There are organisations that communicate constantly, yet fail to come across as having a distinct personality of their own. They publish content, participate in forums, answer questions put to them, address the public, prepare presentations, engage with different audiences across various platforms and formats, and participate in the public sphere with apparent ease. From the outside, it may even seem as though they have a robust communications strategy. The problem arises when you look a little more closely: the organisation does not speak in the same way depending on who is speaking, the context in which they are speaking, or the pressure of the moment. The corporate narrative is fragmented and changes depending on who is speaking within the company.
There’s no need to consider an extreme case. A fairly common situation will suffice. The CEO explains a decision as a commitment to growth. The Human Resources department presents it as a cultural transformation. The sales team turns it into a promise of customer focus, whilst the Head of Communications attempts to give it an institutional spin that doesn’t always align with any of the previous ones. There is no outright contradiction, but neither is there a clear position. What emerges is a collection of reasonable interpretations that fail to form a unified voice.
For a long time, this problem has been misdiagnosed. It is interpreted as a matter of coordination, processes, training spokespersons or internal discipline. It is thought that there is a lack of meetings, shared documents or greater care in implementation. But that explanation falls short. Because when the message repeatedly loses its focus, what usually fails is not the ability to repeat certain phrases more effectively. What fails is something that comes before that: the authority that decides from which position the organisation speaks.
That is the point that many companies fail to make clear. They do, in fact, have messages. They also have channels. They may even have more than enough talent to communicate effectively. What they have not done is answer a far more uncomfortable and crucial question: who in your organisation has the real authority to decide from whose perspective the company speaks? That is, in essence, addressing the governance of discourse.
Control over corporate discourse
Managing corporate messaging is not about producing a handbook of key messages. Nor is it about setting up a communications committee to review texts before they are published. And, of course, it does not involve drafting a guide so that everyone repeats the same talking points. All of these things may be useful in practical terms, but they do not address the root of the problem.
When we talk about discourse governance, we are referring to the structure—whether formal or informal—that determines who has the power to define the framework through which the organisation explains itself, positions itself and responds. This distinction is crucial. It is not merely a question of deciding what is said about a specific issue, but of establishing the criteria by which that issue is interpreted. The framework is not the final statement, but the logic that makes that statement possible.
That is why messages are a result, not the source of everything. Before any set of talking points, there is a more important decision to be made: how does the organisation interpret its context, which tensions does it consider central, what language does it adopt as its own, which boundaries does it refuse to cross, and what stance is it prepared to maintain when the pressure mounts? If all of this lacks clear direction or leadership, every message will emerge as a stopgap solution. It does not build continuity.
That is the difference between an organisation that communicates and one that exercises discourse governance. The former produces interventions. The latter produces a stance. In the former, each context requires the meaning of what is said to be renegotiated. In the latter, contexts may change, but the perspective from which the organisation speaks remains recognisable.
This also has a major impact on reputation. Reputation is not built solely through the accumulation of impressions or the quality of a single campaign. It is built through the consistent application of a clear set of principles over time, which is what underpins an organisation’s public legitimacy.
An organisation becomes transparent when it is possible to understand what it considers important, how it interprets conflicts, and what kind of decisions it is prepared to stand by. The same applies to content: building authority is not a question of volume, but of sustained consistency. When that is lacking, reputation ceases to depend on a stable position and comes to depend on a far less reliable variable: who spoke this time.
In an environment where public authority is also defined by conceptual consistency, not merely by presence or visibility, this issue becomes even more important. Today, it is not enough simply to be there. One must be interpretable. An organisation is not interpretable when its framework changes every time the voice changes.
The crisis that highlights the lack of governance
Some companies realise they lacked control over their messaging the moment they lose control of the conversation. As long as everything proceeds under normal circumstances, this lack of focus can coexist with a certain semblance of order. Each department speaks within its own sphere, each spokesperson operates according to their own habits, and the system holds together because no one demands a clear stance under pressure. The fragility is there, but it remains unseen.
A crisis can change all that in an instant. Suddenly, the organisation needs to decide quickly what it can say, who should say it, and from what position. That is when the vacuum emerges. Not because there is a lack of qualified professionals, but because no one knows for certain what overarching principle should guide the response. The legal department protects against risk. The business protects continuity. Communications attempts to protect legitimacy. Management wants to regain control. Everyone has their reasons. What is missing is a previously recognised authority to establish a unified institutional position.
At that moment, what appeared to be a crisis management challenge reveals something much deeper. The organisation is not merely improvising a response. It is improvising the very ground from which it will respond. That is far more serious, because a crisis does not merely punish mistakes; it also exposes the structures that are lacking. When there is no pre-existing framework, pressure does not make the message any clearer.
The spokesperson who improvises
It is true that there are organisations that do not face major crises and yet still display the same shortcoming, albeit in a more subtle way. This can be seen, for example, when different spokespersons explain the same strategy using frameworks that are incompatible with one another. None of them is lying, but neither are they speaking from exactly the same perspective.
The problem isn’t that there are nuances. A complex organisation needs nuances. The problem is that, when those nuances do not rely on a shared framework, each spokesperson ends up filling the void with the logic of their own role. Sales interprets things from a business perspective. Human Resources, from the perspective of internal culture. Communications, from the perspective of public legitimacy. What is lacking is not a willingness to collaborate. What is lacking is an authority that defines which institutional interpretation should prevail when all these perspectives compete with one another.
