#122 5 ways to shake up your change communications

In this special episode of Less Chatter, More Matter, recorded live from the IABC World Conference in Whistler, we explore how to refresh and reframe change communication in a world where attention is fragmented and information overload is the norm.

Too often, communicators fall back on familiar tools and templates when managing change initiatives... but with today’s audiences juggling endless priorities and digital distractions, those traditional approaches may no longer be fit for purpose. In this episode, we share five practical ways to shift your communication strategy and achieve stronger cut-through and connection.

We discuss how to align your communication rhythm with what your audience actually needs, experiment with different formats and delivery styles, and remove unnecessary complexity from your messaging. We also reflect on how relevance, timing, and empathy can significantly enhance how your message is received and acted upon.

Whether you're overseeing a major transformation or supporting localised operational change, this episode offers thoughtful, experience-based guidance to help you deliver communication that genuinely supports people through change. Listen in now.

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• Change Isn't Hard! - Mel's book
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Transcript

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So you're working on a change project and you're responsible for the communications. You pull out your old tied and tested template, or maybe just a copy of a comms plan you did for another change, and copy and paste. It's the usual stuff. Start with the CEO email. Give things to the leaders to pass on to their teams. Put something on the intranet. Speak at the town hall, blah, blah, blah, and look, it's fine, but it's boring. Not to mention that we know the communication cascade is broken, so the chances of leaders passing information on all the way down to the front line is only about 30% at best. Intranet content is rarely looked at unless it's super relevant, and if your town hall is virtual, you're competing with people looking at their emails and other documents at the same time. So how can we cut through and how can we shake it up a bit? Today I'm going to share five ideas for how you can improve your change communication, because when we ditch the mundane, we reduce the change pain. Hi, friend, and welcome to another episode of Less Chatter More Matter, the Communication podcast. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and today I'm actually recording this episode from Whistler in British Columbia and Canada, which is located on the unceded territories of the Lil'wat and the Squamish nations who have lived on these lands since time immemorial. I am over in Canada to speak at the IABC World Conference, and of course, participate in many other sessions as many as possible, in fact, because if you know me, you know I love learning. And speaking of learning, today, I'm going to be sharing some of my key learnings with you about change communication ideas that can really cut through the noise and make your comms much less boring and much less corporate. And this is important because when there is so much change going on in every organisation, more than ever before, there's a lot of noise. And after a while if we keep doing the same thing, well, your thing becomes white noise for people. They don't even notice your messages anymore. Also, we are living in an attention economy, so people's attention spans aren't getting shorter. There's just more things vying for their attention. So many channels, so many voices, so many messages. And finally, it's important to get this right because people's expectations are changing too. When it comes to comms, they expect shorter snappier and more interesting messages. We can thank social media for that one. So I'm going to share five of my favorite ideas. Some of these may be familiar to you, others not, but I'd love to also hear your ideas. So please let me know what you've tried and how it's worked. So, tip one of five today is characterize the change. So. Oftentimes when we talk about process change, systems change, ways of working changes, we just provide a dot point list of responsibilities, tasks, or steps in a process. When there's role changes, often we just go, here's your new position description. Have a read. It's fine, but it doesn't build understanding because it's just dot points on a page. It's not personal, it's not memorable, and it's certainly not interesting. So this is about creating avatars for the different impacted roles and showing what the change means for them. So for example, maybe it's Freddie Finance who needs to use a new account system, which is replacing the three Freddie already uses. Or it's Mary Manager, who used to take it requests from the business and just add them to a list of things to do, but who will now instead take charge of those IT roadmaps and be a decision maker on what goes ahead and what doesn't. It could be Cathy Counselor who used to only take helpline calls over the phone from clients, but might now provide counseling services through web chats, text messages, voice messages, or anything else. Whatever it is, there is a story to be told. Think about it like a day in the life of a particular role. So when Mary Manager starts work in the morning, what's the first thing she does? Who does she work with to make decisions? How does she prioritise her workload? For Freddie Finance, what are the steps he now takes to respond to an accounts inquiry, maybe from Sally, the supplier? And what does this new process look like for Sally? The great part about creating these characters is that not only can your audience see themselves in them, they become very relevant and very specific to their roles. So you can then develop this set of avatars and use them in different situations to explain different situations or changes or challenges that the audience is likely to experience. Now, why does characterization work so well? The answer simply is because people respond to people not bullet points, even if these people aren't real. Interestingly, there's quite a bit of research around including faces or elements of faces in imagery and messaging. Humans tend to respond really well to it, especially a smiling face. Just take a look at the Amazon logo, for example, and you'll see a smile hidden in there, and they've done that for a reason. There's a few key rules to using avatars though. Number one, don't overcook it. There's a risk. You'll go into way too much detail with each of the day in the life scenarios. Keep it high level, especially if there's a lot of potential variables. If you are too detailed, you'll turn people off and they might expect every single situation to go exactly like that when we know that's not reality. Speaking of reality, tip