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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