Why I love a pen and paper

I am not particularly good at drawing. But that doesn’t stop me sketching out circles and arrows and lines and boxes to try and unpick a load of information and turn it into something that makes sense. For those who have worked with me before, you’ll be used to me sending over a picture of these scribbles that shows (clearly, ahem) how the ecosystem all fits neatly together.

This is a drawing from 2025 of me trying to understand my career

Strategic communications is the sense-maker

Now, I’m not saying my sheets of diagrams articulates the full solution, but the idea that strategic communications is a tool for sense-making is a certainty. It brings together what we know about our audiences, the relationships and webs they have, the context complete with push and pull factors and it helps us understand what will influence these people, what will make things happen.

And by understanding this mesh, by turning it into a clear overall strategic approach with objectives and phases, planned activity and testing points, it means that we create a clear pathway. But more often than not it isn’t a linear pathway. Oh no, it’s a zig zag up the hill, over the field and through the muddy ditch. But the ecosystem is alive, it has feedback loops embedded into it, and far from being a set of soft activity, the engagement and communications approach is a clear strategic act that helps achieve organisational objectives.

Strategic communication allows this. And whilst am a connector of people, dots and ideas this doesn’t happen in the ether. It happens on paper, where conversations are documented, digested, analysed and understood. The diagrams get translated into words. A brief document that highlights what we want to achieve, what we know about our audiences, what we need to find out about that, and how our strategic approach is going to do what we want it to.

Then that document must remain living. It is something we come back to regularly, because by definition the moment it is shared it will be ever so slightly out of date. That doesn’t mean wholesale change all the time, but it does mean tweaks, tests, monitoring those tests, seeing what works and what doesn’t. The strategic approach provides the framework from which activity can take shape and come alive.