Natalie Turner moves into consumer health space as Corporate Affairs Manager

Are communicators confusing the durability of a message with the durability of its emotional effect?

Reassurance can have a remarkably short half-life.

A confident statement from a chief executive can restore optimism. A compelling vision can make an uncertain future feel manageable. A clear explanation of a difficult decision can temporarily settle an anxious workforce. But the relief doesn't necessarily last.

Sometimes it survives for weeks. Sometimes only days. Occasionally, another question emerges before the leadership briefing has even finished.

Nothing material has changed. The information remains valid. The leader is no less credible. Yet the anxiety returns, demanding another explanation, another demonstration of confidence, another reason to believe things might turn out well.

We tend to assume that reassurance accumulates. That each confident statement, encouraging development, and demonstration of competence contributes to a growing reservoir of trust. But perhaps reassurance is better understood as something we consume. And when the underlying uncertainty persists, the relief it provides may create an appetite for more.

For strategic communicators, that raises an uncomfortable possibility: What if the message has worked, but the reassurance hasn't lasted?

When the message isn't the problem

Much of strategic communication is concerned with ensuring that messages are understood, believed and remembered. We develop narratives, establish credible spokespeople, build communication programs, and measure whether audiences are receiving and accepting what we tell them.

When anxiety persists, our instinct is often to communicate again. Refine the narrative. Increase leadership visibility. Find another way to demonstrate confidence. Sometimes that's precisely what's required.

But consider an organisation undergoing a significant restructure.

An employee attends a leadership briefing and receives a clear explanation of the organisation's direction. They understand the rationale for change, believe the chief executive is acting in good faith, and accept that difficult decisions are necessary. They may even leave feeling reassured.

The following morning, however, they wake up worried about whether they'll still have a job in six months. The message hasn't been forgotten. Their confidence in the chief executive hasn't necessarily diminished. The uncertainty has simply become frightening again.

What, exactly, has the communication failed to achieve? Perhaps nothing.

Perhaps we've been treating the persistence of anxiety as evidence that a message hasn't landed, when the real problem is that the uncertainty itself remains unresolved.

Psychological research into reassurance-seeking suggests that repeated reassurance can temporarily reduce distress without necessarily addressing the underlying anxiety. In some circumstances, the relief can reinforce the impulse to seek reassurance again.

I wonder whether something similar happens in organisational communication. When people return repeatedly for information, are they always seeking answers to new questions? Or are they sometimes looking for renewed confirmation of something they already understand?

The distinction matters because one is an information problem. The other may not be.

The reassurance of leadership

This becomes more complicated when we consider what people expect from leaders.

Part of leadership is making an uncertain future feel real. Giving people a credible sense of where they're going, why it matters and why they should believe the journey is possible.

Strategic communication plays a central role in making that future comprehensible and believable. But how often does that sense of confidence need to be renewed?

An organisation navigating prolonged change may communicate frequently and effectively while its employees remain deeply anxious. Another town hall is scheduled. Another leadership update is circulated. Another opportunity is created to demonstrate confidence.

Is that evidence that the previous communication was insufficient? Or is it simply what people need when uncertainty continues?

Perhaps repeated reassurance isn't necessarily a failure of leadership. Perhaps it's part of what leadership requires. But there is another possibility worth considering.

A leader who repeatedly provides reassurance may become increasingly important to an anxious audience, even when the underlying uncertainty remains unresolved. People attend briefings, seek guidance, and return to official channels.

We might reasonably interpret that engagement as evidence of trust. But could it also reflect an ongoing need for reassurance? And might the two sometimes be difficult to distinguish?

What are we actually measuring?

Strategic communicators devote considerable attention to audience sentiment, message acceptance, leadership confidence, and engagement. These are useful indicators, but they may not always tell us what we think they do.

High attendance at a town hall can indicate confidence in leadership. It can also indicate considerable anxiety about what leadership might announce.

A positive response to an executive update may reflect genuine confidence in the organisation's direction. It may also represent temporary relief that a feared development hasn't occurred.

And an employee who continues asking questions may not be confused or distrustful. They may understand the situation perfectly well and remain uncomfortable with what it means for them.

The same observable behaviours can have very different psychological origins. Yet we can be inclined to interpret them through the lens of whether our communication strategy is succeeding.

Perhaps we need to distinguish more carefully between message retention and reassurance retention.

An audience can understand, believe, and remember a message long after the emotional comfort it provided has disappeared. Equally, a message can produce an immediate improvement in sentiment without creating any enduring understanding or trust.

The first may be excellent communication. The second may be considerably less effective than it appears. And if we don't distinguish between them, we risk drawing the wrong conclusions about our work.

Knowing when communication has done its job

None of this is an argument against reassurance. It can be humane, valuable, and essential, particularly when people are confronting circumstances they cannot control.

Nor am I suggesting that communicators should abandon the responsibility to build confidence or that organisations should communicate less frequently. But perhaps we should be more realistic about what communication can accomplish when the underlying uncertainty cannot be resolved.

