You Can't Communicate What You Don't Understand
The World Cup has kicked off in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
And I’ll skip the criticism of choosing a country (the US) that isn’t really a football country, and I won’t get into the ethical side of that choice today. I’ll also skip the pricing complaints and hold back my very European smile at the fan culture in the US (so wholesome, btw). And I won’t criticize... yeah, yeah, I know, everything annoys me now :)
But the most annoying thing of all is the football expertise coming out of screens and the internet. All these player rankings where 3 of the top 10 are Americans. All these strange football analysts and their strange football analysis. And what annoys me most is this: the people responsible for communications had years to watch football, study it, and develop actual subject matter expertise.
Enough time not to embarrass their respectable three-letter networks. Or football itself.
And that’s exactly what we’re talking about today: whether, why, and how deeply a communications professional should know and understand the actual expertise at the center of their organization.
The problem of requirements
Communications work in knowledge-driven organizations (think tanks, research and expert institutes) has its own logic. And it’s different from communications work anywhere else.
Here, communications are an organic extension of the knowledge production process itself. The job is to close the gap between expertise and the people who need it — whether that’s research feeding into policy decisions, or consulting for a specific industry.
In this context, the communications professional acts as a knowledge broker. Their job is to package, reframe, adapt, and redesign knowledge and expertise — and then deliver it to the right audiences. (We’re leaving reverse communication aside for now — not because it doesn’t matter, but because that’s not what today is about :)
Institutionally, the communicator’s job is to provide researchers, experts, and knowledge producers with safe, effective, convenient, and professional tools, environments, infrastructure, channels, and formats for disseminating that knowledge. And support — both professional and, often, psychological.
And here’s the problem.
The modern world asks communications managers to know and be able to do so much that it's very much an open question whether there’s any room left for the second critical element: subject-matter expertise.
How deeply should a communications professional actually know the subject?
I’ll agree that a communicator doesn’t need to be qualified to write an independent peer-reviewed study (though honestly, sometimes that happens too). But they do need to understand:
1. Methodological context: how researchers arrived at their conclusions, what processes and approaches sit behind any given number or statement.
2. Professional language and internal logic: being comfortable with the field’s terminology and understanding how the conversation inside that field actually works.
3. The landscape of opinions: what schools of thought exist, where the consensus line is, and what remains genuinely contested. And knowing the criticism — not just what the organization claims, but what others push back on.
4. Regulatory, political, and social context: what laws, programs, or international commitments govern the field. Expertise doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s always embedded in a system, and the communicator needs to know which one.
5. Internal organizational context: understanding the individual focus areas of experts inside the organization, the nuances of their positions, where they align, and where they don’t. Organizations rarely speak with one voice, and only by knowing the different voices inside can you find approaches that bring them together.
Quite a lot, right?
Why does this actually matter?
Overcoming the Curse of Knowledge: Experts often suffer from a cognitive bias — they assume their complex conclusions are obvious to everyone else. A communicator who understands the substance acts as a facilitator, helping to deconstruct the expertise and translate it into something audiences can actually work with.
Building trust inside the organization: Researchers are traditionally skeptical of communications people (honestly, we’re not very popular in general). They worry their findings will be simplified beyond recognition for the sake of a punchy headline — and not without reason, if you ask me. Deep subject matter expertise is the single most important factor in earning that trust. Without it, effective collaboration just doesn’t happen.
Protecting against sliding into lobbying: In expert environments, communication flows from evidence to conclusions — evidence-to-policy, not the other way around. A communicator who doesn’t understand the substance risks packaging the material as biased political advocacy. Understanding what’s actually there keeps things objective and protects the organization’s reputation.
Making topical positioning work: For a think tank to become a credible authority in its niche (migration policy, AI regulation, whatever it is) the communications team needs to be able to hold a substantive conversation with stakeholders. Without subject-matter expertise, the organization’s brand remains vague and undifferentiated. Many stakeholders and target audiences are experts themselves — and they can tell. So why would you put a communicator who doesn’t really know the subject between two people who do?
What to do about it?
The recipe is very simple.
Just two things:
Listen and learn. Nothing complicated, right?
Talk to experts. Out of curiosity. Ask questions not as a communicator who needs material, but as a person who actually wants to understand.
There is nothing worse than a communications manager who just asks the expert to send over a text. There is nothing worse than a communications manager whose calendar has no regular, recurring meetings with the organization’s experts — just to ask questions and listen.
