Act One: A marketing team produces a campaign concept that is genuinely surprising. It’s a little risky. It’s a little strange. It provokes the kind of internal reaction that, in a healthy company, would mean it’s probably the right call.
Act Two: The concept is presented to the Communications Committee.
Act Three: The concept is approved, subject to seventeen rounds of revisions that remove the surprise, the risk, the strangeness, and coincidentally also the entire point of the thing.
The communications committee. It’s not a villain. It’s a structural tragedy.
What Communications Committees Were Supposed to Do
In theory, the communications committee exists to provide governance over external messaging — to ensure that what goes out the door is accurate, legally defensible, strategically aligned, and not accidentally offensive in the Czech Republic. These are legitimate concerns.
Large organizations genuinely need some form of messaging oversight. A pharmaceutical company shouldn’t be running unreviewed clinical claims. A financial institution shouldn’t be making promises its products can’t keep. These are real problems that require real process.
The mechanism, however, has a design flaw so fundamental it might as well be a feature.
The Design Flaw
Communications committees bring together people whose professional incentives are structurally misaligned with creative risk. The legal representative’s incentive is to remove anything that could be challenged. The compliance officer’s incentive is to flag anything that deviates from approved language. The regional representative’s incentive is to add language that addresses their market’s specific concerns. The CEO’s chief of staff’s incentive is to ensure the CEO won’t be embarrassed.
Each individual in the room is doing their job correctly. Collectively, they are performing a function that systematically removes anything original from the output. This is not malice. It’s incentive design.
The result is corporate communication that is accurate, legally defensible, regionally sensitive, and completely indistinguishable from the communication of every other large organization in the sector. It says what it needs to say without ever saying anything. Fuck The Brief was designed for the moments when you’re sitting in one of these meetings and need somewhere safe to put your actual thoughts.
The Specific Failure Mode: Language Archaeology
The communications committee’s greatest contribution to human culture is the art of language archaeology: the careful excavation of any word or phrase that might be considered interesting and its replacement with something that has already been pre-approved elsewhere.
“Transformative” becomes “impactful.” “Bold” becomes “innovative.” “First” becomes “leading.” “Different” becomes “unique.” By the time the committee has finished, the press release reads like it was written by someone who has never met another human being but has read many press releases.
What Actually Works
Committees need decision-making frameworks, not approval cycles. The governance question isn’t “does everyone agree?” — it’s “does this pass the defined criteria?” Define the criteria once, up front. Give the final decision to one person with full accountability for the outcome. Review after the fact.
The alternative is what you’ve got: eighteen people slowly squeezing the life out of every interesting idea until what remains is a beige mist of approved terminology, distributed via a CMS platform, to an audience that will not read it.
The full toolkit at nobriefsclub.com/shop — for what you actually want to say.