number two is be realistic. A day in the life won't be your lollipops and rainbows. What are some of the common challenges one of your characters might face? And how will they use the new system or way of working or their new responsibilities to help solve that challenge? And number three, diversity does matter. You can't be what you can't see. So don't just pick a bunch of white cartoon characters for your avatars. Mix it up. So that's tip number one. Characterisation. And I'm just tip number two, tell stories. The story of human literacy is a very recent one of all the 350,000 years that the modern human species has walked the earth. We've really only been mostly literate for the last 50 or so years. So given that we weren't writing letters and emails for centuries and centuries, how did we pass on knowledge and news? And the answer is stories, which is why our brains are wired for stories. And when you think about it, most stories are about change. They're about people changing. They're about situations changing. Our brains are also wired to detect change because a change in our environments back in the era of the caveman could have meant danger. So this is why stories are so powerful, especially stories about change. And when we hear a story, our brains release all kinds of happy chemicals, which help to make the message stick and keep us interested. There's a lot to the art of strategic storytelling. You know, I teach that over a full day workshop, so I can't go into all the ins and outs on a 15 minute podcast, but what I will do is give you a few examples of the types of stories you can tell. So in the world, according to Mel, there are four main types of strategic stories that are used during change. The hypothetical, which is the what if situation; the classic, which involves a hero, a villain, and a victim. The personal, which often starts with, I remember when blah, blah, blah, and the analogy. So this is like that. So let's delve into those in a little bit more detail. The hypothetical is a really good option to help people imagine what could be, and then talk about how you will get there. So for example, let's say your company is going to embark on a digital transformation. Your story could start with. Imagine this, it's five years from now, and you walk into one of our clinics. Instead of taking a number and getting in line, you simply say your name into a computer and a voice and name. Recognition means you're directed to where you need to be, right away. All of your records become available to the specialist immediately, along with an AI created summary. So you don't need to tell your whole medical history over and over again. The key to the hypothetical is to make clear what the benefits are of this imagined future state. Not to the business, but to the people that actually matter, so your customers or your employees. The classic hero, villain victim story type is really good for talking about challenges the business faces, and therefore why you need to change. So the villain isn't necessarily a person. It could be a situation or a challenge like climate change or political upheaval, or cost of living challenges, whatever the victim might be, your customers who are going to end up paying more for essential services, and your company can be positioned as the hero if it changes what you offer and how you offer it. Then we have analogies which help people draw a parallel between your change and a situation that is familiar to them or similar. Okay, so for example, you could talk about the importance of culture change to the business, and the analogy might be pointing to another business that knew its culture was rotten, did nothing about it, and now it's defunct, or the owners were forced to sell. Analogies also fairly closely aligned to metaphors. So a metaphor in this situation could be, there's a bowl of fruit. Someone puts a rotten fruit piece of fruit in there and everyone ignores it, and one by one, the good fruit is taken until only the rotten fruit is left. That good fruit is your good employees who will leave if the rotten fruit is allowed to stay there, and nobody takes responsibility for addressing it. The final story type is personal stories, and these are really good for leaders to use to start to build their brand internally and externally. By showing a little bit of vulnerability, a little insight into their personality, and therefore helping to build trust. So it could be a CEO talking about their first experience as a leader and how they made a big mistake when it came to change. And what they learned from this was the importance of supporting new leaders to give them the capability and the confidence to lead change. And so therefore, the story is really about how we need leaders to take step up, but we're gonna support you to do that. When I say personal story, it's personal within boundaries, of course, and it has to be relevant. Now, above all, all these four types of stories need to be relatable to the audience. They need to either see themselves in the story or be able to relate to a similar situation or emotion or experience. So a CEO, getting up on stage and starting a story like I remember when I was staying at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, is not very relatable to most people. So that's tip number two. Use relatable stories. Tip number three, use a nifty visual. Oftentimes, if we're describing a change that's unfamiliar or just a bit nebulous, or it has a lot of parts or it quite complex, it can be really hard for people to understand it quickly. Just talking about it often isn't concrete enough, and it doesn't help people see how it all fits together. So this is where developing a diagram or a model is super useful. So for example, I have a framework model that describes my approach to change comms. And I've also developed visual representations of organisational strategies, operating models, ways of working, et cetera. The reason I do that is because the great thing about mo a model or a diagram is that most people are primarily visual learners, and we make sense of images really, really quickly. It's something like 50 milliseconds or less is the time it takes for your eye to register an image and make sense of it. So rather than a whole lot of dot points on a whole lot of slides, one model can shows how it all works together. It also serves as a really useful tool to make sure conversations about the change aren't boring and don't just become a leader reading off a screen. It becomes a visual aid, which people can point to and they can talk about. It's also high level enough that team leaders could make different parts of that model or diagram more relevant to their teams, and it becomes a really recognisable symbol of the change. Again, you do not need to overcook this. Keep it simple. Sometimes it could just be a picture of puzzle pieces fitting together, or a bunch of concentric circles or