Seven Things Every Comms Professional Should Hear from Lucy Easthope

You’ve been there, I’m sure. You have spent days crafting a statement. Stakeholders engaged. Tick?

Every word has been weighed, tested for nuance and risk. Check. You have thought about how it reads to the families, to the staff, as well as the media. And then a director who has never written a line of copy in their career leans in, red pen in hand, and says, “I’d just say it differently.”

If you work in communications, you’ve probably got the T-shirt. Probably a wardrobe full.

Professor Lucy Easthope is one of the UK’s leading authorities, and the disaster recovery expert that governments turn to. So, when Lucy joined us on PR in the Real World, I expected a conversation about disaster recovery and crisis planning.

We got far more than that. What came through most powerfully was the craft of finding the right words, and the damage that gets done when organisations get the language wrong.

Here are seven things from our conversation that I think every comms professional needs to hear.

1. Nobody sees the work that goes into getting the words right

As Lucy put it: “The public never see the work of good communications.” She described working on a statement for a recent incident. The final product was around 400 words. It took eight weeks to get right, going back and forth for what she called “care and sensitivity and appropriateness.”

That resonated deeply. I have been in this industry for over 25 years, and the gap between what a good comms professional puts into a piece of work and what anyone outside the room sees has never been wider. A 40-word holding statement a takes time. A press release that reads effortlessly took three drafts and a fight with legal. Lucy calls it “lyricism”. It’s difficult because words matter, because audiences are complex and trust can be gained or lost with the slip of a pen.

She said that working in communications in extremis is a lonely place. You do not tend to get the medals. The most incredible work — knowing when to speak, knowing when to be silent, knowing when to step back — is often invisible. But, she said, people like her see it. And going home at night knowing you have done a good job and made a difference is the very best you can hope for sometimes.

2. Everyone’s a comms professional

Lucy described gold command exercises where the entire senior team wants to sign off a statement, overriding the comms lead who has spent their career learning how to do exactly this. Her response was blunt: “Respect the expertise.”

We would not walk into a production facility and tell the director how to run the line. Or rewrite the finance director’s spreadsheet. But somehow, everyone thinks they can do comms. Not just in crises — in launches, events, campaigns, internal announcements.

Lucy told us she still finds organisations where comms is brought in at the wrong time, treated as a middle-ranking function, or routinely sidelined by leaders who think they can post just as well themselves. For her, any absence of a communications professional from an initial response is a red flag.

3. If you cannot imagine how your words will land, you will cause harm

Lucy shared a story from her own life that stopped me cold. She wrote a letter to the health trust that delivered her first live daughter — and she used that phrase deliberately, because she has experienced pregnancy loss. She wrote about her experiences under the obstetric team’s care. The hospital wrote back and said: “We have looked into this and find there is zero likelihood of this event happening.”

Look at that again. A woman who has lived through pregnancy loss, who is an internationally recognised expert in how organisations respond to human suffering, received a letter telling her that her experience had zero likelihood of occurring. That is not a failure of process. It is a failure of empathy. Somebody wrote those words, somebody signed them off, and nobody in that chain stopped to think about how they would land on the person reading them.

4. Take the helicopter view — the words are only part of it

One of Lucy’s most powerful insights is that communications damage is not always about language. She described public meetings for flood survivors held in primary schools where the affected residents were made to sit in children’s chairs. She referenced the Hillsborough disaster, where families waiting for devastating news at the gymnasium found turnstiles marked “Police Only.” The words on the official statements may have been carefully drafted but the experience was degrading.

Her advice to comms professionals is to look at the whole picture. That is comms territory. If we are not thinking about it, nobody else will.

5. Truth and trust are in a perilous position

Lucy said that truth and trust are in a perilous position, and that poll data is starting to confirm it. We are living, as she put it, in the age of mis-, dis-, mal- and gas — misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and gaslighting.

But the challenge she posed was not just about external threats. It was about our own profession. Are comms teams inadvertently contributing to the erosion of trust?

When we write holding statements that say nothing. When we issue updates that are technically accurate but emotionally tone-deaf. When we let legal caution override human honesty. When we tell what Lucy calls the “good lie” — the over-optimistic timeline, the premature reassurance, the fluff that buys time but costs credibility. Every time we do that, we make the trust problem marginally worse. And the cumulative effect is what Lucy is seeing in the data.

There’s a whole blog post here and when I write this, I wondered how often I could be guilty as charged.

6. Hopium is not a strategy

Lucy talked about concept she calls ‘hopium’ — the dangerous over-optimism that infects crisis responses and organisational communications alike. She described culvert collapses where communities are told it will be a week or two before life returns to normal, when the reality is years. She referenced the pandemic, where she watched leaders fixate on when it would be over rather than how to communicate honestly about what was coming.

That, she said, is ‘hopium’ in action. It’s a very human condition, but a dangerous one when it shapes official communications.

The duty of candour legislation coming through will force this conversation in healthcare and public services. But every sector should be asking the question now. Are we telling people what they want to hear, or what they need to know?

7. Beware the honeymoon — and the hero trap

Lucy described what she calls the recovery graph — the pattern every disaster follows. There is the incident, then a brief honeymoon phase of about eight weeks. Central government and senior leaders love this phase. They want the love stories, the rebuilding narrative, the heroes. Give us a heroic security guard. Give us a feel-good angle.

If you fall for the honeymoon’s siren call, Lucy warned, you set yourself up for a much harder slump, and the slump always comes. The social media arc that builds people up will chew them up and spit them out. Comms professionals, she said, are the most receptive to this concept, because they instinctively understand narrative arcs and what happens when you lose control of one.

Links and references

Dr. Lucy Easthope – When the Dust Settles (book): https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/lucy-easthope/when-the-dust-settles/9781529358247

Dr. Lucy Easthope – Come What May (book): https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/lucy-easthope/come-what-may/9781399736220/

Desert Island Discs (Lucy Easthorpe episode, BBC Radio 4): https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DrsUDD/

Word of Mouth with Michael Rosen (episode featuring Lucy on disaster dialogue): https://open.spotify.com/episode/0To7fGDQwhztBumvv5tcnu

BBC Radio 4 – Are You Ready? (programme mentioned): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002n7mh

Good Housekeeping (Lucy’s emergency preparedness interviews mentioned): https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/health/a64618387/prepemergency-disaster/

Hillsborough (TV drama by Jimmy McGovern): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116533/

Amanda Coleman – work/book on reputation in crisis communications (mentioned): https://www.koganpage.com/marketing-communications/strategic-reputation-management-9781398617308

Amanda Coleman on PR in the Real World: https://www.vivapr.co.uk/pr-in-the-real-world-crisis-leadership/

Listen to Lucy’s episode now!