It’s the time of year when I like to think about where we are headed and this I’m going to cite former football manager Tony Pulis, Albert Einstein and Taylor Swift.
The former Stoke manager has spoken about the need for today’s manager to be better at ‘managing up.’ That’s the art of bringing the club’s board with you.
That skill in public sector comms will become absolutely critical in a year of crisis and change for reasons I’ll set out.
Einstein struggled at school but made time to learn in his own time. The leaders of 2035 will be learning in their own time too. The very bright team will encourage regular learning.
Taylor Swift?
“Long story short, I survived.”
There will be change, redundancy and re-applying for jobs. There will be short term pain I don’t minimise. I can only offer my own experience with time and perspective.
How did last year’s predictions work out?
68 per cent I got wholly right
16 per cent partly right
16 per cent wrong
Predictions I got right
The media landscape did continue to splinter.
Algorithms did continue to edge out friends and family as the driver of traffic on social channels.
Good content did beat churning out noise.
Teams did start to have input into the corporate AI policy as well as have one for their comms team.
BlueSky did continue to be niche.
Staff face were facing perma-crisis fatigue so brighter heads of comms invested in them.
Vertical video did break out into the mainstream.
Mass readership local news will look even less like what local newspapers used to be.
Teams did struggle to reach people without ad spend.
Teams have been siloed in a Microsoft AI landscape ignoring the better tools out there.
Legacy tech in an AI world has been a problem.
Teams have been trapped in a Gen X landscape and have not taken on Gen Z people fast enough.
The risk of not bringing the organisation along with you was a problem and remains one.
The risk of not learning new skills was a problem and remains one.
Hmmm… partly right
Hiring a chief story teller did gain wide traction in PR but not in the public sector.
Recruiting an army of advocates to share your content in their communities was be one of the best tactical things you could have done. Few did.
There wasn’t a major be AI fluff up. But there were minors ones.
No
I’m not sure that regional news shifted meaningfully to email first newsletters.
I don’t think the public sector embraced AI cartoons.
I don’t think teams have really embraced AI agents let alone AI swarms.
This year predictions have grouped themselves into strategic, tactics, media landscape and continuous professional development.
Predictions
Strategic
This year will cover an epoch that will be the biggest change in the public sector for 50 years. Some shifts will be self-inflicted like huge reorganisations of the NHS and local government in England. Some will be big picture like AI. In the words of the late Robert Phillips, the PR futurist, ‘embrace chaos.’ Because that’s what the future holds.
Evaluation needs to change but the public sector will be slow to make that change. It needs to move away from the number of web hits, media queries, Facebook followers and likes. It needs to take into account the fracturisation of the media landscape. Those Facebook group posts, those email alerts, that disinformation challenged. How to count that?
As people turn more to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Copilot for search the corporate website will decline in importance. The challenge is that information gleaned from these sources may be inaccurate. Correcting misinformation is needed. But simply putting it on the web is a not a magic cure-all.
The Daily Mail will run a story saying AI is a fad that’s now over. Just as it did with the internet in 2000. On a macro level, there will be an AI hype correction. Gartner’s hype cycle shows generative AI moving from the peak of inflated expectations into the trough of disillusionment. It could move from there to the plateau of productivity. That’s when it gets truly useful. Before we discovered Google and Amazon there was the dot com bubble.
Local government communicators will have to deal more with more Councillors, Council Leaders and candidates who don’t observe conventions, advice or the law. Comms teams need to remain calm. They need to refresh their knowledge of what local government comms can legally do and say. They need to communicate this 365 days a year locally to all parties. Not the morning after an election win. Demonstrate you are politically restricted. Building basic relationships with party leaders to re-iterate this point would be sensible. So would joining a union. These influences will be felt less strongly in NHS, police and fire & rescue.
If they haven’t done already, good communicators at all levels should understand how algorithms have changed and educate the organisation accordingly. That’s things like links should not be used as a primary tactic, for example. That’s so 2011. Without doing this your output may be pointing in the wrong direction.
As pressure grows on services, there will be greater pressure for a slew of vanity comms. That’s comms to look good in front of an incoming administration, a new organisation or to help look for a new job. This will play havoc with the team’s priorities left unchecked. Does your organisation have a list of actual priorities? You’ll need this to bat away the flim-flam.
