Behavioural Change Toolkit · Plan

Comms and Narrative Plan

⚠️ Read this first: comms is not the change. It addresses Awareness and some Reflective Motivation, and nothing else. If comms is your main intervention, go back to Intervention Design Worksheet.

Its proper job is narrow and important: make sure nobody is confused about what they’re being asked to do, and give people something true they can repeat.

The narrative, in four layers

Each layer answers a different question. Most change comms does layer 1 well and layer 4 not at all.

The narrative

1 · Why — the context (what changed in the world that makes this necessary) _______________

2 · What — the change (concretely, what’s different) _______________

3 · What it means for you (honestly — including the cost) _______________

4 · What I need you to do (one specific behaviour, by when) _______________

Test: could a frontline person hear this once and repeat layer 4 accurately? If not, rewrite. Layer 4 is the only one that changes anything.

The honesty section

Write these before anything goes out. If you can’t answer them, the comms isn’t ready — and if you don’t answer them, people will fill the gap with something worse.

Question people are actually asking Our honest answer
Is this about cutting jobs?  
Will this make my day longer?  
Who decided this and were we asked?  
What happens if I don’t?  
Is this like the one that got abandoned?  
What’s changing for the leadership team?  

The jobs question

If it’s in people’s minds, it’s the only thing they’re listening for, and every other message is filtered through it. Address it in the first communication, explicitly. If the answer is “we don’t know yet,” say that — it’s more credible than a reassurance that later turns out to be false. A broken reassurance costs you every subsequent change, not just this one.

Messenger matters more than message

Different messages need different senders. Getting this wrong is the most common comms failure.

Message Right messenger Wrong messenger
Why the organisation is doing this Sponsor / senior leader Project team
What it means for me personally The person’s own line manager All-staff email
How to actually do it A peer who’s doing it Trainer or vendor
Reassurance about jobs The most senior person available HR business partner
That it’s working A named frontline person with a real result Dashboard

Line managers are the preferred and most effective messenger for personal impact — consistently, across the research. If your plan routes personal-impact messages through central comms, it will underperform no matter how well written. Equip managers instead: Manager Conversation Guide.

Plan grid

# Audience Message Layer Messenger Channel Date Response wanted
1              
2              
3              
4              
5              

“Response wanted” is the column that keeps this honest. If a communication asks for nothing, question whether it needs to exist.

Sequencing rules

  1. Leaders and managers first, always. A manager who learns about it from their team’s WhatsApp cannot lead it. Give them 48 hours and a briefing, not an embargo and a slide.
  2. Never announce before you can answer “what does this mean for me?” The vacuum fills with the worst available interpretation, within hours.
  3. Repeat more than feels necessary. You are bored of the message roughly four repetitions before your audience has registered it.
  4. Vary the channel, not the message. Consistency of substance, variety of form.
  5. Two-way from the start. A channel where questions get answered publicly, including the awkward ones. Answering one hostile question well in public is worth more than ten broadcasts.

What to publish while it’s running

  • ✅ Trends, not raw low numbers (“up from 11% to 34%”)
  • ✅ The best-performing unit, and what they did differently
  • ✅ What changed because someone raised it — with their name and their permission. The most valuable thing you can publish. It proves feedback works, which is the thing people most doubt.
  • ✅ Named people with real results
  • ❌ Low compliance percentages — they normalise non-compliance (Social Norms and Influence)
  • ❌ Leaderboards that shame the bottom
  • ❌ “Great progress!” with no evidence

The stock paragraph

Write one paragraph that every leader and manager uses verbatim. Consistency at the top is a signal in itself — when six leaders say the same sentence, people conclude it’s real.

Stock paragraph

_______________________________________________ _______________________________________________

→ Manager Conversation Guide · Objection Handling Bank · The One-Page Board Narrative

← Back to the Behavioural Change Toolkit

Last updated: 11 August 2026