In an MIT preprint, 83% of the people who wrote an essay with ChatGPT could not quote a single sentence of it 60 seconds after they handed it in. The researchers call the pattern cognitive debt, and it anchors an episode about where thinking actually happens at work. Jenni brings Oxford research on the four kinds of rule breaking and why punishment is usually the wrong first move, Gallup’s split verdict on what AI has done to culture and the manager data underneath it, the brain-scan study itself, and the argument that writing was never the job in communications. Chuck opens with two days in Franklin, Tennessee learning the business of books with Jon Acuff, and closes on the same thing.
Jenni opens with Michael Gill’s research in Harvard Business Review, a review of over 250 studies across four decades out of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, which sorts workplace rule breaking along two axes — deliberate choice or situational pressure, constructive or destructive impact — into self-interested breakers padding billable hours, corrupted breakers pressured into harmful shortcuts, edified breakers bending an outdated policy for patient welfare, and pro-social breakers taking back a late return from a loyal customer. The Ethics and Compliance Initiative’s 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey sits underneath it: 65% of employees globally had observed misconduct, up from 60% in 2020. Gill’s prescription is curiosity over reflexive punishment, and Jenni’s test is whether that is practical or just theory. Chuck says it is entirely practical, and proves the negative with his own story: an email from a CEO expressing how disappointed they were, all verdict and no facts, which he answered by telling them they clearly did not have the information but had passed judgment anyway. By the time HR asked what had actually happened it was too late. Jenni’s version of the fix is deliberately small — what happened here, how did we get here, talk me through how you got to this decision — because the learning sits in the answer, whether it is the person, the policy or the pressure. Chuck’s limit is repetition: the employee taking care of an elderly parent who works nine to six is a mature adult, but the one who keeps coffee badging after being told to stop has moved the conversation from curiosity to compliance.
Gallup’s AI’s effect on workplace culture reports 24% of employees saying AI improved culture against 25% saying it worsened it, with “stayed the same” dropping to 51% in AI-adopted workplaces from 59% where AI has not arrived. The manager data is the hook: employees who strongly agree their manager champions AI are far likelier to say it transformed their work, 33% versus 4%, with culture improving 31% versus 21% and improving a lot 9% versus 3%. Jenni’s challenge is commercial — Gallup sells manager training, so every culture problem resolving into invest in managers is a finding that happens to be a product, and she asks whether that is a result at all or something simply true of every workplace shift ever measured. Chuck does not dispute the self-interest and takes the finding anyway: investing in managers is rarely a bad investment, and a manager championing anything helps people through it. What holds his attention is the CHRO split — 99% calling AI strategically important, 57% funding manager AI training, and 50% not trusting their managers to guide AI use — because the organizations funding the technology without funding the people who have to land it already know what drives the outcome. Jenni admits the headline worked on her and the piece said little beyond a thing the profession already knows and still does not do, which she is willing to accept as the takeaway. Chuck’s closing question to listeners is whether AI has changed their culture at all, or whether the expectation was inflated in the first place, since leadership’s tone will matter more than the technology.
The MIT study reached Jenni through a Daniel Pink post on Instagram, and she flags the caveat before the finding: it is a preprint, not peer reviewed. Fifty-four people were followed for four months across three groups — ChatGPT, a search engine, and unaided — with EEG monitoring showing the strongest connectivity in the writers using nothing and the weakest neural engagement in the ChatGPT group. Then 83% of the ChatGPT writers could not quote a sentence from an essay submitted 60 seconds earlier, and when that group was asked to write unaided their brains stayed under-engaged. The researchers’ term for it is cognitive debt: when a tool does the thinking, the brain practices thinking less. Chuck is unsurprised by the recall number and says he could not quote a sentence back from something he had just read either, because reading and writing are processed differently. His real objection is that nobody appears to have graded the essays: the unaided group may have worked hard and produced garbage for lack of access to anything they did not already know, so the study describes brain activity, not quality. Jenni holds the line that outsourcing the thinking is different from outsourcing a task, and offers the evidence that changed her mind — an AI expert keynote she sat through this year that had no thread, just soundbite after soundbite, which made her wonder what daily heavy use does to a person’s ability to construct an argument. Chuck concedes he has no baseline for that speaker, and Jenni agrees she has none either. Where they meet is the use case: a shortcut taken to avoid the work costs something, and the time saved is only worth having if it is spent thinking about the things that repay it.
