There’s no such thing as best practice in internal communication - Joanna Parsons

Our industry is unhealthily obsessed with two words: best practice. You see them regularly on internal comms blogs, you hear it at internal comms conferences, those words come up frequently on LinkedIn. But a best practice approach only works for simple, non-complex work. The work we do as internal communicators is highly unpredictable and and complex, charged with human emotion and full of complexity. Joanna proposes that we instead talk about “good practices” and think about innovation as an antidote to best practice.

Joanna Parsons is the Founder and Director of The Curious Route, an internal communication consultancy practice. She helps organisations to create effective systems of internal communication. 

Joanna is a content creator and thought leader in internal communication with a following of more than 16k on LinkedIn and a new YouTube channel just launched. She has worked in internal comms for more than a decade and was previously Head of Internal Comms with the Irish national police force. She’s a Fellow of the Institute of Internal Communication and has won multiple communication awards for her work over the years. Joanna is also a Lecturer in Strategic Internal Communication with the Public Relations Institute of Ireland. 

She’s currently writing a book, “Innovative Internal Communication” which will be published by Kogan Page in the summer of 2024.