Writing is research.

What makes written content come alive is not simply fancy phrasing — that’s just eyeball glitter. When you experience great writing, what you’re feeling are the hours of deep background that went into it: the desk research; the carefully chosen inputs; the briefings, data, sources or interviews. The craft lies in pulling that material together, like a drawstring, into one seamless story.

We know because it’s in our bones. Quant./qual. research is where we all started out decades ago – studying how organisations work through interviews, surveys and analysis; learning how to ask questions that get beyond the rehearsed answer, and how to turn data responses into narrative. It’s why all of our writing today is proudly research-based.

And the formal research continues too: We conduct private polls and surveys for clients, and continue to publish regular external studies on leadership, reputation, corporate affairs and public policy.

Since 2020, award submissions have been a rapidly growing part of our business, with remarkable results: 83% of our written entries for clients have seen their work shortlisted for major comms awards, such as the EMEA SABREs, PRWeek Globals and Cannes Lions — and 71% have won outright. Often competing against hundreds of rival entries, that’s an incredible hit rate.

We think it’s how we approach the challenge.

Our first goal is to understand not just why your story is great, but why it deserves to win against all the other inspirational stories on the juror’s pile. To rise to the top, your entry has to be a big-picture epic full of sweeping drama, a formal case study and a detail-rich briefing paper — all in one. It needs a narrative arc that catches attention on an initial skim read. It needs subtleties that reward deeper scrutiny at shortlist stage. And we must carefully sow seeds of evidence — strategic innovation, obstacles overcome, ingenious use of limited resources — to give a judge reasons to argue for it in the final jury discussion. All that in just 800 words, while also honouring the awards programme’s submission structure and its judging criteria!

It’s some of the most difficult writing we do. But we believe — and our clients would agree — that we’ve got quite good at it.

Going through a rebrand? New vision? Transformation programme? It usually all means the same thing: a new CEO with a new direction.

We help organisations change the narrative by writing one: the story of who you are, where you’re going and why. Written as a story — whether it’s a formal, HBR-style case study or a dramatic prose narrative is up to you — this manifesto for change becomes your single source of truth from the outset: something to give to brand agencies responding to the RFP, executives developing parallel departmental changes, comms teams creating launch content, or employees looking to understand the front-line changes they’re beginning to see.

Why do it as storytelling? Because the new strategy’s true meaning lives between the bullet points. There are facts and targets, but also motives, convictions, difficult choices, past experiences and dramatic environmental shifts. Narrative brings them together in one coherent, textured account of what’s changing and why. It’s also just more readable to a wider number of people.

Our clients tell us that doing it this way shortcuts months of early stall: the rebrand pitches that miss a crucial nuance, or the divisional strategies that follow the letter but lose the spirit. The biggest drag on change is differential understanding; we help you get everyone literally on the same page.

Ghostwriting makes this a particularly close collaboration. The piece carries your name, so its voice must feel authentically yours. Through interviews, we capture not just your phrasing but your tone — how you communicate passion, how you break down ideas, how you use humour, and how you emphasise what matters most.

And since your beliefs will now go public, they must be challenged: It’s vital that we ask hard questions to road-test the reasoning, helping you say precisely what you mean with enough conviction to persuade someone who doesn’t already agree. An op-ed asks a busy reader to spend a few minutes inside your argument. There has to be something worth finding there.

Our work ranges from pieces for corporate leaders in national media and trade magazines to, most recently, articles in international newspapers for Ukrainian civil society leaders ahead of key UN votes — arguments written for a specific audience, at a moment when reaching it mattered.

A speech has to work at the speed of listening. The audience can’t reread a complicated sentence or turn back a page to recover the thread. Every idea has to arrive clearly, in an order that makes sense, with enough rhythm and variety to keep people listening. And it has to sound natural in the mouth of the person delivering it.

That starts with conversation. We work with you to find the argument, the turns of phrase that make it yours, and then the experiences that give it substance. A candid admission, a joke or a personal detail can often do more than a paragraph of polished corporate language. The skill is finding the right balance for you — then giving you words you can stand behind, as well as stand up and say.

Our experience includes helping senior leaders explain reorganisations, set out new strategies and speak to people facing uncertainty. All involve the same process: understanding what the audience needs to hear from you, what you want them to take away, then finding the narrative bridge between those two points.

This is not your standard writing training — all that well-worn “write in the active voice,” “use the rule of three” stuff. Designed specifically for busy communications teams, this short, interactive seminar has one goal: to get your team away from their keyboards for an hour to re-engage with the craft and think before they next begin typing — whether they’re writing an annual report or an email.

Writing is full of decisions we rarely stop to examine. Why begin with that fact? Why use that word? Why does one sentence carry you effortlessly into the next, while another stops you dead? We open up that machinery, drawing on journalism, literature, neurology, the psychology of reading, writing structure and much more to explore how words hold attention.

Then we put those ideas to work in a corporate comms context: finding the argument in an unwieldy executive interview, giving an abstract article on corporate change something an employee can grab onto, reading a press release aloud to hear where it falters.

We think of it as “a yoga retreat for the professional writing mind” — a chance to step away from the day for one hour to remember what makes writing really work.

A strategy that makes perfect sense in the boardroom typically becomes steadily less clear as it travels through the organisation. People encounter it through a manager’s briefing, a change to their role, word on the grapevine of a reorganisation — and when these contradict or, worse, seem threatening, everything stalls. Our internal communications consultancy starts with that gap: between what leaders intend and what people understand, believe and do.

We bring experience on both sides of it. We’ve spent a quarter of a century researching how the best organisations communicate, and have worked in senior communications roles in multinationals to put that knowledge into practice. We’ve advised senior leaders, developed global communications strategies and helped organisations navigate transformations, reorganisations and changes in culture.

It has only strengthened our belief that the value of internal communications begins and ends with joining the dots; with helping employees make a clear connection between what they do every day and where the company is trying to go. That makes our consultancy a process of continual research to uncover gaps in understanding, creative interventions to bridge them, then more listening to find out whether they have succeeded — tasks for which we think our decades in research and audience-driven content equip us particularly well.

Away from work, we’re creative writers too.

• Josie produces a blog and writes poetry – check out her page.

• Kieron’s writes psychological thrillers under the pen name J.J. Castro. Before You Wake Up will be available in online stores from December 2026

At heart, we’re incurable word nerds. So in our spare time, we also construct crosswords and other word puzzles for national publications, including The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Drop us an email and we’ll happily send you one for free — or if you want one for your publication, let us know!