The closing story is Tanya Pikula’s LinkedIn piece, surfaced on Jenni’s feed by Bridget Aherne, arguing that the job was always judgment — reading a situation, structuring an argument, knowing an audience, and knowing when a message should not be sent at all — and that AI closing the drafting bottleneck raises the value of those skills rather than eroding them. Chuck frames it as the sequence of bottlenecks: code was one and AI broke it, and judgment is the next one, which is where the little-c communicator still has the advantage — not what to say but how, at what frequency, in whose voice. He adds the delivery half of it, that two leaders handed identical content will land it in wildly different ways, and that the who has always mattered as much as the what. His warning is against settling: good enough is not the standard, great is. Jenni’s contribution is the more uncomfortable one. Years of the profession’s own focus on storytelling and craft — through her events, Comms Reboot and the Big Yak before it — made written content the visible output, and that is precisely the part AI can now do, which is why so many communicators feel replaceable. The deeper failure, she argues, is that the move-beyond-content conversation only ever happened inside communications; nobody took it to the business and HR conferences, so stakeholders still see the output and nothing else. The pair close on grammar, with Chuck relaying the argument that it is a bit elitist and that receivers do not care about a misplaced comma, and Jenni refusing to throw it in the bin — a battle they agree to leave there.
What is cognitive debt, and what did the MIT study actually find? Cognitive debt is the researchers’ term for what happens when a tool does the thinking for you and the brain practices thinking less. The preprint followed 54 people for four months across three groups — ChatGPT, search engine and unaided — and EEG scans showed the strongest brain connectivity in the unaided writers and the weakest neural engagement in the ChatGPT group. 83% of the ChatGPT writers could not quote a single sentence from an essay they had submitted 60 seconds earlier. It has not been peer reviewed.
Does the MIT study mean AI-assisted writing is worse? It does not say that. Chuck’s point in the episode is that the study measures brain activity, not output: nobody reports whether the essays were any good. An unaided writer may have worked hard and produced weak content for lack of access to anything beyond what they already knew. The finding is about engagement, not quality.
What are the four types of workplace rule breaking? Michael Gill’s framework sorts them on two axes — deliberate choice versus situational pressure, and constructive versus destructive impact. Self-interested breakers act for personal gain, such as a consultant padding billable hours. Corrupted breakers are pressured into harmful shortcuts. Edified breakers bend rules under pressure for good reason, like a nurse ignoring an outdated discharge policy. Pro-social breakers choose to bend a rule to help someone, such as accepting a late return from a loyal customer.
How should a leader respond to a broken rule in the moment? With curiosity before consequence. Jenni’s practical version is two questions — what happened here, and talk me through how you got to this decision — which surfaces whether the cause is the person, the policy or the pressure. Chuck adds the limit: if the same rule keeps getting broken after a conversation, curiosity has done its job and compliance takes over.
Has AI improved or damaged workplace culture, according to Gallup? Neither, on the headline numbers: 24% of employees say AI improved culture and 25% say it worsened it. The movement is in the manager data — employees whose manager champions AI are far likelier to say it transformed their work, 33% versus 4%. Meanwhile 99% of CHROs call AI strategically important, 57% fund manager AI training, and 50% do not trust their managers to guide AI use.
If AI can write, what is left for internal communicators to do? Judgment, and delivery. The argument in the episode is that writing was always the visible part of the job rather than the job itself, and that reading a situation, structuring an argument, verifying what is true and deciding a message should not be sent are the parts AI cannot take. Chuck adds that who delivers a message matters as much as what it says.
Chuck: Welcome to Frequency. I’m Chuck Gose.
Jenni: And I’m Jenni Field. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience. Beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. And today we are talking about rule breaking, AI’s impact on workplace culture, some MIT research on the impact on the brain when using AI, and that communication is not about writing.
