Communication strategy has always been part of my work, but lately I’ve been paying closer attention to what happens at the decision-making level, way before we get to writing the right headline, cutting the wrong paragraph, or adjusting the article list.

Part of that is because technology has changed the economics of content. We can now write, edit, repurpose, and publish more, faster, and cheaper. But producing more communication doesn’t necessarily mean communicating better.

Another part of it is that I’ve always seen writing and communication as business assets. They might be considered “soft skills” but I believe they can be hard on the bottom line, when done wrong.

With that in mind, where do things break in practice? And what can we do to fix them? To answer that, I audited several recent B2B client engagements across various industries and sizes. From solopreneurs to big companies, I searched for recurring issues with real economic cost: wasted time, scrapped work, duplicated effort, and missed opportunities.

I found several problems, some old, some new. After a few days of writing down observations and analyzing patterns, I realized something bigger connected separate issues: communication problems start upstream and get paid for downstream.

Problems like generic content, inconsistent messaging, bad visuals, or disappointing websites often started with bad positioning, a lack of strategy, or a disengaged workforce. However, instead of addressing the latter, companies tend to try to solve the first by doing a rewrite or adding more resources to a broken process. But that’s usually just a patch that doesn’t hold.

One caveat before I start. I was part of these systems too. In many cases, I was brought in to solve some of the problems I’m highlighting, and I contributed to solutions. Sometimes, I executed what was asked and didn’t see the bigger problem until later. Patterns are never obvious in the moment, they can’t be. Only looking back at these engagements together made some of the conclusions below possible.

1. Communication strategy gets created, but not operationalized

I’ve seen leadership teams spend a lot of resources defining positioning, messaging, and communication priorities.

Then leadership holds a meeting saying that “Next quarter we need to be more present online. We’ll publish more articles, and everyone is encouraged to participate. We need more visibility and leads.” Everyone nods.

A few months later, only one or two people are still doing most of the public communication. Usually they’re the same people who pushed for the strategy in the first place.

It’s easy to conclude that everyone else simply “doesn’t care about marketing”. But that’s not necessarily the case.

Sales has targets. Technical teams have client work. Other people aren’t sure what they’re supposed to contribute, how much time they’re expected to spend on it, or why it matters to their role.

The strategy exists. The system for adopting it doesn’t.

Creating a strategy is not the same as creating the conditions for people to execute it.

2. Companies waste expertise

A related problem appears in companies built around specialist knowledge, which is typical for B2B. A company can employ dozens of knowledgeable people while the market sees the expertise of only one or two. That’s an asset the company is already paying for but barely using in its communication.

I’ve seen companies with excellent technical people where one founder, executive, or marketing leader becomes the company’s entire public voice.

It’s not necessarily because everyone else is too busy (though that’s the official excuse). In my experience, most experts worry a lot about: 

• oversimplifying
• getting a technical detail wrong
• having nothing interesting to say
• sounding like everyone else
• being unable to communicate with an external audience

Telling them to “post more on LinkedIn” doesn’t solve much.

Experts need to understand what the company wants to be known for, where their own knowledge fits into that picture, and how they can contribute without turning communication into a second full-time job.

3. Documentation gets mistaken for adoption

The next step after strategizing? Write a guideline. And when execution fails, write another or refine the first one. Still not working? Keep editing that guideline! 

More than once: 

• I’ve received content guidelines listing mistakes that didn’t apply to my work
• I’ve discovered important documents only after I’d already been working on an account for months
• I’ve watched new versions appear before anyone checked whether people had understood the old ones

There’s an irony in communication guidelines being poorly communicated.

Guidelines themselves aren’t the problem. They’re useful and should exist. The mistake is thinking that a document will change behavior simply by existing.

A tone-of-voice guide sitting in a shared drive doesn’t create a tone of voice. A messaging framework doesn’t create consistent messaging just because everyone received the link.

Information availability and organizational adoption are two different things.

4. Companies remove judgment upstream and pay to restore it downstream

This is a newer pattern I’ve noticed increasingly as content operations have become more automated.

When I started working as a copywriter (in the Jurassic period), briefs were often terrible. They were short, vague, and required endless follow-up questions.

We’ve now occasionally reached the opposite extreme. I’ve received briefs detailed enough to prescribe the structure of individual sentences while simultaneously asking me to make the content original and distinctive. You be the judge of how well that goes. I’ve also been hired for senior-level expertise, then given a process so prescriptive that there’s little left to apply. 

Standardization is not necessarily wrong. It can speed up production and make it easier to manage. But there’s a trade-off, and it shouldn’t be done in excess.

If you hire senior expertise and design a process in which that expertise can’t influence much, you’re effectively wasting resources. And if the resulting content feels generic, another senior person may eventually be asked to make it distinctive again.