This gives rise to a very common paradox: the company believes it is being flexible and adopting a variety of approaches, when in reality it is leaving its discursive identity unmanaged. The organisation does not appear more complex or more mature. It appears less clear-cut. When a company is unclear about what it is doing and why, its reputation becomes more vulnerable than it realises.
Adapting the speech
There is a third situation that is even more common because it is often mistaken for a virtue: the ability to adapt to each audience. In principle, adapting is not a mistake. No serious organisation should speak in exactly the same way in every context. The problem arises when adaptation ceases to affect language and begins to affect one’s stance.
This happens when the narrative shifts too much depending on who the organisation is addressing. When speaking to an industry audience, the organisation emphasises innovation. When addressing an institutional audience, it emphasises accountability. Each version is defensible in its own right. But, taken together, they no longer reveal a position that can be sustained over time. They reveal an organisation that learns too quickly what each audience wants to hear, and too slowly what it wants to stand for.
That kind of flexibility comes at a high cost. The company ceases to build a recognisable presence and begins to operate as a mirror of its context. Its messaging becomes tactically effective, but strategically weak. Everything seems to fall into place in the short term, and yet something is eroded: the sense that there is a consistent logic behind every action disappears. Adaptation, when ungoverned, does not enrich positioning. It dissolves it.
How a discursive system of governance is structured
It is worth clarifying one thing from the outset: a discursive system of government is not a project that is launched, documented and then considered complete. It is an organisational capacity. And like any capacity of this kind, it depends less on the document that describes it than on the authority that sustains it over time.
We must start by determining who actually has the power to set the institutional framework. We are not talking about who is the best at drafting documents, or who edits a press release, or who manages a specific intervention. The relevant question is a different one: who can determine the perspective from which the organisation interprets its decisions and its internal tensions?
That role must be sufficiently close to senior management, because communication is not a department: it is a management function, and it must be sufficiently clear so as not to be diluted amongst departments with differing interests. It may take different forms depending on the company’s structure, but it cannot be left ambiguous. When no one explicitly holds that role, the function does not disappear: it is distributed informally. And when it is distributed informally, the logic of the area with the most urgent needs, the most power or the greatest ability to exert pressure tends to prevail.
Controlling the narrative means, precisely, ensuring that the institutional position does not arise from that impromptu dispute.
Adapting to the framework without compromising consistency
We must understand that a framework is useless if it cannot be adapted to different voices and situations without losing its consistency. The aim is not to produce identical messages. An organisation does not need superficial uniformity. What it needs is for the underlying logic through which the issues at stake are interpreted to remain unchanged, even when the spokesperson or context changes.
This requires work that is less flashy than a manual, but far more crucial: turning the framework into an operational guideline. In other words, a reference point capable of guiding real-world decisions. Which tensions do we prioritise? Which terms do we accept? Which simplifications do we avoid? Which institutional interpretation should not be called into question every time a new pressure arises?
When that framework is in place, spokespersons do not need to memorise a set of principles. They need to understand the perspective from which they are speaking, and that completely changes the quality of their discourse. They no longer respond based on personal intuition or for the sake of convenience. They respond from a recognisable position that the organisation has decided to uphold.
Continuity amidst staff changes
On the other hand, the governance of discourse must endure changes in names, positions and teams. If consistency depends solely on the talent of a single individual, there is no governance, only dependence.
This is particularly important in organisations where the public voice is closely linked to leadership. A good manager can lend substance to the narrative. A good communications manager can bring structure to it. But neither is enough if the framework is not institutionalised. People change, move on, leave or take on other priorities. And an organisation that relies on charismatic individuals for its consistency runs a clear risk: confusing leadership with the system.
That is why the governance of discourse does more than simply define authority. It enables the organisation to maintain a recognisable position even when those who articulate it change. It does not freeze language, but it does preserve the logic that gives meaning to that language.
The management’s stance
None of this can be sustained without ongoing maintenance. The context changes, risks change, business priorities change, and the meaning of words changes too. To think that managing public discourse can be resolved once and for all is tantamount to treating reputation as if it were a static asset.
Maintaining a discursive governance system involves assessing whether the framework remains valid, whether new decisions reinforce or undermine it, and whether the organisation still identifies with it. It requires sustained leadership, not just a passing burst of enthusiasm. It demands a recognition that internal and external communication are not two separate spheres, because the organisation does not change its identity simply because it is addressing a different audience.
In that sense, the management of discourse resembles a management function more than a communication task. Communication expresses, develops and translates it. But the decision as to the perspective from which one speaks lies at the level where the organisation defines who it is, what it prioritises and what it is prepared to uphold publicly.
It’s not a style guide; it’s a strategic decision
Many organisations continue to confuse the problem with their supporting documentation. They commission a brand book, a sales pitch, a positioning paper or a style guide, and expect that material to resolve the lack of consistency. Such documents can be useful. They organise, remind, facilitate and serve as a reference. But they do not govern on their own.
A document has no authority in itself. Authority lies with the structure that determines when that document is valid, who interprets it, who updates it, and who can enforce it. Without that structure, any manual ends up becoming nothing more than a file, a mere methodological ornament.
That is why it is important to articulate this clearly. The management of corporate discourse is not a matter of style, nor of order, nor of operational coordination. It is a strategic decision regarding the perspective from which the organisation makes itself intelligible to others and to itself.
Until that decision is explicitly made, reputation will continue to depend less on strategy than on chance. On the chance of who is speaking. On the chance of the pressure of the moment. The crucial question, ultimately, is who really calls the shots in the organisation’s narrative.