Chuck: Jenni, after you ripping on me about AI stuff last week, I’m glad you brought in another AI conversation for this week. I want to begin talking about something. There’s very few times, Jenni, I feel like I get to make you jealous, and now this is one of those times. I got to spend a couple of days — we talked about it on past episodes — with author Jon Acuff in his hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, which truly is like a Hallmark movie style town. It just had that feel to it. But we spent two days together talking about stage and page, all about speaking and authoring slash writing. One, obviously great to spend that time with Jon Acuff and his partner Bill Hampton, learning about those sides of the business, especially the page part, which I’ve said to people was a bit like me spending a day in a class about quantum physics, because everything I learned that day was brand new. As much as we’ve all consumed and read books, just learning about the business side of books was informational, but also very overwhelming — everything that goes into it. But the best part: there were about 20 of us in the room, all from different walks of life, all from different environments, and it gave me a chance. They were asking me all kinds of questions about ICology — what’s it for, what are you up to — and to be able to brag about the community, brag about this world of internal comms. It was really fun to do. But I was in a room with real estate agents and a former poet and someone who owns karate studios. So to be in a room with people that share similar goals but just come from different walks of life, I think that’s the true highlight out of those couple of days: building friendships with people who are pushing themselves just like I am to elevate the work that we do.
Jenni: I think there’s something really lovely about spending time outside of the comms, leadership, culture and HR space, because we spend so much time in it. I remember the first time I did it was 2019 with Chris Ducker. And I was like, this is amazing. I’m in a room full of people that make matcha tea and do martial art teaching, like all this other stuff, but, like you said, have a really similar goal. And since that, in 2019, I’ve spent a lot of time with other business owners in all other walks of life. And I’ve still got a group now. We call it the Boss Mastermind, and it’s a peer group, and there’s all different people — there’s accountants, there’s a fiction writer, there’s a marketing specialist, there’s all sorts in there. And it’s brilliant. And I actually think spending time with people like that is just good for our brains, so we don’t get stuck in the echo chamber that can often be our world.
Chuck: And I would say one of the other highlights — and I’ll give Bill and Jon credit for creating this space of people being able to brag about their successes. A lot of people in there had already written a book, but to also have a space where they can say, and here are all the mistakes that I made along the way. So it wasn’t an ego trip for anyone in there. It was truly to share and learn from each other. Really great environment for that.
Jenni: I am jealous, because you got to hang out with Jon Acuff and that would be really cool. So yeah, hats off to you. Right, the first article today is about how the best leaders respond to rule breaking. This was in Harvard Business Review’s magazine, July and August, which I was reading at the weekend. And it talks about some new research from Michael Gill at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where they reviewed over 250 studies across four decades and land on an argument that we know leaders won’t love, which is that not all rule breaking is the same, and treating it all as a punishable offence misses what’s actually going on.
Jenni: Gill sorts workplace rule breaking into four types along two different axes — there’s a nice diagram in the article. Was it a deliberate choice or driven by situational pressure, and was the impact constructive or destructive? Now, it talks about self-interested breakers, who act for personal gain, so a consultant padding out billable hours. You’ve then got corrupted breakers, rule breakers who are pressured into harmful shortcuts, so a developer coerced into shipping untested code. You’ve got edified breakers, who bend the rules under pressure but for good reason — a nurse ignoring outdated discharge policy for patient welfare. And then you’ve got pro-social breakers, who choose to bend the rules to help someone, so a rep accepting a late return from a loyal customer, for example. The stakes are rising as well, so there’s an interesting ethics piece here. The Ethics and Compliance Initiative’s 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey found 65% of employees globally had observed misconduct, up from 60% in 2020, with US figures topping 50%.
Jenni: Gill’s prescription is a shift from reflexive punishment to curiosity. So understand intent before reacting. Separate intent from impact, so people don’t stop using judgement or start hiding things. Watch for patterns rather than one-off incidents, so repeated violations signal something that’s broken in policy rather than a bad person. And build channels to surface what never gets reported up the chain, and then fix those root causes — bad incentives, unclear rules, misaligned pressure — rather than just punishing the individual. I really enjoyed reading this article. But one line that stood out for me, Chuck, is the point that if a leader’s first move is to punish, they might solve the immediate issue but miss the real cause. Now, that takes a level of restraint a lot of leaders don’t have, especially under pressure. But what does this leading with curiosity instead of assumptions actually look like in the moment a rule gets broken? Is it practical, or is it just theory?
Chuck: No, I think it is 100% practical. This is the role that leaders play, is to understand the behavior that your employees had. And as you went through the different types of rule breakers — well, actually, before we get to that: I’ve been accused in the past, Jenni, of being a bit of a rule breaker.
Jenni: No! Have you?
