This introduction will introduce the concept of Strategic Communication and provide two articles related to AI use in the workplace that will be discussed in class.
What is Strategic Communication?
Defining the Concepts
Welcome to the first content lesson in this course. You might think about these as the equivalent of the ‘lecture’ element of this course. The focus will be on emphasizing the key learning ideas and supporting you as you do the course readings and activities.
So, what does strategic communication mean?
Anytime you communicate in a professional setting you will always be thinking about positioning and goal. What do you need to achieve with the act of communication? And what choices can you make in how, when and with whom you communicate to reach that goal? Communication is often reactive, as communicators default to easy or traditional patterns; a strategic communicator is proactive, knows their goal, assesses the current environment, and takes the most advantageous position within that environment.
Beyond simply improving your writing, this course is about being able to achieve specific goals through communication in whatever professional context you’re working in. And the underlying assumption here is that it doesn’t really matter how great your ideas or projects are if you reach your audience with effective strategy.
READ
| Begin by reading a short section from an OER entitled Writing for Strategic Communication Industries. Read the section on “Five tenets of strategic communication.” |
THINK & ENGAGE
| For each of the five tenets, make a note of personal or social examples where one or more of the tenets was not followed; this is often an easier way to judge the importance of these five elements. Review the skills listed in the reading. – Given your own professional goals and your current skills sets, which skills do you think you need to really focus on? – And which ones will be salient for your professional success? |
Positioning
At a personal level, we are all masters of strategic communication because we know what we want to accomplish, and we can easily figure out how to make our goals seem valuable to those around us. Think, for example, of a time in which you convinced someone close to you to do an activity that you really wanted to do; how did you convince them or make it worth their while? Professionally, it’s sometimes more difficult to make these connections between our communication goals and the needs of our audiences; it takes more work to figure it out.
Strategic communication means providing messages and sometimes generating action in the interests of a particular position. That position can be very local or very general: the needs of a brand engaging their market, the needs of a manager motivating their team, or the needs of a colleague proposing a new project. Every act of communication is calculated, working from the position of some individual or group hoping to achieve their goals.
But we don’t communicate in a vacuum. Our goals might not be universally shared. We must also be aware of how different audiences might respond to the position we write from. The more aware we are of audience needs and their disposition towards us and our goals, the better we will be able to craft effective messages.
How do you write and produce to engage an audience, while advancing the interests of the group within which you’re positioned? We will practice doing this in this course.
READ
| Now read the two articles below – the first is a summary about a research study (the relevant article is the one on the right of the page), and the second is the research article on which the summary is based (though it is not yet published). |