Authored by: Abhishek Kumar, Communication Consultant.
There is a familiar ritual before a corporate announcement. The messaging is debated, facts are checked, the spokesperson is briefed and the final draft goes through more rounds than anyone cares to count. By the time it is released, the organisation is reasonably confident of what it wants to say.Then the conversation begins. And, as conversations tend to do, it refuses to follow the script.
A journalist asks a question the team did not anticipate. Customers interpret a line differently from what was intended. An internal decision sparks a much wider conversation about the company’s values. Suddenly, the communication plan that looked watertight in the meeting room has sprung a leak in the real world.This is the real test. Do we get stuck in the mud, or stand tall like a deep-rooted tree, flexible enough to sway without being uprooted?
This is where corporate communications needs something more than good planning. It needs Agile Authenticity: the ability to stay true to what an organisation stands for while adapting how it communicates as the conversation unfolds. The distinction matters. Authenticity without agility can leave an organisation repeating a perfectly consistent message that no longer answers the question being asked. Agility without authenticity can make it look as though the organisation will change its position to suit whoever is asking the questions.The real skill lies in holding the two together.
Know what must not change. Know what can.
Every communication has a point of view, a purpose and a set of facts and it must get that right. These are not things to improvise in response to public reaction. What can change is how the organisation explains its position, which questions it addresses first, who needs to hear from it and which channel is best suited to the conversation.That sounds straightforward but in practice, it requires judgement, and judgement rarely comes with a ready reckoner.
The discussion around Lenskart’s employee grooming guidelines in April 2026 illustrated how quickly the meaning of a communication can expand beyond its original context. An internal document prompted questions about visible religious symbols, including bindis and tilaks. The company subsequently clarified its position and published guidelines welcoming symbols of faith and culture. The episode became a wider discussion about workplace practices and cultural expression. The communication challenge was no longer just about explaining a document. It was about addressing what people believed the document said about the organisation. Agile authenticity, in such a situation, means being willing to revisit the explanation and respond to the concern without treating public reaction as something to be managed away. And where the underlying issue requires a change in practice, communication cannot be expected to do the job alone. No amount of message polishing can do the heavy lifting of a policy that needs rethinking. Now consider a very different situation. Britannia joined the conversation around a creator’s mispronunciation of “croissant” as “Prashant”, turning the joke into a brand moment and later extending it through limited-edition packs.Here, agility meant recognising an opening rather than correcting a misunderstanding. The brand could participate because the moment offered a natural way to engage with its audience. There was no need to turn a croissant joke into a solemn statement about brand purpose. Sometimes, a croissant is just a croissant. Or, apparently, a Prashant. One situation called for clarification; the other invited playfulness. Agile authenticity does not prescribe a particular tone or response. It asks whether the response fits the moment while remaining credible for the organisation making it.Adapt the response, not the truth.
This is also why agility should not be confused with speed. A quick response that misses the real concern is not agile communication. It is simply a fast reaction, and the internet already has plenty of those. The first task is to listen well enough to understand what has changed. Is the audience asking for information that was missing? Has a message been misunderstood? Has a new development altered the facts? Or is the organisation being asked to address a legitimate gap between its stated position and its behaviour? Each calls for a different response. Sometimes the original message needs a clearer explanation. Sometimes a different spokesperson or channel will work better. Sometimes the honest answer is that the organisation needs to do more before it has anything useful to say. This makes listening part of the communication process, not an activity reserved for the post-campaign report. Earned media, social media, leadership communication and feedback from employees or customer-facing teams should inform one another. What the organisation learns from one interaction should improve the next. The aim is not to make every channel say the same words. It is to make sure the organisation’s position holds together even when the conversation takes different directions. Consistency is not everyone reading from the same cue card; it is everyone working from the same understanding.Give agility some structure.
There is an obvious risk here. If every comment triggers a response, every trend becomes a brand opportunity and every criticism demands an immediate statement, the organisation will spend its time chasing the conversation rather than contributing to it. The social media calendar may look busy, but that is not the same as being in control. Agile authenticity requires preparation too. Teams need clarity on the organisation’s position, the facts that can be shared, the boundaries they cannot cross and the decisions that need leadership or legal input. They also need enough authority to act when the situation is clear and enough sense to pause when it is not.The solution is not to remove governance. It is to move governance upstream.
The purpose of preparation is not to script every possible reaction. It is to create the conditions in which people can make sound decisions when the unexpected happens. That is how an organisation can respond quickly without becoming impulsive, and adapt without appearing to abandon its principles. The organisation should know what it stands for before it speaks. It should also be prepared to reconsider how it is being understood once it does.Agile authenticity is not a campaign technique or a social media capability. It is a way of approaching communication in which consistency does not mean rigidity and adaptability does not mean compromise. DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and theprpost.com does not necessarily subscribe to it.