Chuck: However, the truth is, I actually learned the rules so well that I learned where there’s some little give and take and where there might be a loophole in some things. But no, as you were reading through those — the edified breaker, where sometimes you have to break the rule for all the right reasons, where the policy is actually getting in the way of what the intended goal is out there. And then the pro-social behaviors, where you’ve got a situation where, hey, this is just the right thing to do for this person because of maybe something they’ve done. And I will say, the example of the loyal customer: there have absolutely been times where I’ve broken rules because a customer has helped out in the past or just needs that added assistance. But it all comes down to the severity of it. What are the consequences of that rule breaking? And I think that’s where the leadership needs to come in. Was it a one-off? Was it out of character for that employee? I know there was one time that immediately came to mind, where I got an email from the CEO basically talking about how disappointed they were in me, they couldn’t believe I made this choice, all these really horrible, nasty things about me. And I actually said, hey, it’s clear you don’t have all the information, but you’ve also passed along your judgment, so I’m good, I’ll take it as is. Then HR got involved. They were like, well, wait a minute, what all happened? I’m like, you know what? It’s too late. You’ve already passed judgment. You’ve already come out with your verdict on what happened without taking the time with this curiosity they talked about. I think you should always lead — if there’s any leadership lesson out there, you should always lead with curiosity, because that’s going to be a more helpful tone to set with that employee.
Jenni: Yeah, and I agree. I feel like it’s a great theory, and I love the get to the root cause and why it’s happening. But I don’t think it takes much in practice to say, what happened here? How did we get here? Do you know what I mean? Like, that’s it. Why did you make that decision? Talk me through how you got to this decision, or talk me through how you got here. Because there’s always something to learn from that conversation, in terms of the employee and their behaviour, the policy that might need to change, whatever it is — there’s a learning in there across these four different areas. And it doesn’t take very much. But to just jump straight to the email you got from the CEO, without establishing facts or interrogating some of that information — is this actually true? Have I verified this? Do I need to talk to him? That is just a good curious mindset. And I think the more people that have that, then the better work would be. I do think a lot of people do jump to this conclusion, and I don’t think that’s helpful.
Chuck: Well, and I think there again, my stance — maybe not the most mature, but it was something where, okay, if you’re going to act that way, I’m going to now act this way. But it also sent me a message: okay, you actually do not care about my approach and understanding the logic or the reasons or the emotions that went into solving this problem. And so again, if I could preach to anyone listening, if you are a leader or you’re working with leaders, you should always lead with curiosity to understand. Let’s say that you’ve got — we’ve talked ad nauseam in this podcast about RTO. Let’s say you have to be at work at eight, and you cannot leave before five. But there’s one employee who — maybe I’m dreaming up scenarios — maybe they’re taking care of an elderly parent, and they’re like, hey, I will come in, but I can’t get there before nine, but I will stay until six. Is that breaking a rule? Or is that called being a mature adult and understanding circumstances that are out there? Now, if you’ve got a different employee who — we know, I think we termed that coffee badging, where they’re coming in every day, scanning a badge and then leaving for coffee and whatever — and you approach that employee and say, hey, that’s not the right behavior, but they keep breaking the rule, okay, then yes, curiosity is important, but there’s also compliance that’s got to come into that as well.
Jenni: Yeah, 100%. So the next story I’ve got is an AI one, so you’ll be thrilled, which is AI’s effect on workplace culture. It’s a recent piece from Gallup, so they’re looking at how AI adoption is splitting the difference on culture. 24% of employees say it’s improved, 25% say it’s worsened, and in AI-adopted workplaces, stayed the same drops to 51% from 59% in non-adopted ones. So roughly the same number of people think AI made things better as think it made things worse. On the surface, nothing much has really moved. But the real hook, unsurprisingly, is the manager data. Employees who strongly agree their manager champions AI are far more likely to say that AI has transformed work — this is a big jump, 33% versus 4% — and manager support correlates with culture improving, 31% versus 21%, and improving a lot is 9% versus 3%. Meanwhile, 50% of CHROs don’t trust their managers to guide AI use, even though 99% call AI strategically important, and 57% are now funding manager AI training as the fix.
Jenni: Chuck, Gallup’s whole story here is that AI’s cultural impact hinges on manager support, but Gallup also sells manager training and enablement. So every time their research finds a culture problem, the fix is always invest in managers, which happens to be their product. Is this genuinely what the data shows, or are they reverse engineering the narrative from what they’ve already positioned to sell? And even if managers really are the variable, is that a finding, or just always true for every workplace shift ever measured, regardless of whether it’s AI or anything else?
