Some Moments Need Senior Counsel. Most Don’t.

The majority of communications work should stay in-house. It is the sentence most advisory firms are too anxious to say.

Your team knows the organisation: the history, the personalities, the unwritten rules. They will still be there when the consultants leave. Bringing in outside help for work your own people can do well costs more and produces worse output, because an outsider will always lack the context that makes communication land. We say this as a firm whose work is, substantially, being brought in.

Some moments are different, and the two kinds are hard to tell apart while you are in them. Across banking, healthcare, regulated industries and GLCs, in boardrooms from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and Jakarta, we have learned to tell them apart.

When the audience is the board, not the market

Many in-house teams are built to communicate outward, to media, customers and the public. Some of the highest-stakes communication happens upward: a CEO succession, a restructuring, a decision the board must understand, endorse and defend.

Advising a chief executive on how to bring their own board along is a different discipline. It calls for someone without a career inside the organisation, who has the standing to say what an internal team may not be free to. Your head of communications may see the problem clearly. The room may not let them say so.

Seniority shapes who speaks first, and bad news softens on its way up. Often the sharpest question in the room is the one asked quietly afterwards, by someone who could not ask it inside.

When the decision cannot be undone

A campaign can be pulled and a message corrected. A leadership transition once announced, a restructuring once executed or a position once taken in a dispute cannot be taken back.

Everyone inside the organisation is downstream of a decision like that, and anyone downstream has a reason to believe it was right. An outside adviser can ask the question the organisation has stopped asking. They have interests of their own, as any adviser does, but they do not sit downstream of the decision.

When the team is too close to see it

This one is easily missed. A team embedded in an organisation shares its blind spots. They stop hearing how the organisation sounds from outside. They know what a decision was meant to say, so they stop noticing how it lands.

There is no incompetence in this, but it is how proximity works. An outsider’s first value is often simple: here is how that reads to someone who wasn’t in the meetings.

Southeast Asia is not one market either. Practice differs from country to country, and advice that treats the region as a single place doesn’t last.

If none of these describes your situation, you probably don’t need us. Finding that out should take one honest conversation, not a proposal.

Two reasons to hire that don’t hold up

To justify a decision already made. If the board has approved a restructuring and an adviser is brought in to manage the narrative, what is being bought is cover, not counsel. A good adviser will see the difference in the first meeting and so will your stakeholders.

To hand off a decision that leadership should own. An adviser can pressure-test your judgement, structure your thinking and prepare you for the hard conversations. They cannot decide which plant to close or who should succeed you.

A third, choosing a firm for its pitch and not its people, deserves its own post.

The honest close

Most organisations reading this do not need a strategic communications firm right now. Their teams are capable, their situations are ordinary, and their money is better spent developing the people they already have.

Some are facing a leadership transition, a restructuring or a decision that cannot be undone, with an in-house team that is good, loyal and simply too close to it.

You know which one you are.

If you are facing a decision of that kind, with a team too close to see it, we should talk. Email changenow@orchan.asia, call +603-7972 6377 or visit www.orchan.asia.