Good morning, and welcome to our event, Unlock the true potential of corporate communication. My name is Maria And I'm Troels, and we are consultants working in Implements communication practice. And we are excited that so many of you are joining us here virtually today to see and discuss how we can unlock the true potential of corporate communications. And the reason we are interested in this topic is quite simple. Across the companies and transformation programs we work with, we keep seeing the same pattern. Highly skilled communication teams are facing growing complexity and invisible barriers, such as unclear roles, fragmented processes, isolated collaboration efforts, and challenges with measuring impact that all hinder the full potential of corporate communications. On the other hand, we have also observed that when the various communication teams work closer together and more strategically aligned with the business, the benefits can be substantial. So, our goal for this session is to provide you with a practical blueprint to help position corporate communication where it belongs as a truly strategic value driver. But before we dive in, let's just take you back to November, where we started this conversation. Here, we hosted a similar event, and maybe some of you were even here. So, here's a short clip, so you can also get a sense of what to expect today when we continue this conversation. If you are not visionary or aspirational on behalf of Corp Combs, no one will be. If you are looking into one and a half hour on key messages and good advice and new narratives, this is not the day. This is a day of structure. So, we see that even highly skilled communication teams, they struggle because they face increasing complexity, but also some invisible barriers. Unclear roles, fragmented processes, silo teams, but also challenges with measuring the impact of communications. I speak again and again with companies who complain that you have all these great people who end up doing a lot of day-to-day stuff and don't have time for any of the strategic things. If that happens over a long period, the discipline also loses its credibility or its strength vis-à-vis top management. To navigate reality and bring order to this chaos that corporate communication can seem to be, we need a structured approach. What we need is a communication operating model. For me, alignment is not a final product. It's a process. That was a snapshot of the conversation and our event that we started in November. Today will be the virtual session of that for those of you who are not able to participate in the physical event. So, let's dive into exactly what we have planned for you today. Today, we will start by talking about the dream to make corporate communication this undisputed strategic value driver that we believe it should be. We are also going to dive deep on the challenges and barriers holding corporate communications back. And then, of course, we will get to it. We will lay out our concrete framework, our communication operating model, that we believe will be the key to unlock this untapped potential and overcome the challenges. We are going to illustrate how we have worked with this operating model through a concrete case that we will walk through. Following this, there will be a chance for you to ask questions in the chat. You can actually do that as we go along. Then we will catch up and answer a handful of your questions from the chat. And then we are going to end this session and send you off with five concrete takeaways for how you can think about this and how you can go about it if you were to start embarking on this journey in your own organization. So, all of this in the next 40 minutes. But first, we would like to check in with you. We are these days wondering about a big question. And we formulate it this way. What would you wish you could say about corporate communications that you cannot say today? This is a question that we are discussing with people like you, communications directors in big organizations out there. Because we are curious what it is you see that is really the difference between where you are today and the dream where you would like to go. So now we would invite you to write in the chat your answer to this big question. And yes, it's a big question to start the Wednesday morning off with. But we hope you're up for the challenge. So we will give you a little time to write in the chat and we will pick up a few of your answers out there. So, let's try to type it. Maybe, Troels, I can start by asking you what would you wish you could say about corporate communication that you cannot say today? I wish I could say, and we maybe alluded to it a little bit in the beginning, that it was really this true strategic value driver for the business. We will also talk about it in a few seconds. But what we really see is that many teams are doing, many of the various communication teams are doing all their efforts really, really well. But because they are not fully aligned with the overall purpose and strategy of the business, and because they don't have ways to align and organize with the other teams, the efforts become kind of fragmented. And that is a shame, because we believe that if they were all aligned much better, that then we could be able to prove the value of corporate communications that is aligned. Yes. And benefit from the synergies. And I can see some answers coming in here in the chat. So let's have a look. Yes. Yes. So what would you wish you could say about corporate communications that you cannot say today? So Sylvia here says that she would want it to be clear and transparent. Yes. And Anna here says it's not authentic. So maybe pointing back to the fact that it's hard for corporations to figure a balance of how to tell their narrative in an authentic way, because they may be afraid of being too transparent and too clear. But maybe we as communicators know that that is really where the effect lies, if you're able to be that. And it might also