We often approach communication as though its effects should accumulate. The more consistently we explain, reinforce, and demonstrate, the more confident our audiences should become. In many circumstances, that's a reasonable expectation.

But uncertainty may complicate the relationship.

People can trust their leaders and remain anxious. They can understand a strategy and remain doubtful about its outcome. They can accept a decision and continue worrying about its consequences. None of these responses necessarily indicates a failure of communication.

And perhaps that's what makes reassurance such an interesting challenge for our profession. Its immediate effects are visible and often measurable. Its durability is much harder to establish.

We can observe whether people feel better after hearing from us. We can measure whether they understand and believe what we've said. But how do we distinguish between confidence that endures and reassurance that simply needs to be renewed?

And when anxiety returns, how do we know whether we need to communicate differently, communicate again, or recognise that the uncertainty itself is doing precisely what uncertainty does?

Perhaps one of the more difficult questions for strategic communicators is knowing when communication has done its job.

When a message has been understood, believed, and remembered, but the anxiety it briefly relieved returns, what exactly are we trying to fix?

The message?

Or the uncertainty that no message can remove?

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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Tom Watson has been promoted to the role of External Affairs Lead at WaterNSW. He has been at the company for more than six years and was most recently Executive Officer - Office of the CEO. Prior to this, Tom held policy roles within the NSW government.

Digital culture hasn't killed narrative: our need for stories that make sense of the world endures. Timeless techniques still create opportunities - including in financial communications - and the greater power that technology gives us also creates greater responsibility.

We like reading at Ashbury, which delights me because I've always believed that the best communicators are also people who read widely and regularly. Advisers and writers need to consume much more than news; they also need to be learning about influence, engagement, and meaning in the broadest sense through immersion in culture in all its forms.

So I was intrigued when a colleague mentioned in the office that she had read a book called The Crisis of Narration by the Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, and I decided to read it. Han argues that what he calls "Phono Sapiens" has lost the ability to create narratives that connect people and give meaning to the world.

It's hard to disagree with the notion that rich narratives have declined in our screen-addicted society. Many of us prefer curating our image on social media to telling, or listening to, a real narrative. I'm sure fewer of us have the attention span to listen to a long tale than in the days of ancient Greece, for example, when teams of performers would recite the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey from memory. Some academics think that the Iliad alone would have been performed over three nights in sessions of four to six hours each.

Homo Fabularum

That doesn't mean narrative is dead, though, or that good narratives have lost their power. Whether we like it or not, we still need their structure to make sense of reality. Or, as Han puts it, "turning being-in-the-world to being-at-home-in-the-world." While we may be addicted to being Phono Sapiens, I think that we're frustrated Homo Fabularum, or story people. Real, deep, and fulfilling stories are what we're looking for - but rarely find - when we're scrolling.

Han thinks that real narratives are quite distinct from mere storytelling, which he sees as a tawdry, superficial, and commercialised activity.

"Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates the narrative and submits it to consumption. Storytelling produces narratives in a consumable form. It charges products with emotion. It promises unique experiences. We buy, sell, and consume narratives and emotions. Stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling."

I think Han is dead right in one way here, but is also ignoring one colossally important fact that makes his distinction between narratives and stories meaningless.

He's right that stories sell. They always have and they always will. Our minds are designed to hold on to stories and use them as an interpretive key to more complex realities. Philosophy and psychology may seem distant from everyday financial communications, but they are not. Storytelling is in fact essential to commercial influence. Let me give you some simple examples.

I listened recently to Rwandan officials talking to prospective investors about the new Formula One circuit they are building near Kigali for the African Grand Prix. There's a planned luxury hotel that will look out over the track. You'll be able to look out over it from the hotel's infinity pool. Because of the area's landscape - rolling hills around a lake - you will have the impression while sipping your cocktail in the pool that the Formula One cars are heading straight at you, before they dip down and turn away. It's a lovely, simple story that I'd bet has been repeated by many people who heard it. That story will surely help to attract investment to the project.

A friend who attended a presentation that a world-famous asset management CEO gave to a group of private investors told me how this individual reacted when one investor asked why he'd never heard of the company and what they really did. The CEO replied with something like: "All you really need to know about us is this. From the moment you wake up, you're using assets that we own. The electricity from your kettle comes from power stations we own. We own the cellphone network you use to make calls. We own the railway you use to go to work. If you invest in our fund, you can own them too."

Even well-chosen metaphors are simple stories that stay with audiences as cognitive keys. Another asset management CEO I know introduces her firm - which owns a number of different brands - as the Louis Vuitton of asset management. It always gets a laugh and it's immediately memorable.

Changing conditions

What Han misses, though, is just how much the world has changed since communities were held together by narratives told by firesides and charged with mysteries, gods, and otherness. There were no brands or multinational corporations in Homer's day (or were there, if you consider the polities, rulers, and pantheons of the time? Answers on a postcard, please). Very few people could read. The technology available for publishing narratives was therefore simple: communication was in person and oral.

