Messaging vs. Communication

While we frequently use the terms messaging and communication interchangeably, there’s a significant difference between the two.

Simply put, messaging is one-way — it aims to deliver a specific narrative. Communication, on the other hand, is two-way — it's about understanding, being understood and, ideally, identifying common ground to build on.

In today’s complex landscape of global relationships, trade, and negotiations, understanding this difference is increasingly relevant.

In many fields, especially in public facing ones, messaging gets presented as communication. Skilled "communicators" practice message discipline, driving their key points home and steering conversations back to their agenda, rather than truly engaging with different perspectives.

Messaging is often strategic. It’s designed to ensure a point of view is heard and considered, especially in competitive settings like debates, media cycles, or negotiations. This requires discipline: staying focused, filtering distractions, and maintaining coherence in the message being delivered.

If your objective is to sell – a product, a policy, or an opinion – messaging is a strategy that makes sense. Messaging follows the methodology of decide, sell, defend – and attack.

Additionally, being effective as a messenger requires a certain discipline to stay focused, to cut out the noise, to not get distracted by other agendas. To separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say. Things that draw away from or potential undermine your message are to be avoided.

Communication, on the other hand, is a more involved process that requires give and take. It’s not about competition or message dominance; it’s about building understanding, first, identifying shared values and goals, second, and then co-creating solutions together.

Being effective as a communicator requires a different set of abilities than that of an effective messenger.

Communication starts with listening and empathy. These are skills that require a certain level of humility. They require acceptance that the best ideas may come from unexpected spaces, whether laterally in a hierarchy or horizontally within a community. It accepts that nuggets of wisdom do not always come clearly polished. Like all things, ideas have a better time flowing laterally than crawling their way uphill, and of developing facets through the rigour of conversation. The flatter your organization is, the more likely its odds of fostering creativity, ideation, and co-creation.

The art of communication is to discuss, decide, and then do. Its focus tends to be less on selling a product or service and more about determining needs and opportunities and co-creating the infrastructure that will meet them.