Public relations and management: the case from Johannesburg

19 Mar

The communications function has never been more valuable to organisations, but it continues to struggle for influence. The issue is execution and evidence in management.

I gave a keynote speech this week at the PRCA International Conference in Johannesburg. This post sets out the argument I made and what I think it demands of practitioners and leaders. Please email or message me if you’d like a copy of the full speech.

The question at the heart of our work

How many of you have sat in a management meeting - where the decisions that matter are being made - and felt your voice shaped the outcome?

Now: how many of you have been invited in afterwards, to communicate a decision that had already been made?

The second experience is the norm. Less than one in five communications functions operate at the optimum level within management.

We've been making the argument about our seat at the management table for more than fifty years - and we're still making it. The argument isn't landing because we haven't yet done what's needed to earn it.

The structural case

The argument for public relations as a management function has never been stronger and the evidence is structural.

In 1975, tangible assets accounted for 83% of the market value of the S&P 500. By the end of 2025, that figure had fallen to 8%. Intangible assets now represent 92% of market capitalisation. This data is from Ocean Tomo.

The assets that dominate corporate value are precisely the assets public relations exists to build, protect and manage. And yet in many organisations, public relations is still positioned as a communications support function. A cost centre and not a value creator.

At the same time, the operating environment is becoming more complex, not less. The weaponisation of media. The erosion of institutional trust. War. The rise of populism. The climate emergency. AI and misinformation moving faster than governance.

These forces are precisely what organisations now need to navigate. The function most equipped to help them do that with the relationship lens, the reputational lens and the ethical lens is ours.

The economy already recognises the value of what we do. Management has not caught up.

Four themes defining practice in 2026

I’ve spent the past five years as a part-time management researcher exploring the conditions under which public relations achieves recognition as a strategic management function. Four interlocking themes have emerged.

1. The shift from reactive function to sensemaking discipline

A paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Public Relations Research analysed nearly 2,700 academic articles over a ten-year period using topic modelling and network analysis. Its conclusion: the central paradigm of our discipline is strategic communication management. It accounts for nearly a fifth of all published research and has the strongest structural connection to every other research area.

Our own body of knowledge tells us we belong in management. Not as a tactical delivery function. As a strategic discipline that shapes decisions before they are communicated.

The most effective communications functions are intelligence systems. They gather signals from stakeholders and the external environment, process them through evidence and judgment, and feed that intelligence into leadership deliberation before positions harden and decisions are made.

In management terms: the difference between being operationally useful and strategically necessary.

2. AI is a governance challenge, not an adoption challenge

We tend to talk about AI in terms of adoption: who is using it, how fast, what productivity gains. The more significant problem is that governance is lagging catastrophically behind experimentation. Psychological safety is thin. Accountability is absent. Guardrails are superficial.

AI is no longer confined to internal efficiency. It increasingly mediates how organisations are discovered, summarised and judged. AI systems now shape reputation without permission, context or recourse.

A new discipline is emerging in response: Generative Engine Optimisation. If your organisation’s narrative and credibility signals are not feeding AI systems, your reputation is being shaped without you. That is a public relations challenge that sits squarely in our domain.

AI competence without governance is unmanaged risk. Unmanaged risk is exactly what should be landing on the communications director’s desk.

3. The models we relied on are breaking

Publishers expect search traffic to decline by more than 40% over three years. Facebook referrals have fallen more than 40% in two and a half years. One in three journalists now publishes independently. Creators are outperforming mainstream news brands in reach among younger audiences.

Internal models are breaking too. Leadership development in communications remains informal and inconsistent. Internal communication is too often optimised for efficiency rather than meaning and belonging.

Relevance in 2026 belongs to functions that treat behaviour as the primary planning unit — understanding how audiences actually consume information, building relationships with the creators and specialist journalists who shape the conversations that matter.

4. The capability crisis is self-inflicted

AI tools now monitor media, summarise coverage, draft press releases, build pitches and construct content plans. As my co-editor Ben Verinder put it: we are cutting off our own blood supply.

If AI handles the drafting, junior practitioners must be embedded in strategic problem-solving and governance discussions earlier, and intentionally. The most effective chief communications officers I have studied are coaching not just their teams but their CEOs - creating reflective spaces, challenging assumptions, fostering leadership across the organisation.

We are an industry that has spent decades arguing for a management seat while failing to equip people with the management literacy that would actually earn them one.

Four capabilities that define the futureproofed function

The communications function of the future is defined by four things.

Intelligence - systematically listening to and interpreting the external environment, feeding that intelligence into leadership before decisions are made.
Governance - owning the frameworks that manage reputational, AI-related and ethical risk on behalf of the organisation.
Alignment - ensuring that what the organisation says, what it does, and how it is perceived are coherent, internally and externally.
Capability - building and sustaining the human expertise, critical thinking and management literacy on which everything else depends.

The question for every agency and in-house leader reading this is: how much of your current function is operating at that level and what would it take to shift the balance?