Chuck: Yeah, I wouldn’t agree with them. I get that this is what they do, but I think invest in managers is never a bad investment, or is probably rarely a bad investment. I just think this data is so fascinating in that it’s not fascinating. I wonder, if you just ask people, hey, how is culture? Probably a quarter would say it’s improved, a quarter would say it’s worse, half would say it’s the same. I’m wondering here, is it truly that we’re learning that AI or AI adoption actually has zero impact on culture? Is it really impacting culture? Should it impact culture? I don’t know. Again, not surprised, though, to see the manager data. The manager championing anything is going to help employees along the journey. And then to point out the CHRO data, basically half trust their managers and half don’t. I’m guessing that the 57% that are funding managers probably are the ones that trust it, and the ones that aren’t funding it don’t — which says, again, invest in managers. And then 99%: I don’t know that you can get 99% of people to agree on anything. But the fact that that many say that AI is strategically important, what does that say about the people that aren’t funding managers? You know it’s important and you’re funding that, but you’re not funding the support, which you know drives the ultimate success. Or maybe this data will now have them change that.
Jenni: Yeah, it also made me think about the conversation we had a few weeks ago, earlier this year, around the different experience people have in organisations. I think we were talking about the different percentage points of if your function or role is invested in, if it’s not, and how that makes you feel differently about the organisation. And I think if you’re asking the whole organisation about culture, then, to your point, you’re going to get a mix of different things depending on your experience in the organisation. It just felt like a bit of nothing. And I thought the headline, AI’s effect on workplace culture — I was like, ooh, I’m going to click on this and see what’s going on for Frequency. And I was like, this is not really saying anything other than invest in managers, which we know, and people still don’t do it. So I feel like it’s another hook into that manager conversation, which, to your point, is no bad thing. But it definitely felt a little bit clickbaity for me, and I obviously fell for it and we’re talking about it. But I think it’s a valid conversation here around anything you’re doing that’s going to impact your culture needs to have an investment in managers. And maybe that’s just the biggest takeaway from this piece.
Chuck: Well, I think for those listening or watching, maybe think about this from your culture standpoint. What kind of impact is it having on your culture? Is it having one at all? Have we overinflated the expectation of its impact? Or are we not really finding where it is impacting? Should it impact culture? I don’t really know. But I think it’s more the tone and the attitude that leadership brings to this conversation that’s going to have a greater impact than the actual technology itself.
Jenni: Yeah, totally agree. So the next story is also about AI, which was a piece on Instagram I saw posted by Daniel Pink, and it’s about some MIT research. So MIT researchers ran the first brain scan study of people using ChatGPT to write essays, and the results were alarming, according to the Instagram post. It is worth noting, though, that this is still a preprint, it’s not a peer-reviewed study, so let’s just take that in mind. They followed 54 people for four months. One group used ChatGPT, one used search engines, and one wrote the essays entirely on their own. Researchers monitored their brains using EEG scans, and the differences were striking. People writing without AI showed the strongest brain connectivity, multiple regions actively working together. ChatGPT users showed the weakest neural engagement. But the most surprising finding came afterwards. 83% of the ChatGPT users couldn’t quote a single sentence from essays they’d written 60 seconds after submission. They then asked the ChatGPT group to write without AI, and their brains stayed under-engaged. So researchers called this effect cognitive debt: when a tool does the thinking for you, your brain practices thinking less. So the lesson isn’t don’t use AI, it’s more about how you use it — using it to challenge your thinking rather than just replacing your thinking. Because we don’t want to create more content and do faster writing, it’s more about how we get a stronger, better thinking mind. So I thought this was quite interesting. So Chuck, if cognitive debt is real, even after four months of occasional AI use in a lab setting, what does this mean for people that are using ChatGPT or Copilot every single day inside their internal comms workflow? Are we already carrying the debt and we just haven’t noticed yet?
