He grew up in a city apartment building across the street from his grandmother’s. Every afternoon, when he came home from school, she leaned out her window and shouted, “What happened in school today?” He had exactly as long as it took for the traffic to slow and the street to quiet to tell his Nonna about his day, before she lost interest and went back to the stove to stir the sauce. Brevity mattered, too: Nonna had to hear it the first time he shouted it across a busy street.
That was the whole lesson. If you can’t tell it to Nonna from across the street before the sauce needs stirring, you don’t know your story yet.
Every editor I worked with after that asked some version of the same question: What’s the story?
Not what happened. Not who said what. The story. What does this mean, why does it matter, and why should anyone care right now?
I’ve carried that question with me from the newsroom into every boardroom, executive suite, and strategy session since. And I’ve learned that most communications problems aren’t really communications problems. They’re clarity problems that show up in public.
The rush to say something
Here’s how it usually goes. An organization is facing a moment that matters: a new leader, a merger, a funding fight, a bad headline, a big opportunity. The instinct is to do something. Draft the release. Post the statement. Schedule the interview. Build the campaign.
The activity feels like progress. Often it isn’t.
When you start communicating before you know your story, you don’t send one message. You send several, and they compete with each other. The CEO says one thing, the website another, the board chair a third. Staff fills in the gaps with their own version. Reporters notice the inconsistencies, because noticing inconsistencies is their job. And the public, which is only half paying attention anyway, takes away the one thing you didn’t mean to say.
Then you spend the next six months trying to correct it.
It’s not a messaging failure. It’s a clarity failure, and no amount of polish on the back end fixes it.
What clarity actually looks like
Clarity isn’t a slogan or a talking point. It’s the hard thinking that comes before either one. And it starts with the same questions every reporter learns to ask on day one: who, what, when, where, why, and how.
- Who needs to hear from us first, and what do they need to know?
- What is actually happening here, and what does it mean for the people we serve?
- When will the impact of what we’re doing be felt?
- Where are we going with all of this, and where will the impact land: in which communities, and for whom?
- Why does it matter, and what do we believe strongly enough to stand behind when it’s questioned?
- How are we going to get there?
Then come the questions only leadership can answer: What are the stakes for the organization, our people, and the community? What does success look like six months from now, and what would we regret about how we handled this?
Those questions rarely have easy answers, and that’s the point. Working through them is where leadership teams find disagreements they didn’t know they had, assumptions nobody has tested, and the real story hiding underneath the one they planned to tell.
Once you have those answers, everything downstream gets easier. Messages write themselves. Spokespeople stay on the same page. Decisions get made faster because there’s something to measure them against.
Why it matters most with the media and the public
I spent years holding the notebook, and I can tell you: reporters can tell within a few minutes whether the person across from them knows their story. When they do, the interview becomes a conversation. When they don’t, it becomes an excavation, and the reporter will keep digging until they find a story, whether or not it’s the one you wanted told.
The public works the same way, just faster and with less patience. People decide in seconds whether an organization seems honest, competent, and on their side. Fuzzy language, shifting explanations, and statements that say a lot without saying anything all read as one of two things: you don’t know, or you’re hiding something.
Clarity is what lets you be direct. It lets you answer the hard question without flinching, admit what you don’t know yet without losing credibility, and stay consistent across every channel, from a statehouse press conference to a community meeting to a thirty-second clip someone shares in a group chat.
In a media environment where your story will be retold, reframed, and recirculated again and again, the version you start with matters more than ever.
Clarity is a leadership act
This is the part that often gets overlooked. Clarity isn’t only a communications asset. It’s a leadership one.
The leaders people trust most aren’t necessarily the most polished speakers. They’re the ones who seem to know where they’re going and why. Their teams can repeat the mission without a script. Their boards know what they’re being asked to support. Their partners know what to expect from them.
That kind of steadiness shows up in the communities you live in and the communities your organization serves. It shapes whether a school district trusts you with its children, whether a city council sees you as a partner or a problem, whether neighbors give you the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. Reputation is built over years, but it is tested in moments, and clarity is what you lean on when those moments arrive.
When leaders do the work of getting clear first, it changes how they’re perceived. Not because they’ve found better words, but because they’ve made better decisions, and the words follow.
How North works: Clarity first
Clarity before communication is the vision behind North’s Strategy & Leadership practice. We provide senior counsel to executives, leadership teams, and organizations navigating growth, change, opportunity, and complex decisions, and we start where a good reporter starts: by finding the story before anyone tries to tell it.
Sometimes that means sitting with a CEO and a blank whiteboard. Sometimes it means bringing a leadership team and board into the same room to test what they actually believe. Sometimes it means stepping in as fractional communications leadership while an organization finds its footing. The work includes:
- Strategic and board counsel
- Organizational positioning
- Leadership transitions and change communications
- Executive decision support
- Stakeholder strategy
- Communications strategy and planning
- Fractional communications leadership
What ties it together is a simple belief: the best communications strategy begins long before the first word is written. Get clear on the story, the stakes, and the people you serve, and everything you say after that has a foundation.
It’s still the test I use with every client: Could you tell it to Nonna before the sauce needs stirring?
Find the story. Then make it matter.
North is a strategic communications firm that brings a journalist’s instinct for the story together with a strategist’s understanding of the stakes. North advises leaders and organizations across five connected practices: Strategy & Leadership, Storytelling & Positioning, Media Strategy & Relations, Reputation, Issues & Crisis, and Public Affairs & Advocacy. The moments that matter rarely stay in one lane. Neither do we. Let’s talk.
