Today, everything feels immediate and urgent, perhaps nowhere more so than communications. Anyone who has worked in communications will recognise the moment: a link begins circulating internally, concern grows quickly, and suddenly the pressure to respond can feel greater inside the organisation than the issue itself appears outside it.
Institutions are often judged by what they say in difficult moments. They are also judged by something less visible: their ability to decide when not to.
That distinction matters because communications teams now operate in an environment where speed is rewarded. Digital platforms compress the distance between a minor issue and an apparent crisis. Good communication therefore depends on the ability to judge correctly.
In my own career in government communications and public service, I have come to see judgment as one of the most important, and often least visible, skills a communicator develops. I have seen some of the strongest examples of that judgment in the women I have had the opportunity to work alongside.
That same quality of judgment is essential at an institutional level. For organisations whose credibility is built over long periods, knowing when and how to respond matters. A regulator, public body or financial institution cannot treat every negative signal as an emergency. If every issue is escalated, escalation itself loses meaning. Audiences become fatigued, internal teams become reactive, and institutions risk spending the credibility they may later need in a genuinely serious moment.
This matters in an information environment already crowded with news and opinions. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that 42 per cent of people across surveyed markets sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 per cent in 2017. Many describe the news as exhausting or overwhelming. Treating every development as urgent can add to that fatigue. Each unnecessary alarm asks for more attention from an audience whose attention is already depleted.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer offers another useful measure. In the UAE, 88 per cent of respondents said that accurate headlines, free from exaggeration or fear-inducing language, would be an effective way to facilitate trust. While the finding relates specifically to journalism, the principle applies equally to institutions communicating with the public: accuracy and proportion are fundamental to trust.
The first task, then, is diagnosis. What has happened? Is the information correct? Who is at risk? Does the matter touch the institution’s responsibilities? Who is talking about it and how many people are listening? The answers help determine whether the situation requires a public statement, direct engagement, continued monitoring or simply time.
Of course, some moments require full escalation. A major cyberattack affecting critical national infrastructure, a critical technology outage disrupting access to markets, a significant financial crime with broad public exposure or the leak of sensitive information, can all require fast and coordinated communication.
Yet many situations that appear urgent are not crises. An issue that generates significant internal concern like a critical social media post from an account, may, externally, have attracted little attention and disappear within hours. A rushed public rebuttal can give it a larger audience, greater legitimacy and a longer life than it might otherwise have had.
Restraint in such cas…