By Bas Wijne, CEO, APO Group
At last month’s PRCA South Africa conference, the leading PR and communications forum in the region, I joined a panel on PR as a Strategic Advisor: Ethics, Sustainability and Boardroom Influence alongside Annaleigh Vallie (Executive Head of Integrated Communication, Nedbank), and Larry Khumalo-MacArthur (Managing Director and Market Lead, Weber Shandwick Africa). The discussion reinforced that when communications is excluded from the boardroom, decision-making breaks down between formation and execution. In complex organisations, executive decisions are often interpreted differently across stakeholders, leading to early misalignment.
The most effective leadership teams address this by involving communications when decisions are formed.
Without this, the same course of action fractures in execution across stakeholders. The issue is not variation in interpretation itself, but the absence of a structured way to account for it in advance.
Communications is a co-architect that belongs in the boardroom, shaping how intent becomes a decision and how a decision becomes reality. This is especially clear in African markets. Differences in regulatory environments, culture, and stakeholder expectations mean the same announcement can be interpreted in fundamentally different ways across jurisdictions. Consider a single boardroom decision. A multinational announces a restructuring across several African territories – typically involving changes to operating models, workforce alignment, cost structures, and local responsibilities.
In one country, the decision is seen as a move toward efficiency and long-term growth. In another, it signals contraction. In a third, it raises questions about market commitment. The underlying decision stays the same, but its meaning shifts depending on where it lands.
These differences affect how decisions are executed across markets. Alignment weakens, not from a flawed strategy, but from fragmented meaning.
For a co-architect, this means stress-testing decisions before they are final. Advising and assessing how they will land in different markets. Working directly with leadership teams to adjust how decisions are framed, sequenced, and released so that intent translates across markets.
APO Group operates as an example of this co-architect model, serving as a strategic communications consultancy that integrates advisory and execution. We don’t just execute communications – we consult and advise at the boardroom level. We apply this approach across multiple African markets. Africa-Newsroom.com, our pan-African newswire and the only platform of its kind on the continent, distributes to 250+ Africa-focused news sites and 450,000+ journalists in all 54 countries. The same infrastructure that delivers messaging across the continent gives us the monitoring data to test how it will be received before a single line is published. That is what stress-testing means in practice.
When a global Fortune 500 telecommunications operator with multi-market African operations needed transformation across six African countries, they consolidated nine agencies into one partner: APO Group. Before announcing the decision, it was tested in each market. We checked how it signalled efficiency, retreat, or questions about commitment.
That insight was fed directly back into how the announcement was structured, sequenced, and released.
Messaging was then executed through a single coordinated system across all markets, rather than multiple disconnected systems.
The result was a 573% increase in top-tier media placements for the programme across key African markets compared to the previous multi-agency model, driven by unified messaging and faster execution cycles.
For organisations operating across multiple African markets, fragmented communications create fragmented decisions. Integrated communications strengthen delivery. In this environment, communications is part of how leadership decisions hold their meaning as they move across borders.
The question for leadership teams is not whether communications supports decisions, but whether it is involved early enough to ensure those decisions hold their meaning as they move across markets.
And ultimately: is communications shaping the decision itself, or only being asked to manage its interpretation after it leaves the boardroom?
Africa Fact: Africans carved the world’s first colossal sculpture 7,000 or more years ago. The Great Sphinx of Giza was fashioned with the head of a man combined with the body of a lion. A key and important question raised by this monument was: How old is it? In October 1991 Professor Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, demonstrated that the Sphinx was sculpted between 5000 BC and 7000 BC, dates that he considered conservative.
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