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| (L-R) Frank DeMaria, Elie Jacobs |
Our job is changing. We are still problem solvers, and traditional communications work still matters. But it is no longer enough. Increasingly, the work that differentiates effective communications leaders is problem-finding—identifying the real risk before it becomes visible, reputational or irreversible.
In consulting, there is a familiar and deeply frustrating failure mode known as a Type III Error: correctly solving the wrong problem. Anyone who has spent time in crisis communications has seen it firsthand. You are brought in to address an urgent, kinetic issue, only to discover that while the immediate problem is solvable, it is dwarfed by deeper structural risks the organization either failed to see or chose to ignore.
Executional excellence cannot compensate for a flawed diagnosis. Being brilliant at solving the wrong problem still produces the wrong outcome.
Organizations still need tacticians to extinguish what is burning. But they also need strategists who can say—often uncomfortably—that a company’s brand promise and its business model are fundamentally incompatible, that second-order consequences have not been mapped, or that leadership is optimizing for the next quarter at the expense of long-term credibility. They need someone willing to ask the question no one else in the room is asking.
Traditional communications tools—press releases, media relationships, message discipline—are not obsolete. They are simply insufficient. The underlying reason is structural: information is no longer scarce. The historical advantage of communications was controlling what people knew and when they knew it. Today, journalists, employees, activists and competitors often see the same signals you do, frequently before your carefully crafted statement is finalized.
When messaging fails, it is increasingly because communications was asked to solve a presentation problem when the real issue was strategic.
A clear example emerged in early 2024, when baby clothing company Kyte Baby denied remote work to an employee whose adopted newborn was in the NICU. The company released two apology videos. Neither worked—not because of tone or wording, but because the underlying issue was a misalignment between a “family-first” brand and internal policies that contradicted it.
This was not a communications failure. It was a problem-identification failure. Could someone have flagged the gap between values and policy before it exploded on TikTok? Possibly—but only if communications had the access, credibility and organizational permission to raise that issue early. Those are significant conditions, and many organizations do not meet them.
In practice, the challenge of problem-finding is not just identifying the right issue. It is identifying it early, building the case for why it matters, navigating the internal politics of challenging assumptions, and accepting that even when you are right, leadership may still choose not to act.
That reality exposes several hard truths about the role.
First, problem-finding requires access. It assumes communications is involved before decisions are finalized, not after, when the instruction is simply to “message it.” Most teams do not start with that level of influence. Earning it takes time, judgment and trust.
Second, problem-finding carries reputational risk internally. If you flag ten potential threats and only one materializes, you are not rewarded for foresight—you are labeled alarmist. Organizations often struggle to distinguish between false positives and false negatives, even though missing a single material risk is usually far more damaging than flagging several that never emerge.
Third, prevention is invisible. “I stopped a crisis that never happened” does not survive budget season. To be valued, problem-finding must be made tangible: a strategy adjusted after pressure-testing, a policy revised before it leaked, a positioning refined before launch. These wins are quieter than crisis response, but they are measurable—and defensible.
None of this replaces problem-solving. It adds to it. The press release still goes out. The media briefing still happens. But alongside execution, communications leaders are increasingly expected to challenge assumptions, map downstream consequences, and surface risks that may sit well outside their traditional lane.
This shift mirrors a broader change in how risk itself operates. In their book Political Risk, Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart document how modern risk no longer originates solely from governments or regulators. Today, it can come from “anyone armed with a cell phone or a Twitter account.” The companies that adapted earliest did not simply hire better PR firms. They built systematic capabilities to scan for threats, pressure-test decisions, and identify misalignment before it became reputational damage.
Their research shows that organizations that take political and reputational risk seriously are surprised less often and recover better when crises do occur. Those that do not are more likely to be blindsided.
Building this capability does not require a sweeping transformation. It starts with discipline. Pick one area—brand positioning, growth strategy, stakeholder relationships—and establish a regular rhythm of asking hard questions: Where is the gap between what we say and what we do? What assumptions are we making that could be wrong? What has changed in the environment that we are not accounting for?
It also requires selectivity. You cannot challenge every decision. Credibility comes from choosing moments where the stakes are highest and the misalignment is clearest, and being consistently right about issues that matter.
Even then, you may still be overruled. Leadership may understand the risk and decide to take it anyway. That is not failure. The job is to ensure the risk was raised clearly, early and on the record—so that when a crisis emerges, it is recognized as a calculated decision, not a blindside.
The organizations that will hold their footing over the next five years will not be the ones with the most polished responses. They will be the ones that identified misalignment before it became a crisis.
Somewhere inside every organization, someone needs to be asking: What problem are we not seeing?
If that is not communications, it should be. And if communications does not yet have the access to do it, that—not messaging—is the gap to close.
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Frank DeMaria and Elie Jacobs are founding partners of Purposeful Advisors, which helps companies clients shape their narrative, identify and understand stakeholders, mitigate reputational risk, and strategically position brands to ensure recognition, relevance and resilience for the long-term success. The counsel we offer can often be out of reach for middle-market and smaller companies, but it is critically important to their success. www.purposefuladv.com
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