Some businesses remove judgment at the beginning of the process in the name of efficiency, then pay to restore judgment at the end.

A strange way to save money, which I doubt will last. 

5. AI increases strategic ambiguity 

I’ve watched a small business build almost an entire content presence with AI before answering a much more basic question: What do we want to be known for?

A folder got filled quickly with articles and social media posts. They covered all the expected topics and said almost nothing that differentiated that brand. I was brought in to make it sound better, but the lack of work before writing was too obvious to fix. 

I’ve since been asked more than once to “fix” content produced this way and refused. 

AI can produce decent content. There, I said it. But to do that, it needs a defined brand to start with and a lot (loooot) of knowledgeable feedback.

The cost of producing tons of strategically useless communication is low. Or is it? 

6. Ambiguity gets progressively more expensive

The initial cost of ambiguity might be low, but once it ripples in all communication streams, it really starts to add up. 

For example, I once wrote for a company for months without speaking to anyone who worked there. Everything came through an intermediary who couldn’t answer fairly basic questions: What’s the strategy? Who is this for? What is this supposed to achieve?

I’ve worked with another business where even the people running it struggled to explain succinctly what the business did and who it was for. It did a bit of everything, for everyone. As a result, junior employees created terrible visuals. Different people operated under god-knows-what rules. Campaigns were organized at the last minute. Marketing materials were commissioned and never used. Websites were rebuilt more often than sales were made.

This is what makes unclear positioning expensive.

Every person downstream has to interpret what wasn’t decided upstream. Each interpretation creates another opportunity for rework and waste. By the time the problem appears publicly, it looks tactical: inconsistent messaging, mismatched creative, a weak website, or random content. But the tactical problem is often just the symptom.

Don’t mistake low initial costs for overall savings. 

7. Communication debt gets transferred

The cost of ambiguity doesn’t always stay inside the organization either. Sometimes employees absorb it. And so do freelancers, partners, and customers.

Some brands ask a great deal of external collaborators while providing very little clarity in return: different instructions from different stakeholders, last-minute changes, unclear expectations, promises not followed through.

Who solves that ambiguity? An agency asks more questions. A freelancer spends unpaid time figuring things out. A partner adjusts their own plans. An employee rebuilds something for the third time.

The original business may not record any of this as a communication cost, but it exists. Eventually, it shows up elsewhere: higher fees, slower execution, frustrated partners, a weaker reputation, or people simply deciding not to work with you again.

Communication debt doesn’t disappear. 

8. Solving problems before diagnosing them correctly

I’ve been delivering communication and writing training for years. Training can be extremely useful when people lack a skill. But I’ve also been brought in when the apparent problem was that “the team isn’t communicating well” while the underlying issue was different.

Some people didn’t see communication as part of their job. Some didn’t understand why the company wanted them involved. They had no incentive to participate.

The people already motivated to improve picked up the techniques immediately. The disengaged people were still disengaged at the end of the day.

It’s a diagnostic mistake, similar to when:

• Editing gets bought for a positioning problem.
• Guidelines get written for an adoption problem.
• AI gets introduced for a capacity problem.
• More content gets commissioned for a differentiation problem.
• A more detailed brief gets created because nobody trusts the execution.

What’s the root cause?

Here’s the path a communication strategy should follow: 

Positioning and goals → internal understanding → expertise and judgment → processes and tools → execution → what the market eventually sees.

A weakness early in the chain remains. And the further it travels, the more people spend time compensating for it.

That’s why the expensive part of poor communication isn’t always the bad article or inconsistent LinkedIn presence. It’s repeatedly paying to solve downstream symptoms of problems that originated upstream.

Before struggling to make a social media post more engaging or redoing the website a tenth time only to get a disappointing result, I’d look at the path and ask a different question: Where does this problem start?

We are part of the problem

There’s another conclusion I can’t really avoid after looking back at these engagements: as communication practitioners, we’re part of this system too.

If someone hires you to write ten SEO articles, it’s easy to focus on writing ten good SEO articles. If they ask for training, you build training around their goals. If they ask you to improve an AI-generated draft, you improve the draft.

But experience should also make us better at recognizing when simply doing the job well won’t solve the problem behind it.

I wouldn’t approach every engagement above today the same way I did at the time. I’d ask more questions earlier and, in some cases, I’d recommend a different route before agreeing to the work.

Better communication work isn’t always about executing the brief. As uncomfortable as it might be, sometimes you have to challenge the existence of the brief itself.

Need help diagnosing communication problems? Seeing the bigger picture from inside the process is not easy. I’ve been working with B2B leadership for many years, and I can help you identify the root cause and list possible solutions. Book a session at the communication clinic, and let’s work it out together.