Yet these conditions were changing centuries before smartphones arrived, thanks to the movable printing press (around 1440) and its successor technologies: newspapers (1605, depending on what you call a newspaper), radio broadcasts (1906), TV broadcasts (1926), and the Internet (the first website went live in 1990).

Economic structures were transformed by joint-stock companies (since 1553), publicly-traded companies (1602), banks (early 1400s), central banks (late 1600s), and limited liability companies (early 1800s) among many other developments. Printed advertising itself may be a thousand years old: a copper printing plate advertising a Liu's needle shop in Jinan, including a rabbit logo and slogan, dates back to China's Northern Song dynasty (960-1276).

What this meant, first in Europe and then over centuries in the world beyond, was that business became bigger and often more international, brands became more prevalent, and societies became more urbanised.

In 2026, many of us will see dozens, if not hundreds, of advertisements a day. And while research on this is patchy and dated, it's possible that over half of the editorial media coverage we consume has been influenced by public relations professionals. I'd be surprised if it wasn't more in business and finance news.

So Han may be right about the decline of classical narrative, but the fact is that the conditions that supported the kind of communication he valorises have been disappearing for centuries. For better or worse, we storysellers have replaced the bards. We intermediate a big part of what counts as narrative in today's world. So what does that mean for us?

Story lessons

First, we shouldn't forget what we can learn from the great traditions of narrative. How did bards manage to hold people's attention night after night for six hours at a time? Strong characters, whether relatable or extraordinary. Dramatic tension. Memorable tropes. Surprises. All these techniques are available to us today.

This is why we do executive profiling and encourage CEOs to develop their presence on LinkedIn. It's why we might juxtapose a bold strategy or idea with the consensus view. It's why we reassure audiences with familiar wording (growth opportunities in Asia, anyone?). It's why we love stories about 150-year-old banks launching products based on cutting-edge technology. The scene changes and the centuries roll past, but a lot about narrative remains the same. That's hardly surprising: channels and formats may change, but our neurological make-up and essential psychology don't.

Second, we shouldn't lose sight of the power that comes from creating an image in the mind's eye. Stories that can do this stay with people, like the racetrack and the cars heading straight into the infinity pool, or being the Louis Vuitton of asset management.

Finally, companies with long histories also have a particular advantage in fulfilling the traditional purpose of narrative, which is to give people a hold on the world. When any organisation has been around for centuries, its particular story maps onto a recognisable arc of history more generally. It can be a constant over generations, part of a shared patrimony. And longevity itself can acquire an aura: if a company has been in business for so long, there must be a reason for it. Long histories can have drawbacks too, but on balance they are invaluable reputational assets.

Power and responsibility

We should recognise that intermediating reality to audiences is a serious responsibility. Communicators' duty to act responsibly has only increased along with our relative power. Narratives used to take years to spread, constrained by the tyranny of dangerous seas, bad roads, and illiteracy. Abundant data and the analytical power of artificial intelligence (AI) mean that we can now be more targeted, more relevant, and more influential than ever before, while achieving impact in seconds.

If we're honest, communicators have not been very consistent in acting with integrity throughout history. Too many have succumbed to the temptation to use the power that comes with creating narrative to mislead and manipulate others. Today's data- and AI-enabled communicators need to do better, for all our sakes.

I'm confident that the author of The Crisis of Narration would dismiss the idea of responsible storyselling in financial communications as an impossibility. Han gives the impression that we humans are powerless to resist the way that digitalisation is reducing us and robbing us of meaning. I think he's seriously underestimating people's ability to create narrative and the extent to which we continue to seek out real narrative in spite of digitalisation. And I think he's underestimating the immutability of narrative power, and its ability to transcend new channels and formats.

Smartphones and social media aren't likely to be the final word in the way we communicate in the financial context or any other. New forms and mechanisms will emerge - and I see no reason why narrative won't adapt to these too.

Narrative isn't in crisis; it's just moving with the times. That's in its nature because narrative is deep in ours. Financial communicators need to grasp this, make intentional use of techniques developed over millennia and sell stories responsibly.

Key takeaways

• Narrative is adapting, not disappearing. Channels and habits change, but people still seek stories that connect them and help them make sense of the world.

• Traditional storytelling techniques still work. Strong characters, dramatic tension, familiar tropes, and surprises remain valuable tools for corporate communicators.

• Make complex ideas memorable. Vivid mental images and simple, relatable examples help audiences understand, retain, and share a story.

• Put organisational history to work. A long history can connect a company to a shared past, offering continuity and strengthening its reputation.

• Greater influence demands greater responsibility. Data and artificial intelligence increase the speed and precision of communication, making integrity and the avoidance of manipulation more important than ever.
  
  

Adam Harper founded Ashbury in January 2020. He was previously Head of Communications for Greater China at HSBC, where he was also Regional Head of Communications for Global Banking and Markets, Asia-Pacific.

Before joining HSBC, Adam was a Vice President in Credit Suisse's Asia-Pacific Corporate Communications team and Asia Editor at EuroWeek. He has worked in Asia since 2004 and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge.

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