Organisations spend considerable time deciding what to communicate, when to communicate it and how much to disclose. In difficult situations, silence can appear to be the safest option, giving leadership time to establish facts or manage legal considerations.
The difficulty is that an organisation’s need to manage information does not always align with its stakeholders’ need to receive it.
Silence is a decision, not the absence of one
Silence can be ethically justified when it protects confidentiality, allows facts to be verified, or prevents an ongoing investigation from being compromised.
It becomes ethically problematic when information is withheld primarily to protect the organisation from scrutiny, conceal wrongdoing, or prevent stakeholders from understanding decisions that affect them.
The distinction lies in whether silence serves a legitimate responsibility or the organisation’s self-interest at the expense of the people affected. Delaying disclosure may well be necessary. Withholding material information to avoid accountability can mislead stakeholders even when no false statement is ever made.
Disclosure is a governance responsibility
The OECD’s work on board responsibility and sustainability-related disclosure in Asia makes a point that extends well beyond sustainability reporting. Reliable disclosure depends on more than the final statement an organisation publishes. It requires sound governance, effective reporting systems and oversight that ensures material information reaches the people responsible for acting on it.
Disclosure problems therefore often begin long before communications is involved, when information is not escalated, material issues go unrecognised, or leadership does not register what stakeholders need to know. By the time a response is required, earlier decisions may already have narrowed what the organisation can credibly say.
That is why the timing of communications involvement matters as much as the quality of the eventual statement.
What this asks of communications leaders
As the function takes on a more genuinely advisory role, practitioners are increasingly contributing to decisions about organisational accountability rather than managing the language used to explain them afterwards.
Three responsibilities follow from that.
The first is distinguishing legitimate discretion from reputational avoidance, which is a judgement about motive rather than about process.
The second is considering what stakeholders actually need to know, as opposed to what the organisation is comfortable telling them.
The third is being involved early enough to influence the disclosure decision itself, since a function brought in after the decision can only shape the wording.
Taken together, these place communications inside the organisation’s accountability process rather than at the end of it. The objective is not to eliminate silence. It is to ensure that silence has a defensible purpose.
The question worth asking
The question is not simply whether an organisation has a reason to remain silent. It is whether that reason adequately accounts for the people who must live with the consequences.
When silence protects an organisation but leaves stakeholders unable to understand decisions that affect them, the issue is no longer what communications should say. It is what the organisation believes it owes the people it serves.
Source: OECD, Board Responsibility and Sustainability-Related Disclosure in Asia.
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