The communications committee was formed with good intentions. Most organizational tragedies begin this way. Someone senior noticed that the company’s communications were inconsistent, or that the wrong people were approving things, or that a tweet had gone out without the right sign-off and there had been a mild incident. The solution was a committee. The committee would bring structure. The committee would bring alignment. The committee would ensure that nothing went out without everyone being on the same page.

The committee has been meeting for eleven months. The company’s social media account last posted six weeks ago. The newsletter is eight months overdue. The press release about the product launch is in its fourth revision, incorporating feedback from six different stakeholders who have never been in the same room and who each have different ideas about what the company stands for. The committee is very well-structured.

The Anatomy of a Communications Committee

The typical communications committee includes: the Head of Marketing, who actually understands communications and is slowly dying inside; the CEO or a direct representative of the CEO, whose presence means nothing can be decided without implicit reference to what the CEO might think; the Head of Legal, who reviews everything for liability and has a broad definition of liability; the Head of HR, who is there to ensure all communications are “inclusive” and “respectful,” which means she flags anything with an edge; the Sales Director, who wants everything to include a call to action and doesn’t understand why brand communications sometimes don’t; and two or three additional stakeholders whose inclusion was a political decision and who attend inconsistently.

This group meets monthly. Monthly is not frequent enough to move at the speed of communications in any industry that has existed since 2008, but it is frequent enough to make everyone feel like the process is under control. Between meetings, feedback is collected asynchronously, which means the Head of Marketing sends a document into a void and receives comments from different people at different times, occasionally contradicting each other, with no way to adjudicate without a meeting.

The next meeting is in three weeks.

What Gets Made (And What Doesn’t)

The committee produces a specific kind of communication: one that satisfies all objections. Not one that says something true, or distinctive, or useful — one that has survived the objections of eight people with different priorities and different risk tolerances. The result is communication that is technically correct, legally reviewed, HR-approved, Sales-endorsed, and completely inert. It says things that are true in a way that would not move any reasonable person to feel or do anything specific.

Everything that doesn’t get made is more interesting. The campaign that the Head of Marketing thought would genuinely cut through — too risky. The founder’s story piece that could have built real brand equity — the CEO’s representative felt it was “too personal.” The reactive social content that would have shown the brand had a point of view — by the time it was approved, the moment had passed. The committee is a very effective filter for anything that could go wrong. It is equally effective at filtering out anything that could work.

The Slower Disaster

The communications committee doesn’t create dramatic crises. It creates a slower, quieter disaster: the gradual erosion of a brand’s presence and distinctiveness through the accumulation of small omissions. Nothing goes catastrophically wrong. Nothing goes notably right either. The brand continues to exist in a kind of communications limbo, technically present across channels, practically invisible in any meaningful sense.

This is particularly lethal in categories where brand personality drives preference — which is to say, most consumer categories and a surprising number of B2B ones. Buyers don’t choose purely on rational criteria. They choose brands they feel something about. A brand that says nothing, or that says everything in a voice scrubbed clean of any editorial risk, gives buyers nothing to feel. It competes purely on price and availability, which is a fine position if you’re the cheapest option and a deeply uncomfortable one if you’re not.

The irony is that the committee was formed to protect the brand, and the committee’s method of protection — eliminate risk, ensure approval, slow everything down — gradually does what no single communications error could: it makes the brand irrelevant.

What Actually Works

Brands that communicate effectively have, almost without exception, a small number of people with clear decision-making authority and strong points of view. They have an editorial lead who can move quickly, guided by clear brand principles rather than committee approval. They have escalation paths for genuinely high-stakes communications, and they don’t mistake “high-stakes” for “anything that has a comma in it.”

The committee, if it must exist, works best as a governing body for strategy and principles, not as an approval process for individual pieces of content. Approve the voice, the themes, the guardrails — then let the people with expertise operate within them. Trust your communications professionals to communicate. This is what you hired them for.

If you’re the person sitting in that committee meeting, watching a perfectly good campaign idea get revised into meaninglessness, the Fuck The Brief collection was made for the specific expression on your face right now. And when you’re ready to build something that actually moves people, No Briefs Club is here — no committee required.