elude to the big AI topic, of course, that in these times of AI, where we might tend to use AI for a lot of the day-to-day tasks and, for instance, leadership communication. We need to be careful because we need to ensure that we still are the human quality filter and ensure that it's authentic. What else do we have here? Line Nissen says she would wish that corporate communication would follow a systematic approach, create line of sight and make our colleagues proud. I like that as well. Yeah. Nina Beck branches there's a gap between top and the rest. Yeah. And that's actually something we are going to touch upon in our case. I also like the one from Sophie Tandrup that it is about quality and honesty rather than quantity and too fast pace. Yes. Also interesting point that we will touch upon later. Yes. So really that you maybe focus your efforts on the things that really drive strategic value for your business. Yes. And do that very well rather than doing everything very fast. Yes. And really working from the same direction, the same shared narrative. Yes. And then I think we should end with this one. Pernille saying, I wish there would be no question that corporate communication should have a seat at the top leadership team. That's without further ado. That's right up our alley. That's of course, we believe in the strategic power of communication to drive the business strategy and purpose. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Thank you so much for answering this maybe big and high flying question. But I think and of course, maybe the last thing I would include is from Kenny, the measurable impact. It continues to be, of course, for communication, a little bit of an Achilles heel. How do we demonstrate it? How do we demonstrate the impact? And we also going to touch a little bit upon that today. Thank you so much. Let's move on to the first topic of our agenda, the dream and the challenge of corporate communication. Let's start with a definition or at least a sort of a definition, because what do we actually mean when we say corporate communication? We talk about it as an interdependent system of all the communicating functions internally and externally in a corporation. So it's not only the function that might have the name corporate communication, but it could also be that. But in reality, you know, it we need to always start with the definition in each organization's context, because how we think about the word might differ. But let's get back to that, because if we talk about the dream of corporate communication, it looks something like this. This is what this system that we just talked about could look like. So what you see here is an example of a full communication ecosystem in an organization. Different communication disciplines and teams working across and towards different stakeholders in different arenas. But of course, ideally, they should all be connected and guided by the company's core purpose and strategy, illustrated here, of course, by the radiant sun in the middle. And as we talked about, this also illustrates the dream and the ideal of corporate communication, that we are actually able to make consistent, coherent communication, because then that is what ultimately will make all of our stakeholders make sense of our company and act in our support. But what does act in support means? Of course, that means different things to different stakeholders. And why should the board of directors, for instance, back to the thing about the seat at the table, why should they care about this dream of corporate communication? Well, because when done successfully, corporate communication and communication disciplines create immense amounts of business value. If marketing communication is done well, it will resonate with the right customers in the marketplace. They will support by buying more, paying more, staying loyal, and hopefully also recommending your product or service to their friends. If investor communication is handled well, stakeholders in capital markets will invest more, buy more shares, and finance your company on better terms. If public affairs and public relations are handled well, stakeholders in the broader society will give your organization's license to operate, access to their markets, maybe even invite you in for policy making. And of course, the general public would have a higher degree in trust with you, allowing you to operate in their society over time. And finally, if internal change and leadership communication is handled well, employees and leaders will be more engaged, by that maybe more productive. And of course, they will maybe also be more adaptive to change and execute faster when we need to change the big ship. And people would, of course, increasingly want to stay at your workplace and you might even find it easier to recruit. And that is ultimately why we believe corporate communication deserves a seat at the table. Because when managed successfully, it is undeniably, as you can see from these benefits, a huge value driver for the business. But Maria, this ideal and the dream is also the challenge, isn't it? It definitely is. So you could say in practice making this work is far from simple. In fact, because that we do are doing the individual communication clean as well. That is one thing. But how do we manage all these disciplines that you see up here in the ecosystem collectively and effectively on a day to day basis across these various arenas and stakeholders? Corporate communication is complex by design, but when we treat it as a set of disconnected activities, we get inefficient workflows, broken processes, misalignment and siloed teams running in different directions with separate KPIs. In other words, you could say we miss out on the synergies. So this high level of complexity needs to be managed well. Or it might negatively impact even the best communications teams out there because we know they are there and it might also impact the organization as a whole. Yes. This challenge in