Exclusive: Lebo Madiba - The Chaos Dividend - Corporate Affairs must lead with pattern recognition, not panic

Lebo Madiba is at the World Communications Forum Association’s Davos Communications Summit. Here, she reports on the message from the keynote speaker, Paul Holmes, founder and chair of PRovoke Media (Image supplied)

The keynote speaker, Paul Holmes, founder and chair of PRovoke Media, delivered a message that was as unflinching as it was necessary.

One that should be echoing across every boardroom, agency, and leadership teams, a tour de force: part history lesson, part industry reckoning, and part call to arms.

Holmes didn’t mince words. Public relations, he argued, is no longer about what we say, it’s about what companies do. And increasingly, it’s about what we see coming before anyone else does.

What Holmes delivered was more than a retrospective. It was a wake-up call for anyone in the business of reputation, stakeholder trust, or leadership counsel.

We live in an era of permanent disruption, political instability, social volatility, environmental collapse, and technological acceleration, yet most corporate communicators are still optimising campaigns, polishing press releases, or measuring sentiment.

Meanwhile, the rules of corporate engagement have changed entirely.

We are not in the persuasion business anymore. We are in the pattern recognition business.

When purpose became a punching bag

Holmes revisited the moment when corporate values became a strategic imperative.

The Business Roundtable’s pivot in 2019 toward stakeholder capitalism, followed closely by BlackRock’s now-famous commitment to sustainability, was not a flirtation with progressivism.

It was a practical, investor-led recognition that companies cannot create long-term shareholder value without considering the societies and environments in which they operate.

The pandemic reinforced this reality. The Black Lives Matter movement, rising consumer demands for inclusion, and corporate reckonings around equity were not ideological sideshows.

They were business risks, reputational, operational, and talent-related, and companies needed to respond. Corporate affairs professionals, Holmes argued, were central in this shift.

Yet, just as quickly, the backlash came.

Suddenly, ESG and DEI were labelled “woke.”

Regulatory pushback intensified in the US. Right-wing media reframed purpose-driven policies as political overreach.

And once again, Holmes pointed out, the public relations industry was caught off guard.

We did not prepare the ground. We did not anticipate the ideological counterpunch. And we did not build a robust defence of ESG and DEI as fundamentally pragmatic, future-proofing strategies.

We asked for a seat at the table. Now we have to earn it.

For decades, corporate communicators asked for more influence.

We wanted to be in the room when strategic decisions were made, not just after-the-fact messengers.

That seat at the table finally came during Covid, during geopolitical shocks like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and during moments of social upheaval when reputations hung in the balance.

And yet, as Holmes puts it, when the dog finally caught the car, most of us didn’t know what to do with it.

A small minority rose to the challenge, offering decisive, values-led guidance on whether to exit markets, make public stands, or protect reputation over short-term profits.

The rest? They were unprepared. Because writing speeches or managing influencers doesn’t equip you to advise a board during a geopolitical crisis.

Holmes’ challenge to the industry is clear: we must evolve from communicators to strategists. That means developing new muscles, scenario planning, geopolitical fluency, and long-range pattern recognition.

Chaos is not the exception. It’s the new operating context.

One of the most sobering insights from Holmes’ keynote was the idea that chaos is no longer episodic. It is structural.

From insurrections to misinformation attacks to economic nationalism, we are in an era where volatility is the baseline.

Companies that continue to optimise for stability and certainty will be constantly outpaced and unprepared.

In this new reality, PR cannot function as a reactive service. We must become architects of resilience.

That means asking not “What do we say about this?” but “What are the next five disruptions we haven’t seen yet, and how do we prepare the business to withstand them?”

We need to help our clients and executives move from shock to scenario. From spin to strategic positioning.

Holmes gives the example of AI not as a tech revolution but as a thinking crisis.

Just as calculators eroded basic maths skills, AI tools risk hollowing out the next generation’s ability to write and, by extension, to think critically.

For a profession that learns through writing and builds credibility through judgment, this is an existential risk. We must not outsource our core competencies. We must double down on them.

Pattern recognition: The new PR skillset

So, what does the future of public relations look like?

It’s not just media relations, content creation, or stakeholder mapping. Those are execution skills.

The true differentiator is the ability to connect dots others don’t see. To anticipate backlash before it brews. To navigate misinformation before it goes viral.

To advise on policy, not just posture.

Holmes calls this “pattern recognition”.

It is, in essence, strategic foresight, the ability to look at global, social, and political signals and identify the business implications before they hit the balance sheet.

This is the PR that earns its seat in the C-suite.

This is the corporate affairs that makes decisions, not just decks.

This is the mindset we must instil in the next generation of communicators before they are overtaken by tools, trends, or chaos itself.

Because as Holmes concluded, the world will not wait for us to catch up and neither will history.

Look out for Lebo Madiba's second article "Bell Pottinger’s Legacy and the Shifting Terrain of PR, Ethics and Geopolitics" from the World Communications Forum Association’s Davos Communications Summit