With all this change, some people will forget internal comms. If you forget internal comms you are stuffed. It’s really hard to evaluate this but in a time of change talk to your staff. This is less prediction and more advice. But this is internal comms to staff but also managing upwards.
An AI plan for a comms team will become essential. This will work out what AI is, some basic training and working out how the organisation can use it constructively and safely.
The smart team will further streamline approval processes. Sign-offs built for the print age do not work when the demand is often real time.
The gig economy will be more of a thing in the public sector. The sector is in the middle of a shake-up but still needs hands to do certain tasks. Drawing on some experience when and where it is needed will become routine.
There will be more people demanding more failing tactics. The poster used to work. So the answer is more posters. This needs to be resisted. Some of this will be service areas and some will be the team itself.
Tactics
Human storytelling will stand out even more strongly. Enshittification is the precise term that describes the process where something online starts off good then gets filled with rubbish. In social spaces, the amount of AI slop and abuse is noticeable. But so is the nurse talking about what motivated her to become a nurse in the first place.
Tactical print will be more effective. Cutting through some noise is a strength of tactical print. It’s novelty value will cut through. It can also land through a letterbox without a crowd of hostile people commenting on it.
More comms workflows will be automated by AI. Rather than being a threat the process that trims minutes from tasks will be a benefit.
There will be things of benefit that AI does at the end of 2026 that we could only dream about at the start of the year. There’s no point predicting a widget that does ‘X’. But when that widget comes along we’ll all be impressed.
The media landscape
In regional journalism, there will be even fewer reporters and BBC Local Democracy Reporters will become even more important. People who work in journalism talk about AI creating a ‘bloodbath’ amongst an industry whose senior people are failing to grasp how AI will affect them. This will play out as fewer reporters paying even less attention to what you have to say. BBC-funded reporters will be the exception to this. They are the final bastion to what old journalism looked like. Elsewhere that kind of reporting will get even harder.
A crisis scenario made worse by AI is around the corner. We learned hard lessons about social media in 2011’s riots. We will learn more about AI and emergency planning in 2026.
More disinformation. With the rise of the far-right and Russian influence the public sector strategically needs to understand what disinformation is and how to challenge it.
One of the most significant barriers to good communication will continue to be the radicalised over 50s. Some public sector Facebook pages are magnets for bile and misunderstanding. Shaping a way to triage debate and misinformation will be the most important day-to-day challenge.
There will be more very good and more very bad video. Some of it will tick a box and will fail. The best will have a hook, be made for the specific channel and will work. The Chief Executive may hate some of it. They are not the audience.
Continuous professional development
The public sector may finally wake up to the idea that niche content will perform better than a single loud broadcast across multiple channels. We’re not in Kansas anymore and it’s not 1990. The entire population of Stafford does not watch the 9 O’Clock News and read The Stafford Newsletter. The bright comms team will create content for the Polish WhatsApp, the email list aimed at parents and the Reel aimed at under 24s. They will be entirely different pieces of content. An army of advocates will make this easier. The Polish employee who can share content to the Polish WhatsApp will add value.
There is an immense need for teams to come together to schedule regular time to train more, listen more and to reflect more. All this change would have been hard pre-pandemic. Even if WFH was ended tomorrow, it will remain hard. Time booked in for training or to compare notes is not a luxury. It is survival. This is where you can plot a path for the future pf the team and your own future. This will involve listening, learning and adapting. This may be thorny. It will always be useful. This is best done at scheduled times face-to-face. If the team won’t do it, do it yourself.
Some people will ‘Brooks’ it. Brooks was the character in the film ‘Shawshank Redeption’ who becomes institutionalised. He cannot learn new things. Some comms people buffeted by years of change will make a conscious decision to stop learning. This is understandable but is going to be tricky for leaders.
The comms person who is still in the sector in 2032 will have set aside time to learn new skills now. A comms person who doesn’t invest an hour a week minimum now in their own R&D won’t have the skills. The bright head of comms will encourage this. Reassurance is going to be a big part of this. The sharp officer will just do it anyway.
That’s it.
Thanks for reading.
For more, I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape.
ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS,
ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER,
ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.
Picture credit: By Footpath Sign by Keith Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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