particular was actually framed very well by Professor Lars Thöger Christensen from CBS that you also saw earlier in the video. And he joined us back in November to our corporate communications event. He described modern organizations as fundamentally complex. And then he posed a simple but powerful question that you see here. How do you manage complexity? And his answer was with complexity. Now, that does not mean adding more chaos or making things more complicated. No, what he means and the view we also share is you cannot simply remove complexity from modern organizations, of course. Instead, you need to design the right structures, systems and processes that help people navigate that complexity. So everyone can move in the same direction while still doing what they do best and what they are experts at. So with that being said, let's dive into how we can actually unlock corporate communications to true potential. Let's focus on the solution. To navigate this reality and bring order to the chaos communications simply need structure, something that acts as you could say a mission control center. That's what our communications operating model aims to provide. It consists, as you can see here, of three directional dimensions. We have in the top strategy. We have stakeholders and story. And under that six core dimensions that enable the function to operate effectively. We'll return to those in a moment. Yes, but we will start here in the outer directional dimensions. Also, me myself coming out of Las Tuer's school of thought and as a strategic communicator, I believe that communication is strategy and strategy is communication. Or said in a little less fluffy way, at least communication is here to enable the best strategy. So the very first question you need to ask is what impact must corporate communication deliver to advance our purpose and strategy? We are not doing communication for the sake of communication. All communication should be done to advance the purpose and strategy of the business. The answer to this question sets the direction for everything we should do and what should be the business critical communication activities that you should focus on and which one you can leave out. The second directional element is the story. We need to ask the question. What is the overall aspirational and unifying story about our organization and its role in the world that is strong enough to motivate stakeholders across arenas to act in support of our purpose and strategic goals? And strong enough to be an embracing term for all our strategic messages to our various stakeholders under one meaningful umbrella. Thirdly, and impacting the insights of course to all the other, to the two other dimensions is of course, we need a deep understanding of what drives value for our most critical stakeholders. And allow me to be a little black and white here. But so what we see in general is that most communication function has a pretty solid grip on the directional elements. They know their strategy. Maybe they can simplify it even more, but they know what their communication strategy is. And they often also have a very strong, engaging and aspirational story. And they are very good at understanding the stakeholders. But there seems to be, what seems to be way more difficult for communication teams is if you ask them the question, do you have a structured operating model for how communication works as a whole and deliver value? One that directly addresses the challenges and paradoxes that we just talked about. In our experience, this is where even the best communication teams often have a gap. And that's exactly what we're here to solve. So let's direct our focus to that now. The inner six dimensions of our operating model. You can also call them the interdependent cock wheels that make the whole communication work go around. The dimensions are organization and governance, processes, capabilities, tech, tools and services. This is where AI lies. Performance management and not least leadership and culture. You should see this as a holistic model that ensures you can navigate and tap into all the relevant dimensions you need to improve your communication operations as a whole. Although it might differ in practice, what is most relevant and hence where you should begin. This can be used to, because the situation is different in practice, this can be used to kind of navigate yourself to where you will want to start and then build from there. And we will now unfold each of these dimensions briefly, just to give you an idea of what each of these elements contain and what we typically work with when we open one of these dimensions. And then we're going to end with a case where you can see how we have worked with this model in real life. The first dimension is organization and governance. It covers how we design the optimal organizational design to deliver the prioritized communication activities that we believe drive value for the business. So when we work with this dimension, it typically includes, of course, analyzing and assessing the scope of disciplines and resources that are needed. Where the teams are best placed in the organization. And of course, a governance model and clear roles and responsibilities for how these different communication functions to work together. What are the key cross-functional interfaces that we need to have. The next dimension is processes. It covers core activities and processes, of course, for corporate communication that enable us to deliver value. When we work with this dimension, it could include mapping of tuned ways of working, including the pain points, the bottlenecks. It could include redesign of existing processes to improve efficiency and enhance value creation, including having a close look at the ownership, approvals, workflows, interfaces and quality criteria. Lastly, implementation of the new processes. Where do we standardize and where do we leave room for flexibility? Yes. And the third dimension is capabilities. And here we seek