Chuck: I think it’s just like this thing said: it’s not that you’re using it, it’s how you’re using it. So if you’re using ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude every day, it doesn’t mean you’re not thinking. It doesn’t mean that your brain isn’t working. It could just be, how and why are you using it? The fact that it said 80-plus percent of the AI users — I don’t know why we’re calling out ChatGPT in this, though that’s fine to do it — that they couldn’t recite a single sentence. Of course they couldn’t. I’m not surprised by that. But also I think about, if I were to read something and then come back 60 seconds later and say, hey, read me a complete sentence from something you just read, I probably couldn’t. Right? The way your brain processes information, I think, is very different when you’re regurgitating it or reading it versus actually writing it out. So I’m not surprised about any of this. What I am curious about, though: the people that wrote essays entirely on their own, versus those that used search engines, versus those that used ChatGPT — was it any good? Was the quality any good? We don’t know. Maybe your brain worked really hard, but it was kind of garbage content because you didn’t have access to other information, so it’s really relying on what you already knew versus going out and finding additional information. So this doesn’t speak to quality of content information. It just speaks to what someone’s brain is doing at that point in time.
Jenni: Yes, but I think that is the point, which is, if you’re using it to do the thinking and creativity for you, it’s going to have a long-term impact on your brain and your ability to be engaged and think and have those things. So if you’re outsourcing your thinking, then your brain isn’t going to work as well as it should do. And I have to say, I did witness somebody speak at an event earlier on this year who was an expert in AI, and they were maybe the closing keynote, or they were the opening keynote, I think, on the second day. It was the most disjointed presentation I’ve ever sat in. It was like, we’ve got a thought, and then I’ve got a thought, and then we’ve got a thought. And I was like, there is no thread to this. It was just a little soundbite. It was really hard to follow as a talk. And it got me thinking, is this because this person has lived in this AI world for such a long time and maybe outsourced some of their thinking, that they’re not able to really think about the story and what they’re doing, and everything’s become almost soundbite? It was just genuinely very strange. That was the first time I really thought about, what is the impact on our brains and our ability to construct stuff and write and think critically, if we are heavy users of the tool, and heavy users in a way that is outsourcing your thinking and writing?
Chuck: Well, and I just want to say, outsourcing thinking and writing in some contexts could be the same thing, and it could be wildly different from one another. Maybe what needs to be written — you can outsource the thinking of that, because you’re focusing your thinking on other things. So it’s not that people aren’t thinking, it’s just maybe in this one context they weren’t using their brain because they didn’t feel like they needed to. But again, it doesn’t speak to the quality. I understand what you’re saying about that one presenter. They could have been sporadic with or without AI. Pre-AI, I remember seeing presenters all over the board with content.
Jenni: True, I have no baseline. I have no baseline.
Chuck: Correct. But I think it comes back to how and why are you using it. Are you using it to create a shortcut because you don’t want to write something? Yeah, then your brain’s probably not going to work as hard. But I would rather us focus on the quality of the work, and that you spend the time thinking on the things that you get the most benefit out of.
Jenni: The last story today is about the fact that communication isn’t about writing. Now, as AI gets faster and better at producing polished writing, is the communications profession losing its core value, or is it finding it? This is an article on LinkedIn from Tanya Pikula, and it was highlighted to me on my feed by Bridget Aherne. Now, in the article, it makes the case that writing was never really the job. The real work of communications has always been judgement: understanding a situation, structuring an argument, reading an audience, and knowing when a message shouldn’t be written at all. AI can draft in seconds what once took hours, but it can’t provide context, verify accuracy, or judge whether a message will actually land. If anything, those human skills just became more valuable, not less. So Chuck, if AI can now produce writing that’s good enough in a fraction of the time, do you think that raises the bar for what good communication work looks like — we talked about quality just now — or does it just shift where communicators spend their time and let quality quietly slip?
Chuck: Yeah, I think this is a good conversation as an industry to have. Let’s look at this from the AI side of things. I can’t remember the gentleman’s name who talked about this — I would like to give him credit; if I find it, we’ll put it in the show notes. We talked about how AI has always been about breaking through bottlenecks. So for example, with coding, it just took time to write code, and then AI broke through that bottleneck. The next bottleneck is judgment. That is where we still have that superiority. That is where we have that clarity on communication. So yes, I do think that is the role of a great communicator. And I’m saying little-c communicator, not big-C, meaning just people who are really good at communications, who just have this knack, have this understanding of not what to communicate, but how, and at what frequency, and different techniques to drive, and different tone and words and all that to use. You’re right, AI can’t do that. It can draft in seconds what might have taken hours or days before. And we’ve all worked with people who are great writers but horrible communicators. So I do think this is something for us to look at as an industry: what is our purpose, what is the value we bring? And I do think it is reading the room, structuring that argument, pulling all the data points and things into one point. That is the role. But we’ve sort of streamlined it because some of us are really good writers. And I also don’t think we should be looking at good enough as the quality. We should be looking at how can we make things great.
