Internal Comms

Internal Communications

Internal communication fails in predictable ways: the wrong people hear it first, the message explains the decision but not the consequence, and nobody tests the draft before it reaches 2,000 inboxes. This skill treats an announcement as an artifact with a blast radius, a sequence, and a pass/fail quality bar — not as a writing exercise.

The three levers are who hears it in what order, what the message must contain, and which channel carries it. Get those right and tone matters far less than people assume.

When to use this skill

• Announcing a reorg, layoff, or leadership change where sequencing errors are unrecoverable
• Rolling out a policy change (RTO, expenses, security, performance process) that people must act on
• Communicating a product or system migration with a deadline and a required user action
• Structuring a recurring all-hands or weekly exec update that currently reads as a status dump
• Pressure-testing a draft before send: reading level, jargon density, missing elements
• Deciding channel and cadence for a multi-week change programme rather than a one-shot email

Inputs the skill expects

• The change itself: what is changing, effective date, whether it is reversible
• Audience list with impact level (high / medium / low) and rough headcount per group
• Draft text, if one exists (plain markdown or text is fine)
• Constraints: embargo, legal review, regulatory disclosure, market-sensitivity
• Available channels and which ones your org actually reads
• Who can answer questions after send, and where

Clarify First

Before generating, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• Blast radius — who is materially affected vs merely informed — this decides whether you need a cascade (manager-first) or a single broadcast, and cascades cost 3-5 days
• Reversibility of the decision — reversible changes can be announced as proposals with a feedback window; irreversible ones must never be, because inviting input you will ignore is the fastest way to lose trust
• Effective date and the required user action — sets every T-offset in the plan and determines whether the message is informational or instructional
• Whether anything is legally or market-sensitive — embargo constraints override the ideal sequence and force simultaneous rather than cascaded delivery

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

Workflows

Workflow 1 — Audit a draft before it sends

Run this on every announcement that reaches more than ~50 people. It takes 30 seconds and catches the failure modes that generate the most follow-up questions.

1. Save the draft as JSON with title, body, audience, and channel.
2. Run the auditor. It scores five required elements (what changed, why, who is affected, what to do, where to ask), reading grade, jargon density, and hedging.
3. Fix every FAIL element. Treat WARN on reading grade as advisory unless the audience includes non-native speakers or frontline staff, in which case treat it as FAIL.
4. Re-run until the score clears 75.

python3 business-operations/internal-comms/scripts/announcement_auditor.py \
  --input business-operations/internal-comms/assets/sample_announcement.json \
  --min-score 75 --format text

Workflow 2 — Sequence a change communication

1. Describe the change and list audiences with impact and headcount.
2. Run the sequencer. It computes blast radius, orders audiences by a impact-then-influence rule, and assigns T-offsets in days relative to broadcast.
3. Review the manager-enablement step — if the plan says you need one and you skip it, managers learn about the change from their own reports, which is the single most common reorg comms failure.
4. Export the plan and assign an owner per step.

python3 business-operations/internal-comms/scripts/comms_sequencer.py \
  --input business-operations/internal-comms/assets/sample_change.json \
  --format text

Workflow 3 — Pick the channel

1. Characterise the message on six dimensions: urgency, complexity, audience size, sensitivity, whether it needs two-way discussion, and whether it needs a durable record.
2. Run the scorer to rank channels and see which are actively disqualified.
3. Use the top-ranked channel as the primary, and the highest-ranked durable channel as the system of record. Never let a chat message be the record.

python3 business-operations/internal-comms/scripts/channel_fit_scorer.py \
  --input business-operations/internal-comms/assets/sample_message_profile.json \
  --top 4 --format json

Decision frameworks

Blast radius → sequence pattern [PROVEN]

Blast radius is the count of people whose work or employment changes, not the count who receive the email.

Escape hatch: legal embargo or market sensitivity collapses this to a simultaneous broadcast. When that happens, say so in the message — "we could not brief managers first because of disclosure rules" — rather than letting people infer carelessness.

The five required elements [PROVEN]

Every announcement of consequence answers these, in this order. A message missing any one of them generates a predictable class of follow-up question.