to answer the question of what are the key capabilities that we need to deliver on the strategy now, but also with a look towards the future. Of course, right now, this also very much becomes an AI discussion. But working with this dimension overall typically includes, of course, assessing the gaps between the capabilities we have today versus the capabilities we need going forward. And then based on that assessment, we develop a capability building strategy. So how are we going to get these capabilities? Will we invest in upskilling our current workforce? Will we outsource part of our value creation? value creation? Or will we even insource or acquire the capabilities from another company that we need? And of course, if it's about training and upskilling, we bring the capability training to life by designing training programs and academies. And speaking of AI discussions and what you might also have top of mind right now, this is where it lives, especially in the model. In practice, this element involves three things. It starts with looking at the landscape and architecture of the tools, technologies and channels, asking ourselves whether we have the right combination in place or whether there are opportunities to optimize how we work both now and in the future. Building on that, we often define playbooks and best practice guidelines, including best practices for how are these tools actually used best across the organization. And third, increasingly important governance of AI and data. This includes really setting clear guardrails for how AI is used so we can increase speed and quality while still maintaining trust, integrity and control. Yes. And the second last dimension is performance management, which, as we talked about in the beginning, this is where we measure impact and have been and always been a little bit of an Achilles heel. For communication, how do we actually measure the impact? And that is not because communicators don't want to measure impact, but it's just really hard to make the causal link to business impact. Because many teams have figured out how to measure many of the leading metrics, such as engagement rate, media mentions, and to what degree people are fond of your communication. And the challenge remains to prove, as I said, the causal link to how this creates real impact for the business. This is, let's be honest, still difficult to do. But what we always do to kind of argue the best way possible for how all of these metrics fit together is that we establish an impact case. So here we make the hierarchy of metrics and KPIs kind of to build the causal link as strong as we can from the bottom to the ultimate business impact. And this includes, of course, setting up systems to track this impact. Do we have the right surveys? Do we have the right dashboards so we can monitor as we go much faster than we have done in the past? Because this is, of course, a system that needs to inform us when we should improve and where we should course correct to make sure, again, that we really realize the impact we are set out to do. And the final one. Yes. And last but not least, we have leadership and culture. And I'm happy to talk about this one because it's quite close to my heart. It's really about fostering the needed ownership among leaders and the right culture for corporate communications to deliver value. Working with this includes behavioral principles. First of all, what kind of culture do we want to cultivate? How do we make it tangible through principles or guidelines on how we need to act? Then engagement and coaching of leaders is essential. How do we activate them as the most powerful channel and enable them to role model in role model the desired behaviors, you could say? And of course, change management asking ourselves, how do we go about changing people's mindset and behaviors? They are the ones driving this. And also, how do we handle the ones who might resist the change? So this was actually the communication operating model. But how do you actually go about working with the model in practice? Let's dive into that. Now that we have a case example from a recent project that we have been working on. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Maria. In this case, we gave the title from broken links to leader led communication. And this was a case for a local country market. So an affiliate in a big global organizations. And the situation was that this company has experienced rapid growth and was entering new markets that it was not used to be in with an increasing internal pressure, external pressure on the company. Much more public scrutiny, much more exposure to external stakeholders. But there was also a big change happening internally. There was a big internal culture shift going on because there was a new CEO been appointed, a new, more modern leadership style with more empowerment, replacing a more traditional conservative leadership. So that was the situation. The complication was because of this external pressure. There was a need for faster and much more proactive communication and much more need for an aligned leadership team and organization for what is our narrative, what is our story and what is our key messages. But then there was also, of course, related to that need to support a big culture change to answer the external pressure, but also to fall in line with the vision of the new CEO. So a big cultural change that needed to start with the local leadership team. And then on top of that, kind of the perfect storm, employees was also demanding more transparent leadership communication. And the key question we was brought into answer was basically this. How might we set up our entire communication organization across internal and external disciplines to effectively support our business strategy? And this is an example of an evolving case where we started one place in the organization and governance bucket, as you will see in two seconds. But the project grew over time because we had a hypothesis driven