Reputation risk does not begin with a headline

By the time an issue reaches the communications team, a decision has usually already been made about how much room there is to respond.

This is the part of crisis work that rarely gets discussed, because the profession tends to evaluate itself on the quality of the response rather than on the width of the options available when the response was required. A team that handles a crisis impeccably with three bad choices has performed well, and it has also arrived too late to have influenced which three choices were on the table.

Two numbers that describe the problem

The WTW 2026 Global Reputational Risk Readiness Report contains a pairing that is worth reading twice.

Ninety-five percent of the organisations surveyed have a reserved budget set aside for a damaging reputational event, including contingency for communication and marketing. Only forty-one percent said they knew which reputational issues actually mattered to their stakeholders.

Almost every organisation has money waiting for the crisis. Fewer than half can tell you what is likely to cause one.

The direction of travel is more concerning than the figures themselves. That forty-one percent has fallen from fifty-eight percent in 2024, and the proportion of organisations who said they knew where negative sentiment around their brand was most concentrated fell from fifty-six percent to thirty-seven percent over the same period. Visibility is not merely inadequate. It is deteriorating, and it is deteriorating while spending on crisis contingency holds steady.

The ground is not neutral

This matters more in some markets than others, and the markets where PRWF's members practise are among those where it matters most.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that seventy-one percent of South Africans, seventy percent of Kenyans and seventy-two percent of Nigerians hold a moderate or higher sense of grievance, which Edelman defines as the belief that business and government serve narrow interests and cause harm, while the wealthy benefit and ordinary people struggle. The global average was sixty-one percent.

An organisation operating in those conditions is not starting from neutral. It is starting from a population already disposed to read its decisions unfavourably, which means the interval between an operational misstep and a reputational consequence is shorter, and the benefit of the doubt that might absorb a mistake elsewhere is not reliably available.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer suggests this is hardening rather than easing, reporting that seven in ten people globally are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, backgrounds or information sources. Audiences are not simply more sceptical. They are less inclined to hear an explanation from a source they have already decided is not theirs.

The signal arrives long before the headline

Reputational damage almost never begins in public. It begins in a customer complaint that recurs more often than it should, an employee grievance that has stopped being raised because raising it achieved nothing, a regulatory conversation that has become noticeably cooler, a supplier relationship under quiet strain, or a community concern that nobody has been asked to escalate.

Every one of those is a signal, and every one sits within a stakeholder relationship that a communications function is already monitoring or could be.

What happens in most organisations is that these signals are held in the parts of the business closest to them. Customer service knows about the complaints. Human resources knows about the grievances. Regulatory affairs knows about the cooling. None of these functions is looking at the others, because none of them has a mandate to.

The communications function is the only part of most organisations with a reason to look across all of them at once, and in many organisations it is the only function holding an existing relationship with each of those stakeholder groups.

Read against the WTW findings, this is the likely explanation for why organisational visibility is falling. The information has not disappeared. It is distributed across functions that were never asked to consolidate it, in an environment where the volume and velocity of stakeholder signals has risen faster than anyone's mechanism for reading them.

What upstream actually means

Moving communications upstream is often understood as a seniority question, which is what has made the argument tedious to make and easy to dismiss. Framed as a request for access, it sounds like a function lobbying on its own behalf.

Framed as an intelligence question it becomes considerably harder to argue with. The proposition is not that communications deserves to be in the room. It is that an organisation making decisions about risk, restructuring, market entry or regulatory posture without a consolidated view of how its stakeholders currently feel is making those decisions with a piece missing, and somebody in the organisation is already holding that piece.

In practice, this means three things.

It means building the listening infrastructure deliberately rather than relying on what happens to reach the team, because most organisations hold far more stakeholder information than they have any mechanism for consolidating.

It means reporting on the trajectory of stakeholder confidence rather than on communications output, since a leadership team receiving a quarterly read on where trust is moving and why will make different decisions from one receiving a summary of coverage.

And it means being willing to raise a concern before it is certain, which is genuinely uncomfortable, because a signal raised early and correctly looks like caution rewarded while a signal raised early and wrongly looks like an overreaction. Functions that only escalate certainties escalate late by definition.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

There is a reason this shift is difficult, and it is not that leadership teams are indifferent to reputational risk. The WTW figures make that clear enough, since organisations budgeting for reputational damage at ninety-five percent are plainly taking the risk seriously.

The difficulty is that early intervention produces no visible event. A crisis that was prevented leaves no evidence of itself, generates no coverage, and cannot be pointed to in a performance review, while a crisis that was handled well leaves a great deal of evidence, and the team that handled it receives credit that the team preventing the next one will not.

The profession has not solved this problem, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What can be done is to make the prevented event legible by documenting the signal when it is identified, recording the recommendation made, and noting the decision taken. Over a year, that record becomes the argument. Without it, prevention remains invisible and therefore unfunded.

The question worth asking

For senior practitioners, the useful question is not whether the organisation values communications, because that framing leads back to the conversation about respect and status the profession has been having for a decade without resolving it.

The more useful question is the one WTW effectively put to several hundred organisations and found that most could not answer well. Does this organisation currently know which reputational issues matter most to its stakeholders, and does it know where negative sentiment is concentrated right now?

If the honest answer is no, that is not a complaint about status. It is a gap with a name, a cost, and an owner, and it is a considerably stronger case than asking for a seat.

Sources cited in the article: WTW 2026 Global Reputational Risk Readiness Report; 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, Africa; 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer.

About PRWF

The Foundation is a global social impact enterprise strengthening the practice, leadership, and economic relevance of public relations by building elite communities, globally mobile talent pipelines, and high-level capability platforms for communications professionals and institutions. The Foundation is deliberately focused on emerging markets, recognising the unique PR and communications practices these economies have evolved to meet their societal and economic contexts. Through its initiatives, the Foundation amplifies the voices and influence of professionals whose contributions have shaped the growth of the global PR profession.