Should You Communicate Before Your Strategy Is Finalised? Here's the Honest Answer
Should you wait until the strategy is fully signed off before saying anything, or start earlier while parts of it are still being worked out? Most leadership teams default to waiting, but the evidence points the other way.
Waiting feels responsible, since it avoids saying something that later changes, fielding questions nobody can answer yet, and looking less certain than the business wants to appear. For leaders managing a change programme or a response to market volatility, that caution makes sense on the surface.
The flaw is that silence isn't neutral. If a business doesn't communicate, employees and customers don't stop forming a view. They simply form it without your input, whether that's from a departing colleague, a shift in a manager's tone or a competitor's announcement. Whatever fills that gap fills it without you, and it's rarely more accurate or reassuring than the truth would have been.
Why the gap is worse than an imperfect answer
Once an unofficial story takes hold, correcting it is much harder than shaping the real one from the start would have been. Typically, people forgive an honestly incomplete picture, delivered directly, far more readily than a long silence followed by a sudden, fully-formed announcement. The silence itself becomes part of the story, read as evasiveness or as proof something worse is being hidden.
What communicating early actually takes
This doesn't mean announcing details that might still change. It means being transparent about the process, covering what's being worked through, roughly when more clarity lands, and what won't change even while the specifics are still being finalised. It takes more discipline than staying quiet, not less, because leadership needs a considered view of what can be shared honestly at each stage, rather than oversharing speculation or defaulting to nothing at all.
The pattern among businesses that get this right is consistency of honesty over completeness of information, with communication running alongside the strategy work rather than arriving as the final output once it's done. Trust survives the uncertain period this way, and trust broken by silence is expensive to rebuild, far more expensive than the discomfort of an early, honest, incomplete update.
So yes, communicate before the strategy is finalised, as long as you're honest about what it doesn't yet cover. The risk of speaking early and imperfectly is almost always smaller than the risk of a vacuum, because a vacuum never stays empty. It just gets filled by someone else.
At Propellant, we work with founders, CMOs and boards to build brands that stay true as they scale. We uncover what an organisation has earned, protect what must remain recognisable, and create new permission for growth.