Jenni: I wondered, as you were just talking then, about the role of communication, the writing, the content, the content focus that we’ve had in our industry. I was thinking back over the years of running my event, Comms Reboot, and before that the Big Yak, where people kind of choose their topics, and storytelling has been quite a big phrase. You’re a big fan — storytelling has been a big phrase, I think, for our industry for a long time. And I wonder if that’s partly, and that’s become, I think, a bit about written content. I’m not saying it should have been, but I think that’s where that’s taken me: how do we write more creatively, how do we write better, has become such an area of focus. And I wonder if that focus, as the predecessor to AI coming in, is probably what’s making everyone feel like they’re now being replaced, because AI can do the storytelling, AI can do that. And I wonder if that just happened to all come at the same time, and whether that’s made it feel more messy and uncomfortable, because we spent so much time talking about crafting the story and all of that, and now that element has to some degree been taken away.
Chuck: Well, and I think, too, to look at the delivery of what you’re doing. And I don’t just mean delivery as in what channels you’re publishing into, but who is delivering that message. We’ve had some data here in the past that the who matters just as much as the what. So it’s not just that it got written, but who is talking about it, who is sharing it. That’s the part, because you could have two leaders get the exact same content, internalize it, and deliver it in wildly different ways that are going to connect with different people. That’s the role that communicators play. Again, lower-c, because we’ve all worked with leaders who might be in marketing, maybe they’re in finance, who are really strong communicators because they know how to connect with who they’re trying to communicate with.
Jenni: Yeah, I think that’s it, isn’t it? It’s the outcome that you’ve got to stay focused on, and that’s that connection. And I think it’s moving us away from this tick box. Part of the reason I really like this is because of the conversation I was having with people about AI. And I’ve been having this conversation about six months with communicators, which is: we have spent a lot of time as internal communications talking to each other about the fact that the industry needs to move away from just creating content and into sort of advising and asking questions and being curious and all the stuff we talk about on this podcast and in this episode. But we never really went outside of communications to have that discussion. So we all talk to ourselves about this need to do it, but nobody went and spoke at the business conferences, the HR conferences, about the importance of communication and doing it with impact and outcome and all of this stuff. So all people see is the output, which is the content, the story, whatever it is, which AI can do. And actually that’s more convenient, because I haven’t got to have this really horrible conversation where you’re going to ask me lots of questions about judgement and understanding the situation and all those things. Because I just want the output, and the output can do that, because we haven’t connected the dots in helping that stakeholder understand why that’s important and what that’s going to do. And I still see that now, and I think that’s part of the challenge. And I think this article highlights that to a degree, in terms of it’s not about the writing, it’s about everything else. But we didn’t take everybody with us, and I think that’s still work that needs to be done to help people understand why that’s needed, why those human skills of verification, the context, all of that, still needs that education for the stakeholders so that they do come with us.
Chuck: I also want to talk about the better at producing polished writing part. I’ve been on this thread recently where I’ve been hearing more and more that grammar is actually quite elitist. That we’ve sort of got it all wrong, that the power of communication is connecting people. It’s not having it be grammatically accurate, because you can actually get your message across and be creative in context without it being this perfect style. And I think that’s something we’ve seen at events and conferences, where people are like, it’s not this style, or it’s not that style. The receiver doesn’t care. They don’t care. Can you get your message across in creative ways? It doesn’t have to be this polished approach. We saw that with video content a lot. Now people just want to be connected to it. Let’s bring that style to what we’re doing as communicators.
Jenni: Yeah, I would say that grammar is still important, though. I don’t think you can just throw it in the bin.
Chuck: No, you can be in that camp. But all other camps are saying, in the grand scheme of things, yes, you don’t want to have intentional misspellings and stuff, but the commas in the wrong place, or they misused a semicolon — people don’t care. We care. No one else cares.
Jenni: No, my mum has a great picture in her downstairs toilet — there’s a link here, I promise — which shows how commas are important, which is like, no comma, more wine, versus no more wine.
