“What exactly do you think is going to happen?” It is a reasonable question. It is also, sometimes, the wrong one.
I have been asked some version of it in rooms where a decision had already been made, the early response was encouraging, and concern sounded almost impolite. Nothing had gone wrong. There was no headline to point to, no stakeholder revolt, no evidence proving that the environment had changed. There were only signals: a phrase beginning to travel without its original context; an audience newly interested in a subject it had previously ignored; an ally becoming quieter as the political temperature shifted outside the institution; and an interpretation, once marginal, beginning to acquire more powerful messengers.
Emerging change rarely enters an institution with the courtesy of a confirmed event. It arrives in fragments. I could not always say what would happen. I could say that the conditions of interpretation were no longer the same.
Organizations spend considerable time deciding what they want their actions to signal. An appointment signals priority. A budget signals commitment. A partnership signals alignment. Public language signals identity, intention, and belonging. Institutions understand, at least in principle, that what they do communicates beyond what they say.
They are often less disciplined about reading the signals coming back.
The signal does not enter an empty room
Signaling is usually discussed as an outward act, and organizations perform it constantly. A university appoints a chief innovation officer to show that it is preparing for technological change. A foundation redirects funding to mark a new strategic priority. A nonprofit changes its language to demonstrate that it understands the communities it serves.
Stakeholders receive every signal through their existing memories of the institution, their current needs, their confidence in its leadership, and their reading of the moment. The organization may intend to communicate progress. Its employees may read disruption. Funders may see responsiveness. Community partners may see abandonment. A decision can be internally coherent and externally dissonant at the same time.
That was the argument beneath my first On Repute essay: institutions do not encounter stakeholders without a history. People interpret what happens now through what they already remember. The harder question is whether the institution can detect when that interpretation is changing.
Because signals do not move in only one direction. Stakeholders send information back through their questions, behavior, attention, silence, resistance, enthusiasm, and shifting expectations. Funders do. Employees do. Communities do. Political actors do. The institution is always receiving. Whether it recognizes what it receives as knowledge is another matter.
The signals coming back are rarely arranged neatly enough to enter a board packet.
A funder begins asking different questions about outcomes. A community partner describes a need that does not fit the institution’s current programs. A competitor starts occupying intellectual territory the organization once assumed it owned. Employees begin using language that reflects a different understanding of the mission. A topic that once belonged to specialists begins appearing in executive conversations, grant requirements, and legislative proposals. Individually, each development may appear minor. Together, they may be saying that the environment has changed.
That change may represent risk. It may also represent opportunity. An organization may discover that a familiar position is losing authority, or that stakeholders are assigning new meanings to its silence. It may also discover an unmet need, an emerging constituency, or a place where its capabilities suddenly matter more than they did before.
An institution misses an opportunity for the same reason it misses a threat: it continues reading the environment through an outdated understanding of itself. It assumes its value resides where it has always resided. It promotes the programs it has already named as priorities. It waits for stakeholders to request the work in the institution’s own language. But communities, funders, and markets rarely describe a need in the terms an organization has chosen for its internal structure. They describe the problem as they experience it, and the institution must be able to hear the demand beneath the wording. That is not opportunism. It is adaptation. The difference lies in whether the institution is chasing attention or recognizing where its mission, capabilities, and a changing need actually meet.
Every organization operates among competing stakeholders. Corporations answer to markets, regulators, employees, and communities. Mission-driven institutions face a particular interpretive challenge because no single market measure can settle whether they remain relevant, credible, or legitimate. A think tank, foundation, university, museum, or nonprofit must read funders, policymakers, employees, communities, and the public, often at the same time, and what one stakeholder experiences as leadership another may read as drift. There is no single dashboard that reveals this. The signals are distributed across relationships.
The limits of the questions we ask
Most organizations are structured to collect information through familiar questions. They commission surveys around established concerns. They monitor topics already identified as important. They evaluate programs against approved objectives. They build dashboards from measures the institution has agreed to count. All of that is necessary, and all of it creates a blind spot.
The information most capable of changing an institution’s direction often first appears outside the categories built to receive it: an unexpected stakeholder question, an unusual request from a funder, a recurring concern raised by frontline staff, a new application of the institution’s work that no strategic plan anticipated. The problem is not always that leaders lack information. Sometimes the information has arrived, and the institution has not recognized its significance.
This is the paradox of institutional foresight: organizations say they want to know early, but their systems reward certainty. By the time a signal becomes conclusive enough to satisfy the institution, it may no longer qualify as foresight. It has become an event. And then the question changes. The organization is no longer asking what the signal might mean. It is explaining why it did not see the meaning sooner.
Before certainty becomes an event
“What exactly do you think is going to happen?”
Sometimes the honest answer is: I do not know exactly. I cannot say which stakeholder will move first, which interpretation will prevail, or whether the shift will become a threat, an opportunity, or both. I cannot assign a date to a change still taking shape.
But uncertainty does not mean there is nothing to know. We may know that the audience has changed. That an old claim is losing force. That a need is becoming more urgent. That attention is no longer random but has begun to organize. That the institution’s familiar understanding of its environment no longer explains what it is seeing.
Senior communications and strategy leaders should not be expected to predict events with false precision. Their responsibility is to help the institution identify what has changed, test whether scattered signals form a meaningful pattern, and bring that interpretation into the room before the available choices narrow.
Leaders do not need to act on every faint signal, but they do need a credible way to surface and test what the institution is hearing.
“What exactly do you think is going to happen?” Sometimes no one can answer with precision. The better question is what has changed, what the pattern may be telling us, and which choice will disappear if the institution waits for proof. Organizations that cannot read the signals coming back will not simply be surprised by the future. They will keep making decisions for a world that no longer exists.
Author’s note: Professional illustrations in this essay are anonymized and synthesized from recurring experiences across more than 25 years. They are not intended to describe a single institution, colleague, or event.
Editorial note: This essay was written by Shrita Hernandez and edited with the assistance of AI. The argument, analysis, and final judgment are the author’s own.