Luis Antonio Comissi accepts new role at trade union

Neeley Williams has joined The NRMA as Senior Brand Communications Manager. She was previously Communications Lead AU, NZ and PNG at The Coca-Cola Company. Prior to this, Neeley worked agency-side at Sefiani Communications Group and Hill+Knowlton Strategies. 

"I don't know what I don't know." 
 
I've heard some version of that from nearly every communications leader I've worked with over the past year, and it usually arrives with a slightly rueful shrug. I've come to understand that the shrug is doing a lot of work - because when leaders don't have enough working knowledge of AI to picture what their team actually needs, they can't commission that work, can't evaluate what comes back, and often end up delegating it to someone who's navigating the same uncertainty. 

That's where I suspect things can stall. And this article is a reflection on this very challenge. 

The delegation problem 
An anecdotal digression: I'm kicking off a pilot coaching program at the moment with a communications leader in Asia. She's sharp, genuinely enthusiastic about AI, and has been trying to get her team moving on adoption for the better part of a year. 

At some point she did what a lot of leaders do: she identified someone on the team who was interested, appointed them as the AI champion, and handed the programme over to them to drive forward. 
 
It’s sputtering. Not from any lack of effort - he's a solid, hardworking person. But he's also someone who needs more strategic direction than he was getting, and without close engagement from his manager, things drifted. 
 
After a few conversations between us, the leader arrived at a realisation I've come to see as something of a turning point: she needed to get more directly involved herself, stop treating it as something she'd delegated, and actually champion it. That's what prompted the coaching work we're now doing together, which is, in a way, the start of the course correction. 

What she also admitted, with some honesty, is that the reason she'd stepped back in the first place was uncertainty. She wasn't sure what AI could realistically do in her specific context. She hadn't built enough working knowledge to know what to ask for, what to prioritise, or what good AI integration even looks like for a team like hers. 

When AI usage starts to drift 
Most of the communications teams I'm working with are still early enough in their AI journeys that this particular scenario hasn't fully played out yet. They're working through initial projects with me and starting to explore what deeper integration might look like. 

But I can already see the conditions forming. Leaders feel the pressure to enable AI, have given their teams access to a tool, pointed someone at it, and maybe arranged some training. Yet they haven't built enough working familiarity with what AI can actually do, in practice and in their specific context, to evaluate what comes back, spot which friction points are worth attacking first, or make a credible internal case for it when the moment comes. 

The broader pattern here is well-established. BCG's 2024 research on large-scale technology programmes found that more than two-thirds miss their targets on time, budget, and scope. McKinsey's work on transformations more broadly puts the success rate consistently below 30 per cent, with leadership engagement (or the absence of it) repeatedly identified as a primary factor. 

This isn't unique to AI or to communications. Change programmes that don't have genuine, knowledgeable engagement from the person at the top tend to drift, regardless of the technology involved.
 
What makes AI harder to lead than most technology rollouts is the knowledge dimension. A leader can engage meaningfully with a new CRM or a collaboration tool without needing to understand how it works under the hood. The process logic is familiar enough. With AI, the gap between what the tool can actually do and what most leaders can currently picture it doing is often significant enough to shape the whole programme. If the leader can't see it working in their context, they won't know what to ask for, and they won't be able to judge whether what they're getting is any good. 

My hunch is that this is where a lot of AI programmes in communications will quietly get stuck in the year ahead. Not because of resistance or lack of goodwill - there's plenty of both - but because the conditions for the stall are already present: a leader bought in at the level of the idea but not yet at the level of the work, and a team waiting, consciously or not, for a clearer signal of what they're supposed to be building toward.  

Knowledge from working experience 
What I've come to believe, from a year of working closely with communications teams on this, is that working knowledge at the leader level isn't a nice-to-have, it's the condition most other things depend on.  

A leader who understands what AI can realistically do in their context will identify the right friction points, ask better questions, set clearer expectations internally, and create the environment where adoption can actually build on itself rather than plateau after the initial wave of interest. 

The coaching work I'm doing with the leader in Asia is one attempt to address this directly - building real working knowledge from the ground up, starting with her context, her team's friction points, and her own day-to-day. I'm testing it as a format with a small group of leaders. Early days, but the direction feels right. 
 
With UnMute having turned three, the year that's felt most significant, though, is this one, with AI exploding across the industry. It feels like the right time to be testing things. 

Perspectives' is a Telum Media submitted article series, where diverse viewpoints spark thought-provoking conversations about the role of PR and communications in today's world. This Perspectives piece was submitted by Darren Boey, Founder and CEO of UnMute.

Unmute is a Hong Kong-based consultancy that helps marketing and communications teams integrate and scale their use of AI across their workflows. Its services include training, designing shared structures including prompt libraries and brand-trained AI assistants, and advising on governance frameworks that enable the safe and secure use of AI. 
 
With a career spanning more than 25 years, Darren has a background in journalism, including more than18 years reporting on financial news at Bloomberg, first in Australia and then Hong Kong, where he led coverage of regional markets. He's also led communications teams in the blockchain, gaming technology, and AI sectors. 

When organisations face sustained opposition, they almost always do the same thing: improve their communications.

They commission research. They refine their key messages. They engage a community consultation process with considerable production value. And the opposition, entirely unmoved, continues.

As a result, organisations do more of the same with greater intensity, and wonder why the gap between what they are saying and what people are hearing refuses to close.

The problem is not the messaging. The problem is the diagnosis.

