One pattern has stayed with me throughout my years of working in India’s power sector.
Whenever a tariff revision attracts criticism, a transmission project encounters local resistance, a renewable energy development raises questions, or an operational disruption comes under public scrutiny, organisations often respond in a remarkably similar way.
They begin explaining. But by then, the conversation has usually moved beyond the organisation’s control. This has always intrigued me.
It is certainly not because energy companies are careless communicators.
Few industries devote as much attention to precision. Projects are shaped through years of engineering, regulatory review, financial evaluation and risk assessment. Every important decision is tested repeatedly before it reaches the public domain.
But the effort invested in helping others understand those decisions is generally smaller than the effort invested in making them.
That imbalance is easy to overlook because technical organisations are built to solve technical problems. They are designed to produce sound decisions, not necessarily to explain those decisions to audiences who were never part of making them.
For many years, that distinction hardly mattered.
Today, it matters enormously.
India’s energy sector operates under continuous public, regulatory, and commercial scrutiny. Investors, regulators, consumers, local communities, policymakers and journalists all examine the same project through different lenses. A technically complete explanation that satisfies one audience may leave another searching for answers that were never intended to be addressed.
The organisations that recognise this early usually retain greater influence over how their decisions are understood.
Those that don’t rarely lose control of their story overnight. They surrender it gradually, each time they assume the technical merits of a decision will speak for themselves. By the time questions begin to dominate public discussion, someone else is already explaining the organisation’s decisions on their behalf.
The Explanation Gap
Organisations mostly believe communication begins after a decision has been made.
In reality, communication begins the moment someone outside the organisation tries to understand why that decision was necessary.
That is where media engagement becomes important.
Journalists do not require different facts. They are only trying to answer a different question.
Inside an energy company, discussions naturally revolve around engineering assumptions, regulatory provisions, commercial implications, and operational feasibility. That is exactly how they should be framed. The people making the decision need confidence that it is technically robust and capable of withstanding scrutiny.
Journalists work differently.
Their responsibility is to help readers understand why a development matters, what changes because of it and who is likely to be affected.
Neither approach is superior. They simply serve different purposes. Confusing one for the other creates the explanation gap.
Translation is Not Simplification
One concern generally surfaces whenever media engagement is discussed.
If technical issues are simplified, won’t important nuance be lost?
Experience suggests the opposite.
Good translation preserves complexity. It simply changes the point of entry.
Imagine a company announcing a major transmission investment. Within the organisation, conversations are likely to focus on evacuation capacity, network resilience, redundancy standards, and future demand projections. Those are entirely appropriate discussions.
But outside the organisation, people usually begin somewhere else. Will this improve reliability? Will it make renewable energy integration easier? Will it reduce future congestion on the network?
The engineering has not changed. Only the starting point has.
The strongest communicators understand this instinctively. They begin with significance before moving to technical detail. They make complex decisions accessible without making them simplistic.
That is a discipline, not a compromise.
Journalists Remember Patterns
One difficult interview rarely damages an organisation’s credibility.
One critical article rarely defines its reputation.
Narratives evolve differently.
Journalists, much like investors and regulators, notice patterns over time. They remember which organisations are willing to explain difficult decisions before controversy develops, which leaders remain available when uncomfortable questions arise and which companies appear only through carefully drafted statements after issues have escalated.
None of these interactions seems particularly important in isolation. Collectively, they shape expectations.
This is why some organisations eventually conclude that the media does not understand them. But the reality is more uncomfortable. They have gradually stopped participating in the process of shaping their own story.
Once that happens, journalists, commentators, stakeholders, and critics naturally begin filling the gap. Rebuilding narrative ownership is considerably harder than preserving it from the outset.
Long Before the First Interview
This is precisely where many organisations lose control of their own story.
They assume media engagement is the responsibility of a communications function, rather than a leadership responsibility.
Leaders who are genuinely clear about why a decision has been taken rarely struggle to explain the assumptions behind it, the constraints within which they are operating, and the trade-offs they have consciously accepted. They recognise that acknowledging complexity does not weaken confidence. More often, it strengthens it because stakeholders see that difficult decisions have been thought through, rather than merely defended.
Consistency matters just as much.
Stakeholders notice when interviews, public speeches, regulatory submissions, investor presentations, and corporate announcements reinforce the same underlying narrative. They notice when those messages shift depending on the audience.
That consistency cannot be manufactured a few hours before an interview. It is built gradually, long before the first journalist calls.
The strongest media relationships are built in exactly the same way. Long before they become necessary.
The Next Phase of Energy Leadership
India’s energy transition will produce projects that are technically more sophisticated than anything the sector has built before. It will also produce greater public scrutiny, wider stakeholder participation, and more complex conversations around cost, reliability, sustainability, and implementation.
Engineering excellence will always determine whether infrastructure performs as intended.
Increasingly, however, organisations will also be judged by their ability to retain ownership of their own story.
That ownership cannot be recovered during a crisis or rebuilt through a single interview. It develops gradually through consistent explanation, credible leadership, and relationships established long before difficult questions arise.
If organisations do not explain their decisions with the same discipline they apply to making them, someone else inevitably will.
And once others begin telling your story for you, regaining control becomes one of the hardest leadership challenges an organisation can face.
At what stage does your organisation begin explaining its decisions, before questions arise or after they do?
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Also read: The Second Judgment Every Energy Company Eventually Faces
The Questions the SHANTI Act Leaves Open