approach. So we were going in where the need was biggest. And that, of course, evolved over time. But over the course of 12 months, we touched upon all the dimensions in the operating model. So how did it all start? It started with, OK, we need to respond to this external environment, but it's very unclear internally what roles do we have? What capabilities do we have around communication and how should we organize for this new reality? So we started classic consultant style assessing the needs and the core capabilities and the gap from where they were today. And we designed through many workshops with the leadership team and involvement of the organization, different prototypes and scenarios. We ended up designing the new organizational design for all the communication roles. But as we as communication consultants would have been the first one to say, of course, moving boxes is very rarely, probably never enough. So we were invited in for a second phase where we overall went from these organizational boxes to dealing with the real root causes inside the organization. And this real root cause analysis we did revealed that although now the roles were in place, the bigger issue, at least to mobilize the internal organization to deliver on the external pressure, was that the broken links vertically in the organization were very big. There were simply no clear plan or structure for how communication would be flowing from the CEO to the leadership team and to the individual teams, marketing, sales, etc. So we simply went in and designed, not simply, we went in and designed, looked where are the broken links. We installed some standard meeting types that needed to happen in the vertical sense. And we designed standards and playbooks for how to conduct those meetings. And then we coached the leadership team in actually being better communicators and running these meetings more effectively. And then we have kind of figured the sort of kind of the backbone, the internal structure of at least the how communication flows inside the organization. But while we were getting a lot better meetings from that and employees were increasingly satisfied with the communication from their leaders, we still had a way to go. We still needed to really align on how do we look across all our communication initiatives, make fewer and better and bigger bets on what we believe are the three most critical must win battles for our communication strategy. So we developed that across the internal and external priorities together with the leadership team, who used to see communication as the responsibility of the PR and marketing manager. But through this process, we managed to get the full buy in and ownership that these three communication must win battles were part of the overall affiliate strategy. And then we ended our engagement off with not just having a full and aligned leadership team, but also onboarding the entire team of 200 employees to this new strategy. And including that the communication strategy where we designed a two day offside, physical offside with a strategic missions theme, trying to really onboard and engage the employees in what the new strategy was all about and how they could contribute. So that was a walkthrough of how we have approached an operating model project. We also, there's many ways to start with this. You can go more holistic, but normally it starts based on a bigger need and a hypothesis. And then we work our way from there where the need is. So. Before we round up this last section of the event, we are curious to hear if you have a few questions out there. So please share in the chat. Yeah, so now it's your chance to, as Maria says, to write a few questions in the chat. We will have time for a few of those. Yes. And maybe while you are typing, if you have a question, there's a question actually, Truls, that I wanted to talk a bit about. And we often hear this when we are out working with these communication operating model out in the real world. So really often we hear the question, how should communication teams think about AI more structurally? And how does it actually connect to this communication operating model? And for that, there are three things we recommend to keep in mind here. First, define the role of AI in the organization by asking yourself from the get go, what role should AI actually play? This means being clear on where AI should support the work and really making sure that we have AI involved from the start. And second, move beyond the individual efficiency. That's really where the real value comes in when you could say AI is support shared communication processes. And finally, of course, set clear guardrails, ensure the responsibility to protect credibility and trust. Yeah. And there's a question coming in. There's a question from Line. Did you already address all four stakeholder types, capital markets, customers, workplace and policy, or where did you start? So we started on the big dream, of course, saying that if you manage to align between all the different functions that communicate to each of these stakeholders, then we will get better. That's kind of the dream and ideal of corporate communication. We didn't go in detail with how we communicate, how we work with each area. We think actually that all the elements in our operating model are valid for whatever team you're in. If you're in public affairs or in PR or in internal communications or in branding or what it might be, it will still be the same kind of elements you need to look at. But what we would urge you to is to think end to end and design the overall processes, the overall value streams for communication. And they will probably go across different communication disciplines and then work from there to kind of define roles and responsibilities and what are the supporting tools enabling these end to end processes. Because we want to have more shared processes that are clear who does what, of course, and less fragmentation. At least there needs to be a very central