squares, whatever. It's more about the hierarchy and the order of the information and creating a logical flow throughout the diagram. If you need ideas, jump onto Canva. Look at the thousands of designs they have on there for processes and infographics. Do a Google. There's loads of inspiration out there. All right, tip number four is amplify the good stuff. Too often in change we focus on what's not working or where the areas of resistance are, and that just serves to reinforce this idea that all change is bad or hard when we know it isn't always bad or hard, and it's often good and easier than expected. So this is about sharing the stories of where the change is working really well, not just berating the people who aren't doing what you want them to do. So find where the change is working and then delve deeper. Ask yourself, why is it working there? What did those people do to make it work? What could we learn from them that we could apply to other teams or individuals? And then share those stories. So importantly, you've gotta share these bright spots with leaders because they're the ones who are going to really learn from these good news stories and experiment with simple ideas or sim similar things for their own teams. So for example, let's imagine your business is trying to implement a culture change. They want people to feel more empowered, innovate more, be more creative in their thinking. Now, right now, they're very stuck in their ways. They feel very comfortable just following the same old rules. Their leaders are very compliance driven rather than thinking more broadly. So maybe you find a team in the business who is demonstrating this new kind of thinking that you want to see throughout the whole organisation. Perhaps it's a story of how a person in your call centre was talking to an elderly customer who was struggling to understand a process. So this person took it upon themselves to create a quick flow chart to explain the process to the customer and send it to them. And now they use that flow chart all throughout for all their customers. This is the thing Innovative thinking doesn't have to be big technology driven innovations. It's simply creative problem solving. But that's a story worth sharing because not only does it show an example of an employee who feels empowered and took initiative, it also shows how small changes can make big differences. And when people love the status quo, which we do, sometimes we need to win over them with little baby steps. Okay. The final of the five tips is choose the most impactful messenger, not necessarily the most important Messenger. Too often we resort to a message from the CEO as a key channel to drive change. But here's the rub. Your change might not be relevant to the whole organisation. A lot of people might not care, and more importantly, people are less likely to listen to their CEO than they are to listen to their direct leader or a peer. Research tells us that those outside of the C-suite say they trust their peers to tell them the truth much, much more than they trust their CEO to tell them the truth. Many of you I know are already using Change Champions to help people through change, and that's a great starting point. If those champions are trusted peers, because then they become a trusted communication channel if you give them the right tools. The problem we often find is that change champions tend to be the same people every time, so they become a bit of white noise too, or change Champions are voluntold by their leaders, so they don't really want to be there or know why they're there. If you can't rely on a change champion network, then how can you tap into this messenger effect? Two options. Number one, team leaders, and I'm talking leaders of frontline teams, not the C-suite or the next layer down. Like I said earlier, we know the communication cascade is broken, so go straight to the trusted source Team. Leaders often have things like daily standups or toolbox talks, or weekly meetings or weekly emails with their teams, so give them the tools to share with their teams and be a feedback loop, and importantly, you've gotta make it quick and easy for them. They are super busy and they're probably inundated already. The second is go straight to team members themselves, then they become their own news network as they talk amongst themselves. The key here again, is to make it interesting and relevant and reach them in ways that work for them. So for example, maybe they're really active in a Viva Engage group. Maybe their team has a regular Friday email that goes out, whatever it might be, tap into where they are. Now, importantly, with all these ideas, get creative. Think about other channels and tools you could be using like a private podcast feed; short animations you create in Canva, or using AI. A fun game around the office using QR codes or whatever it might be. Maybe drop in sessions or a morning tea because everyone loves free food. There's loads of ideas out there. You just gotta hop online or tap into your network to find them. Okay folks, it's time for your episode recap. So today I shared five ideas for communication tactics you can use during change to cut through to your audience. Tip number one was characterise the change. Develop avatars that your audience can relate to and demonstrate what the change will look like in practice. These are your day in the life stories that don't only show the good stuff, but also the challenges and how you expect people to work together differently. Tip number two, which was related to tip number one is tell stories. Our brains are wired to respond to stories, especially stories about change, so use this to your advantage. I mentioned four different types of stories. There's the classic hero, villain, victim, the hypothetical analogies and personal stories. Tip number three, use a great visual, especially for strategic change or very complex change a simple graphic or model to show how all the pieces work together is ideal. Tip number four, amplify the good stuff. Don't just berate the people who aren't changing. And when you find the good stuff, learn from it and share those stories in really cool ways. Tip five, choose the most impactful messenger, which in many cases will be a person's immediate leader or a trusted peer, not the CEO. All right. That's all for today, and as I said at the top of the episode, if you've got other ideas for different ways to communicate change, I am all ears. Send them through. And of course, both my books are about change comms, so if you want more detail, you can dive into those for now, if you think this episode might be useful to someone, please pass it on. And if you have six seconds right now, please leave a rating and review about this podcast on your app of choice. It really means the world to me, helps us share the learning even further, and you'll make me genuinely happy. Keep doing amazing things and bye for now.