Chuck: I’ve seen those signs, yes. I know what you mean.
Jenni: I’m going to stay firmly in that camp. But I hear you on it doesn’t need to follow the rigid rules that maybe we did have many years ago. So we’ll leave that there, because clearly we’re going to get into a battle. That brings us to the end of our stories today. What are you freq-ing out about?
Chuck: I’m going to come back to the event that I attended with Jon Acuff, and the stage and page. And I’m going to focus on the page part. This is what I’m freq-ing out about. The stage part, I’ve done that. I can get a lot better, I can curate that a bit more, so I learned a lot there. I want to focus on the page part, because everything shared that day was brand new to me. As many books as I’ve read, the intricacies of the business of writing and selling books was entirely brand new to me. And it was a lot to digest. It was so much to learn. But I will say again, it was having other authors in the room. So a shout-out to the people that were in the room sharing the mistakes that they made, sharing the things that weren’t perfect, and having Jon Acuff share early on in his authoring the mistakes that he made along the way. That’s only going to encourage more people. Because you’ll have the camps out there — maybe this is part of your grammar camp as well, Jenni — that’s like, we don’t need another book about that, we don’t need another book about something. I brought up the example: imagine James Clear, people saying, there’s already a bunch of habits books out there, you don’t need to write another habits book. No, he did. He found the unique angle. He found what made it personal to him that clearly other people needed. And so it was just really encouraging to hear that yes, there’s a lot of wonderful ideas out there, so many great books, but there’s so much more opportunity for more great books. But so overwhelming, learning that business side of publishing.
Jenni: Yeah, there’s something lovely there about being in a room and properly learning. I think at a certain stage of my career — I’ve shared, I think, on here that I’ve been to a speaking boot camp in the UK, and I came away from that thinking, I’ve actually learnt stuff today, and that’s really cool. I was quite fired up, quite overwhelmed, but I was also like, this has been great, properly learning stuff today. And I like being in a classroom, I’m up for that, rather than anything online or any of that stuff. So yeah, really cool. So my freq-out this week is dog chaperones. And I know you’re thinking, where is she going? So I was at my brother-in-law’s wedding last week, and him and his now wife Sarah — congratulations William and Sarah — have a dog called Nico. And Nico was in charge of bringing the rings down the aisle for them, and then obviously giving them to the best man. And they had a dog chaperone at the wedding. So they had somebody who looked after Nico the whole time, just walked him down the aisle — obviously he wasn’t just going to come round and give out rings. And I had never heard of a dog chaperone at a wedding until this happened. And in fact I’ve got other friends who have got dog walking businesses, and I said to them, do you know, you could be a dog chaperone at a wedding? And they were like, what a cool job, to just hang out with dogs all day at what is a super fun day anyway, because it’s full of love and joy. So they’re adding it as a service now to their dog walking business, as dog chaperones. But you’re nodding — I feel like it’s quite a normal thing in the States. I’ve never heard of it over here.
Chuck: I haven’t seen that side of it. I’m nodding along because I’m like, if I could ever have a job at a wedding, that’s the job I want. I would do that in a lot of situations and environments. I would rather just hang out with the dog than have to manage people at that point in time. So yeah, I love the idea. Because also it’s a bit like having a babysitter for a kid — you do need to have someone help take care of the dog. Much rather do that than other things at a wedding. Brilliant idea. Brilliant idea.
Jenni: Such a cool idea, just such a cool idea, it’s lovely. Well, that’s it for this week. Thank you for joining us. We hope the articles and insights will help you think about how to improve comms, leadership and culture in your organisation. If you don’t yet subscribe or follow, please do, as it helps make sure you won’t miss an episode. All the links to all the articles we’ve mentioned today are in the show notes, so you can grab those to read if you want to explore anything further. We’ll be back with you on Monday with more news, insights and opinions about everything comms and leadership in workplaces today. Appreciate you being here with us.
Chuck is a US-based internal communications strategist and the founder of ICology – a community and resource hub for IC professionals. He brings a practitioner lens to every conversation. Chuck is a recognised voice in the industry, a regular speaker and event host, and one of the most connected people in the North American IC world.
Jenni is a UK-based leadership and internal communications consultant, author of two best-selling books, and international speaker. She runs Redefining Communications, a consultancy working with organisations around the world to help them communicate better and close the gap between what leaders say and what employees experience.
