I’ve had the opportunity to work with one of the best communications team….and one of the most important lessons I learned was the importance of “timeless” vs “timely” communications for more strategic efforts. It’s a simple, but powerful concept.

A timeless message is something that doesn’t change. They tend to be things like “The customer comes first”, “Quality is our number one job”.  These are messages which create context, goals, framework….they demonstrate consistency in an organization’s intent. People derive comfort from the fact that they don’t change….they act as general expectations of behavior and decision-making.

A timely message is something which does change, and they usually support the timeless message. For instance, if the timeless goal is to “Manage risk appropriately in the organization”, the timely messages might be a service level, with results that change (“number of audits failed with YTD actuals …0/15 audits failed as of May, 2021).

I’ve seen situations when timeless messages change too often…one year the priority is people, the next, financials….it changes every year.  Timely messages suffer when they don’t really support a timeless message (metrics which are used because they are easy to obtain, but don’t really tell you anything), or they don’t change (the service level has always been 85% and we make it every month).

So the next time you’re communicating something that’s more strategic, that’s guiding the objectives of your function or your team, think about what your timeless and timely messages are.