Outrage has its own logic

In the 1980s, American risk communication scholar Peter Sandman made an observation that should have permanently changed how organisations think about public opposition and largely did not. He noticed that the level of public concern about a risk bore almost no relationship to the actual hazard it presented. Communities would organise furiously against threats that experts rated as minimal and accept with relative equanimity risks that experts considered genuinely serious.

His explanation was precise: risk perception is not driven by hazard, but by outrage. And outrage has its own logic, entirely separate from the facts.

Outrage rises when people feel a risk has been imposed on them rather than chosen. When they feel they have no meaningful control over decisions that affect them. When they believe the institution responsible cannot be trusted to tell them the truth. When the distribution of harm feels fundamentally unfair.

None of these are information problems. More facts will not solve them. Nor will better graphics or a more empathetic spokesperson, although many organisations have spent considerable money discovering this.

What Sandman understood, and what many institutional communicators still struggle to operationalise, is that opposition is not a signal that your message hasn't landed. Rather, it is a signal that something real is being felt.

Until that feeling is genuinely heard and addressed, the message has no pathway in.

The pattern across public life

The dynamic is visible across every kind of organisation that operates in public life.

The listed company whose activist investor has filed the same governance concerns for three consecutive years, each time receiving a more polished investor relations response and each time returning with the same concerns, slightly better organised.

The infrastructure developer whose community opposition has survived three project managers, two consultation rounds, and one independent review, because the people opposing it remember every commitment that was made and not kept.

The consumer brand that has been managing the same reputational pressure for years, spending steadily on purpose-led communications while the underlying grievance, that they have never genuinely engaged with it, remains untouched.

In each case the organisation has done the communications work. In each case the outrage has not responded to it.

When opposition lives next door

This is nowhere more visible, or more instructive, than at the local government level, where the dynamics of sustained opposition become almost uncomfortably human.

At the local government level, your antagonists live alongside you.

They are at the school pickup and in the same supermarket aisle. You look them in the eye at the farmers market on Saturday morning and you will look them in the eye again at the council meeting on Tuesday night.

The opposition does not go away between engagements because the person carrying it doesn't go away. They are your neighbour, and they will still be your neighbour when this is over, whatever over turns out to mean.

That proximity is uncomfortable, but it is also clarifying. It makes it very difficult to maintain the professional fiction that opposition is primarily a communications problem, because you can see the person. You can see that they are not misinformed. You can see that what they are carrying is not confusion about the facts, but something older and more legitimate: a feeling of not being treated as a full participant in decisions that will shape the place they live.

The instinct, even so, is to reach for the traffic study. To present the evidence. To demonstrate, with considerable rigour, that the concerns are either overstated or already addressed.

It is easier to argue with data than to sit with someone's grief about their street, their neighbourhood, and their sense of what this place is and what it is becoming.

But the data, presented into unaddressed outrage, does not land as reassurance. It lands as confirmation that the organisation still doesn't understand what is actually wrong. It widens the gap it was designed to close.

Rebuilding the right to be heard

The organisations that navigate sustained opposition over time, though not the majority, tend to share a particular orientation. They have learned, usually through experience rather than theory, to treat opposition as information rather than interference.

To ask not “How do we address this?” but “What is this telling us that we have not yet properly heard?”

That is not a passive posture. It does not mean capitulating to every objection or abandoning every decision that generates resistance. Rather, it means developing the institutional capacity to make a distinction that many communication strategies never pause to draw: between opposition that signals a genuine problem with what you are doing, and opposition that signals a genuine problem with how you have made people feel about what you are doing.

These are not the same problem. The first may require you to change course, whereas the second requires you to change how you are present in the relationship. To demonstrate, through something more durable than a campaign, that the people affected by your decisions are genuinely participants in them rather than an audience for them. Conflating the two is where many institutional communication strategies quietly fail, because it allows organisations to keep doing the wrong kind of work and calling it engagement.

Sandman's framework gives practitioners something useful here: a set of diagnostic questions that sit upstream of messaging. Not “What do we need to say?” but “What is actually driving the outrage, and which of those drivers are within our capacity to address?”

Control, trust, fairness, and respect are not communications variables. They are relational ones. They respond to relational interventions, not campaign ones.

This is perhaps the most uncomfortable implication of taking Sandman seriously. It suggests that the work required to address sustained opposition is not primarily communications work at all. It is the slower, less legible work of rebuilding the conditions under which communication becomes possible, and earning the right to be heard before asking to be believed.

Trust is the real outcome

Organisations that understand this tend to invest in genuine dialogue not because it is strategically advantageous, though it often is, but because they have accepted that their antagonists are never truly going away.

The question now is not whether you will have a relationship with them, but what kind.

Opposition is not a messaging problem. It is a meaning problem.

The organisations that learn to hear what the outrage is actually about are the ones that, over time, find themselves with something their competitors and counterparts increasingly lack.

Not the absence of opposition, but the trust to navigate it.

Matthew (Matt) Thomas is Founder and Chief Catalyst at Stake The Reputation Company, a Melbourne-based consultancy working across brand, reputation, communications, and public affairs. He has advised some of Australia’s largest private companies and has worked extensively with global organisations localising their storytelling and narratives for Australian audiences. His experience spans consumer, government, health, infrastructure, technology, and corporate reputation, including advisory work at all levels of government in Australia.

Matt’s work sits at the intersection of communications, behaviour change, and institutional strategy. He is also a contributor to the The Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose, writing on reputation, legitimacy, and the growing gap between organisational messaging and operational reality.

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