alignment of the priorities. And one of the key things in that under the governance part is also to have a cross, a fixed cadence for how the cross communicate, how the, all the different functions meet and align on the priorities cross functionally. Should we, we have a few, should we take one more and. Yes, let's just read them here. We, Lauren writes here. We are changing from a high service level comps department to a more self service model. What are the key drivers in your opinion to make this work? Yeah, I like this, this question. And of course, also with AI that is becoming much more doable. And I think the good thing about that. And of course we see that as well, that the resources allocated to communication teams are limited and, and might even get even more limited in the future. So this might be the way that many has to go. Uh, and AI enables that, but it should also then the time that it frees up for the remaining communicators. This is our chance to, to get into the strategic advisor role and, and, and get even closer to, um, to the management. Um, so I, we see that a lot out there. And I think what is key is to set up clear guardrails. If it's a self service model, of course, the tools need to be super sharp and good, but there also need to be some clear guardrails. And quality assurance around it, especially with AI. Um, so I would think about that very much. And then the other point, as I said, free up your time and find out how you then can really deliver strategic value for your management team. Yes. And that also ties to your question, Christina. So if you cannot do it all and have very limited resources, what is the most critical in your opinion? Uh, in your opinion, it goes into that. And often when we are working with the corporate communications model, as mentioned, we also choose from the start based on the hypothesis to focus on the most critical elements. Yeah. And I think, uh, if, to answer your question, Christina, if you have limited resources, what is most critical in your opinion? I think it's actually in the strategy, uh, out of directional element. Be super clear, uh, with your bosses. If you have that, what are the, and give them the answer to what are the most critical, uh, ways where your, where the communication teams can deliver value and maybe decide on, let's say three must win battles, three things you focus on. Uh, and then build from there. And if you dive into the operating models, uh, core elements, I would start with based on those strategic priorities mapping out the most crucial end to end, uh, value streams or processes that you have and make them work across teams. Yes. Yes. Yes. With two minutes left. And thank you, Pernille, also for your question. We will get back to you in written. Um, yes, but as promised, we also wanted to quickly touch upon how to go about it. Some of you may now be wondering what are the most important things to take away from this. And as if we were a TV kitchen, we've done a bit of, uh, prepping and homework beforehand, and we would like to leave you with five key takeaways. Our experience with operating model projects have highlighted the importance of five key principles to be successful. First of all, be visionary biases from the past or the fear of certain stakeholders firm opinion too often and limit, limit creativity and visionary thinking, which is actually what moves the needle. So dare to seek inspiration from other companies and sectors and explore these insights about possible futures. Secondly, be hypothesis driven. These types of projects by nature are very wide in scope and should always be tailored to the specific organization. As you saw in our case case, the scope was really clear, but also adjusted along the way to constantly reflect what we came to know about the problem and the required solution. And the third element is, as we just talked a lot about design end to end. Um, that is really the key to tie it together across, um, across functions. Um, and we don't want to sub optimize. That's really the whole point because then we cannot achieve the dream of this, uh, consistent communication coming from the organization as a whole. Fourthly, um, as you also saw in the case, we invite you to build in sprints because again, this is complex. It is a big, uh, beast. So start where the need is the biggest and then, uh, work in sprints to deliver some results, uh, fast. It's, it's based on design thinking and all the benefits that many of you probably know from there. And, and then from there we can test and scale the solution. And finally, try, and it goes maybe to your question, Penelie. Try to, um, involve senior management from day one. In the case, it was the CEO of this, uh, local affiliate that approached us. In other projects we have, it's the head of communication, uh, who initiates it. Sometimes it might even come from the CFO who needs to see some savings, unfortunately. But no matter what, from day one in this project, you should involve state and senior stakeholders because the operating model is the link between the strategy and the execution. Uh, and if the operating model work is delegated too far down in the organization, again, there's a risk of it not being closely enough connected to the strategy and not having the ownership. So by involving the senior management team in designing, uh, the workshop, uh, the operating model, you will ensure secure this buy-in and a deeply anchored ownership also for the solution. Okay. That was it. We want to leave you with that. Our time is up, but if you want to know more, if you have more questions, if you want to know more in depth about these dimensions or anything else that we mentioned, please, we would love to continue the conversation. Uh, reach out to us. You can see our contacts here or in the follow-up email. Um, I think that's it for us today. Thank you. Here from sunny Copenhagen. Yeah. We hope you have, uh, enjoyed watching in and we wish you a fantastic day. Thank you so much and see you. Bye.