Internal comms writing from Chuck Gose and the ICology members.
Posts on strategy, tools, leadership, and the frontline. Plus community announcements, events, and the occasional unpopular opinion.
The room block for Flyover Festival is open. Here's where to stay and how to book before the July 27 cutoff.
Culture storytelling is one of the hardest things to get right on camera. Not because it's technically difficult, but because most of us are filming the wrong thing.
A startup called SimpleClosure is helping shuttered companies sell their internal data, including years of Slack messages and email threads, to AI companies. The employees whose conversations are in those archives were never asked. This is already happening.
Four ICology members are on the BrightSide 2026 speaker lineup, covering culture, values, employer branding, and employee listening. Here's what they're bringing to Omaha on September 23.
Firstup's 2026 engagement reports surveyed more than 6,200 employees across North America and the UK. The headline numbers look reassuring. What's underneath them is a different story.
McKinsey paid $1 billion for its role in the opioid crisis. Now they're publishing guidance on trauma-informed leadership. Ellen Griley, who lost her brother to the crisis McKinsey helped accelerate, has thoughts — on the data, the source, and what the Trauma Industrial Complex gets wrong.
A software employee stopped working entirely for a year and nobody noticed. Her story isn't the outlier it looks like — and the data behind it should make every communicator uncomfortable.
Culture isn't what you say it is. It's what your leaders, systems, and incentives reinforce every day. I talked with bink. CEO Ann Melinger about the gap between cultural intent and employee reality — and why knowing about it without acting on it might be the most dangerous move of all.
AI delivered on speed. The coordination fallout is something else. Here's what the State of Teams 2026 means for IC practitioners — and what to do with it.
Someone said internal communications is a cost center, not a revenue driver. The data disagrees -- and the gap between those two beliefs is expensive.
Golin's CEO Impact Index is being read as a guide for PR agencies and corporate affairs teams. Internal communicators should be reading it too. The data is about external communications. The lessons aren't.
Most organizations aren't short on engagement programs. They're short on clear priorities. This week on Frequency, Jenni Field and I dug into why motivation erodes after the hire, what internal comms professionals are getting wrong about access and influence, and why the companies furthest along on AI are quietly changing what they measure.
Half of employees say message volume is about right. 44% still tune out. That gap has a name: passive disengagement. Here's what the data says about trust, channel discipline, and AI in workplace communication.
Not all IC communities are the same. Here's an honest breakdown of the practitioner communities, professional associations, and social spaces worth knowing — including ones that aren't us.
The Flyover Festival 2026 speaker lineup is set. Five sessions, six speakers, and a creativity thread running through the entire day. August 27 in Sioux Falls, 45 seats, zero passive keynotes. Here's who's joining us and why you should be in the room.
Amy Edmondson's research identified three core leader behaviors that make teams safe to speak up. One of the hardest is admitting you got something wrong. Plenty of leaders never get there, and the credibility bill lands with internal communication.
When HR, IT, and comms leaders get in the same room to talk about AI adoption, the conversation gets honest fast. No polished case studies - Real talk about what's working, what's breaking, and what employees are actually experiencing at work.
Forrester's Q2 2026 Wave for intranet platforms is out, and vendor inboxes everywhere are celebrating. Before you forward the graphic to your leadership team, here's what the report actually measures, who it was built for, and how to use it if you're a communicator - not a CIO.
Organisations keep buying solutions to problems they haven't actually defined. This week on Frequency, Chuck Gose and Jenni Field cover corporate wellness, the BANI framework, toxic culture labels, and when to push back on your CEO.
There's a new acronym making the rounds: AI;DR. "AI Didn't Read." It's what employees are already doing with communications that smell like a chatbot wrote them — and internal communicators are more exposed than they think.
Nearly half the vendors Gartner evaluated landed in the Leaders quadrant. That tells you something about where this market is before you even read a word about the platforms. A communicator's read on the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions - including the line buried in the report that no vendor will be quoting.
Vendor demos are designed to impress. These are the questions that get past the pitch — covering implementation, workforce reach, measurement, and what happens when you want to leave.
MIT FutureTech tracked AI performance across 17,000 real work tasks — and the results directly affect how internal communicators work. Here's what the data says, and what IC practitioners should do about it.
Four stories this week that don't share a headline but share an uncomfortable thread: the systems running workplaces are quietly breaking down, and the data is catching up.
Not a neutral roundup. Every event where ICology is speaking, facilitating, hosting, or recording Frequency live in 2026 — in one place.
Yasar Ahmad wasn't talking about internal comms when he shared these five phrases. But if you've ever left a meeting feeling like your voice didn't land the way it should have, this one's worth your time.
Only 21% of employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership. This week's Frequency covers the Kano model for trust, why recurring meetings are a culture problem in disguise, and what the research on psychological safety says IC teams should actually be doing.
You're not under-resourced because you're doing something wrong. You're under-resourced because most organizations still don't staff internal communications like a real function. Here's how to survive it, and do good work anyway.
IABC World Conference 2026 runs June 14-16 in Toronto, and four ICology community members are on the program. Here's a look at what Chuck Gose, Pinaki Kathiari, Andrea Greenhous, and Arlene Amitirigala are bringing to the stage.
On May 21, Workvivo is hosting ENGAGE New York at Manhatta, 60 floors above Lower Manhattan. It's free, it's in-person, and it's built for IC and HR practitioners who want practical conversation over polished pitches. Chuck Gose will be there. Here's why you should be too.
