Communications, once viewed with a certain agnosticism, was now credited with having a central role in the company’s future. And the corporate reputation was instinctively understood to be not just fragile but the product of a dizzyingly complex interplay between executive policy, strategy, communications, brand and service. So challenging was that mix, in fact, that these executives had understood that a great reputation would not magically arise simply from the sum of good intentions. It needed to be managed centrally, rigorously and with purpose; with deep integration across multiple communications, policy and strategy areas; perhaps even then overseen as a standalone function of the whole executive on an ongoing basis.

They knew, too, that moving around reporting lines on the org chart would not deliver what was required. This could not be another ‘reorganisation’. Instead, in company after company in our research, these senior teams had commissioned their heads of communications or corporate affairs to conduct a tabula rasa reimagining of what these departments did and how they did it in the service of the organisation’s standing: If we had to design a world-class reputation management function today from scratch, with no preconceptions, how would we do it?

The headline results of that reform work were eye-catching. Almost unanimously, we heard of new budgets and structures for communications and strategy teams; reforms of creaking old processes; clearer reporting lines and consolidated strategic goals. But these were just the surface – the effects of a far deeper and more radical change in attitude. What underpinned it was the way these businesses clearly now thought about communications and policy teams – as the indivisible components of a multi-skilled, swiss-army-knife approach to reputation management.

Most strikingly of all, the companies we assessed had, by now, largely landed on the same unifying structure to accommodate the transformation: These teams were being folded into a much larger and more influential corporate affairs function–newly centralised, global and all-encompassing; the big tent for all the shapers and protectors of the company’s reputation. A department that has so often in the past struggled for a clear definition (sometimes a synonym for corporate communications; sometimes a synonym for all the public and policy affairs to be kept away from corporate communications) is now fast being repurposed worldwide, it seems, as executive ‘mission control’ for all the orbiting satellite teams of communications, strategy and policy that circulate in the reputational cosmos.

Corporate affairs’ professionalism is being elevated to match, too, as is its stature. Many of our interviewees were being asked to head up the new function and bring their expertise to bear on it. In the past, their organisations had often shipped in professionals from other fields – legal, marketing or strategy – to lead corporate affairs, seen as a generalist training ground for the next wave of company leaders. Now, those same businesses were instead recruiting communications and reputation experts to the role – and giving them greater access to the C-Suite than ever before, with the heads of corporate aairs in our study commonly saying they now reported direct to the CEO. In multinationals around the world, if it wasn’t before, it seems that corporate affairs is fast becoming an obligatory executive function.

This is not a little tinkering around the edges, and nor (as a seasoned cynic in the profession might suggest) is it merely another round of corporate meddling – the contraction into a hub-like global department simply the latest in the waves of centralisation and decentralisation that form the familiar tides of corporate life.

The story that emerged most commonly from our research was not the structural changes per se but rather the intent that drove them; the awakening consensus from boardroom to boardroom worldwide that communications and corporate affairs had a clear and intrinsic value – guardianship of the business’s reputation; that this value was now held as axiomatic, so much so that it was deemed worthy of its own executive seat; and that enabling this remit meant disciplinary reinvention, integrating communications’ varied forms of expertise into an intelligent matrix of actions, all choreographed by a corporate affairs director with the necessary heft and operational control to be able to deliver.

For so long our professions have yearned for this – the answer to credibility and value. Now, for the first time, it seems we have an unambiguous answer: Communications matters because reputation matters.

In many ways, what is happening is not a sudden turn of events but the predictable culmination of a series of events within our profession – a tipping point we were always bound to reach eventually, given the development path our professions were on. That should give us succour through this transformation, because it means it has been earned.

For it is not just the pressures of a changing society that have induced this epiphany among the C-Suite but the complementary maturation of each of our different professions. We have often noted these growth paths, of course, but usually only the individual stories, rarely spotting the full sweep of the movement. Over the last decade in particular, we have seen our different professions evolve in response to upheavals in society, professionalising themselves and realigning to constant new normals. All that inward development and external pressure was bound to create a perfect storm of growth demands one day, necessitating a total redrafting of what we are all here to do as a collective.

It is only 10 years ago, after all, that ‘digital’ meant having an unpaid intern post comments on Twitter, and a developer make a basic app for the few global customers with iPhones. Now, it’s often one of the first words in the corporation’s annual report. Back then it was just a channel. For increasing numbers of industries today, ‘digital’ is a core product; at bare minimum, a central feature in the business’s long-term growth plans.

PR once meant leveraging contacts with long lunches for column inches. Now, in an era of protest, unrest, populism and political division, it means hyper-vigilant risk management, navigating vulnerable reputations through a highly unpredictable public world. A decade ago, businesses could allow the Occupy movement to come and go and remain largely unaffected by it. Today, there is no boardroom in the world that has not, in the last few months, discussed Black Lives Matter at great length and not just agreed a position on it but developed active programmes around it.

What has been the raw material of external communications for decades is now foremost strategic policy for major organisations. In a world of unregulated public conversations, the whole of the business world is PR.

Look at the growth of sustainability functions over the last 20 years: At the turn of the millennium, little more than ‘environment’ and ‘charity’ sections of the annual report – something the business simply ‘needed to be seen to be doing’. By the 2000s, corporate social responsibility (CSR) heralded the maturation of those ideas to the ‘need to do’ stage, as soon as ethical business practice began mattering to the buying public. The growth of environmental and corporate social governance (ESG) over the last five years shows these ideas are now entering the final developmental stage, the one its sister communications disciplines have also closed in on – ‘need to leverage’ – as businesses increasingly not just nod to ESG but orientate large sections of future growth planning around it.

Indeed, across all communications functions, nothing in recent years has galvanised the fusion of purpose more than the Covid pandemic because it has demonstrated to any intelligent observer in the executive suite – beyond the point of reasonable doubt – how these teams operate most effectively when resourced as an integrated whole. If the future of the communications profession is to form the component parts of a reputation management ‘mission control’ department, then the pandemic has been that model’s dry run.

Independently, then, on separate trajectories, all our professions have been on journeys of validation and growth over the last decade, each on a trajectory towards its own maximum point of value. Course-corrected by emerging events around them, learning and evolving, what we are witnessing now is the inevitable point of convergence of their individual paths, as each arrives at the very same value point: the corporate reputation.

Like a critical moment of cosmic mass – when the attraction of a black hole on orbiting bodies becomes an unstoppable gravitational pull, becomes a fusion into a single entity – this is the corporate aairs profession’s singularity moment. We are at the point of convergence. The coming together of all our multiple disciplines behind a single purpose, arrayed within a corporate affairs function of real heft and operational complexity, and choreographed in an intelligently integrated way to protect the company’s reputation – this must be the future, because it is the answer to the questions underpinning so many of the existential crises our profession has suffered over the years: What is our most fundamental purpose? What are we here to do? How do we add value?

These new structures answer how the executive class view the best of what we do: We matter because the reputation matters. And all the indications are that this worldview is contagious, so lagging organisations need to mobilise fast: If the 100-plus organisations we assessed is a reliable indicator, then we would expect this sort of transformation to become near-universal in multinationals within the next five years. What is now being written, then, is the future of our profession. It is exhilarating and also unsettling, because the answers aren’t yet fully clear. It promises a better future and a clearer purpose, but in which our personal value point is more opaque: more inter-dependent; more diffuse; less our own. We will have to recalibrate our professional thinking, too, and even how we speak about what we do, because the building blocks of the job will not be the same, nor even many of the core skills. There will be so much to learn.