You don't have a messaging problem. You have a conversation problem.

Three people around a table. The founder who built the company, the marketing lead who joined to scale it, and someone from the leadership team with the commercial perspective.

We were there to finalise positioning. Except we weren't finalising anything. We were on draft version eight, and no one could explain what was wrong with version seven.

One person kept saying it "didn't feel quite right." Another kept talking about "how the market will receive this." The third kept asking about "competitive differentiation." Everyone was polite. Everyone was thoughtful. Everyone was stuck.

Then I asked a different question: "What do you each actually believe this company stands for?"

The room went quiet.

Three completely different answers. And suddenly it was clear why we were on draft eight.

We'd been trying to write positioning that reconciled three fundamentally different worldviews. Through document edits.

What you're actually avoiding

Your brand messaging project has been running for months. You've got drafts piling up. Everyone's given feedback. Nothing's been approved.

The problem isn't the strategy. The problem is that people in your organisation have different views on what the company actually stands for, and no one wants to be in the room where you work it out.

So instead of one difficult conversation, you're having six polite meetings where everyone dances around the disagreement. Drafts go back and forth. Nothing gets decided. The project drags.

You're avoiding the conversation where people say what they really think, discover they disagree, and have to work through it.

That's uncomfortable. But it's the only conversation that actually matters.

Why strategists can't fix this

Most strategists can't facilitate worth a damn. They're brilliant at frameworks. They can write beautiful positioning statements. But put them in a room with stakeholders who fundamentally disagree, and they fold.

They try to find the compromise position. They smooth over the tension. They deliver messaging that's vague enough to keep everyone happy and clear enough to land with no one.

The valuable skill isn't writing the strategy. It's facilitating the conversation that makes the strategy possible.

What actually works

Get the stakeholders in a room. Surface the disagreements. Work through them. Make decisions.

This requires someone who's comfortable with tension, who can hold space for conflict without trying to resolve it too quickly, and who can extract clarity from competing perspectives.

It takes two hours. Sometimes less.

Back in that meeting, once we'd surfaced the actual disagreement, we worked through it. People needed to hear perspectives they'd been avoiding. The founding vision needed to meet market reality. Commercial priorities needed to align with authentic positioning.

Two hours later, we had positioning everyone could commit to. Not because it made everyone happy, but because we'd actually had the conversation.

Where this skill comes from

I spent eight years running a school. That means facilitating conversations where parents, teachers, and board members all have different priorities and strong opinions. You learn very quickly that avoiding the difficult conversation just makes everything take longer.

Most brand consultants have never had to do this. They've worked in agencies where everyone's already aligned, or they deliver strategy decks and leave before the hard conversations happen.

I stay for the hard conversations. Because that's where the actual work is.

If your messaging project is stuck, the problem probably isn't that you need better strategy. It's that you need someone who can facilitate the conversation you're avoiding.