Tuesday marks ten years since Britain voted to leave the European Union. As the anniversary arrives, Keir Starmer has resigned, clearing the path for the country's seventh prime minister in a decade. David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Starmer, and now a seventh, with former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the runaway favorite to take the keys to Number 10.
Seven leaders in ten years.
For context, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair each ran the country for more than a decade on their own. Britain has now churned through prime ministers at roughly one every 18 months since it decided to redraw its relationship with the rest of the world.
I have written about Brexit many times over the years, and I want to be careful here.
The point of this Ross Rant is not to relitigate whether leaving was right or wrong (it was wrong). Reasonable people disagree, and the economic arguments cut in more than one direction depending on which figures you trust. The point is narrower and more useful to you: Brexit is the clearest case study of the last decade in what happens to a society, a culture, and a business environment when leadership treats a major inflection point as a moment to be explained rather than a moment to be communicated.
Here is the distinction that matters.
An explanation comes after the decision. Communication comes before, during, and after. The Leave campaign understood this. "Take back control" was three words that did the work of a thousand white papers. It told a story about agency, identity, and a future. The Remain campaign responded with GDP forecasts and warnings from economists. One side communicated. The other side explained. We know how that ended.
What followed was a decade of leaders who kept making the same mistake in the other direction. They won or inherited power, then governed as if the job was to manage the file rather than to keep telling the story. May tried to explain a withdrawal agreement nobody could follow. Truss tried to explain a fiscal plan that the bond market rejected within two days. Sunak tried to explain competence to a public that had stopped listening. Starmer, less than two years after a landslide, tried to explain why the change he promised kept getting watered down or scrapped. Each one treated communication as the thing you do after you decide. Each one was gone before the next anniversary.
Three things this means for leaders facing a major inflection point of their own:
First, at an inflection point, the story moves faster than the strategy. The Leave side won because it had a narrative before it had a plan. That is uncomfortable for operators who believe the work should speak for itself. It does not. In a moment of upheaval, the audience immediately reaches for meaning and will accept the first coherent story on offer. If you are still assembling your facts while someone else is offering meaning, you have already lost the room. Have the story ready before the decision lands.
Second, upheaval does not end when the decision is made. It begins there. Britain treated the 2016 referendum as a finish line. It was a starting gun. Ten years and seven prime ministers later, the country is still arguing about what the vote meant and still postponing summits to reset the relationship it thought it had settled. When your company makes a major move, a merger, a restructuring, or a market exit, the communications work is not the press release. It is eighteen months later, when employees, customers, regulators, and investors are each writing their own version of what happened. If you go quiet after the announcement, they will write it for you.
Third, the cost of a communications vacuum is paid in trust, and trust does not return on the same schedule it left. The deeper story of British politics this decade is not any single leader's failure. It is the steady erosion of public belief that anyone in charge can actually change anything. As the Liberal Democrat leader put it on Monday, the public is tired of changing who sits in Number 10 while nothing else changes. That is what a decade of explanation, rather than communication, produces. A population that has stopped believing the words. Your stakeholders are no different. Spend the trust carelessly at one inflection point, and you will not have it at the next one.
The world has changed. The way you need to explain it has not. Most leaders still treat communications as a tactic for explaining decisions after they are made. Brexit is a ten-year monument to the cost of that instinct, played out at the scale of a nation. The leaders who win in this environment treat communication as a strategy that shapes how an audience understands a decision before it is made, as it unfolds, and long after the announcement. Not an explanation bolted on at the end, but the strategy that carries the whole thing.
Britain has had ten years and seven prime ministers to learn that lesson. Your next inflection point will not give you nearly that long.
Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.
-Marc
