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This week, we officially (Re) launched Piar. The timing is deliberate.
Onclusive released their 2026 Communications Outlook, revealing something most communications professionals already suspected: 52% of PR and communications professionals cannot connect their work to revenue or business growth. Another 52% of in-house teams and 44% of agencies can't prove ROI beyond vanity metrics.
Those numbers should concern every communications leader. Organizations like AMEC have established measurement frameworks that serve as the industry gold standard. The field includes tenured, celebrated leaders who have dedicated careers to advancing measurement and evaluation of communications. These are the people whose books line my shelves, whose posts I follow, whose awards I celebrate from the sidelines.
I hold those ideas in high regard. I spent years working across continents with some of the largest organizations, sitting in boardrooms, presenting findings on effectiveness, competition, and reputation. I built dashboards and custom scoring systems. I explained impact, outcomes, outtakes. I listened to the same concerns from clients and colleagues repeatedly.
Then a leader in the measurement space, an extremely well-trusted and revered pioneer of go-to-market effectiveness for large US organizations, put me on the right track of understanding causality in ways I had never considered. That conversation sent me into months of research, reading, writing, spending time and energy to find the truth and set that truth as my standard.
The biggest problem in PR and communications is the thinking part itself. Decisions are being built on unrecognized assumptions, biases, myths, and misconceptions. Being more aware of those gaps, blind spots, and illusions changes everything when those issues are left unchecked.
What opens your eyes is how widespread these misunderstandings and misinterpretations can be. The opportunity for PR and communications leaders to lead in addressing this issue is substantial.
For years, across experiences working with some of the largest organizations around multiple continents, sitting in boardrooms, presenting findings on effectiveness, competition, and reputation, looking at strategy, moving the needle, explaining the why and how, curating briefings, supporting crisis teams, building dashboards and custom scoring, I heard the same problems from clients and colleagues:
We need to prove the value of PR and communications to leadership, especially in B2B. We need to elevate the profile of our organization. We need to measure impact beyond vanity metrics. We need to show the C-Suite we are a strategic asset, beyond an overhead expense. We need to support marketing and go-to-market strategies with earned media, internal communications, and organizational reputation management. We need to prove value beyond media focus, and beyond even just PR and communications. We need to tie efforts to ROI, sales, donors, message pull-through, leads, signups, web traffic, HR outcomes, and objectives. We want to move detractors from negative to neutral. We want to measure brand health and relationship health indicators with stakeholders.
To be fair, I find PR and communications leaders to be among some of the most brilliant and emotionally intelligent people at any organization. They lead small teams that move mountains.
The question became: How do I tell people about what I found, and create enough value that people want to use this as standard operating procedure?
After attending every kind of PR and communications workshop, summit, bootcamp, panel discussion, and webinar, after hosting a few of my own, I reached a conclusion: thinking about thinking is a superpower that needs to happen ahead of every significant decision or calculated move, whether I am part of the equation or otherwise.
An entire industry of people agrees, beyond PR and communications and related disciplines. Behavioral scientists and behavioral economists have understood for decades that a counterfactual world could be created through smart nudges and expert-crafted interventions to change human behavior for the better. In classic fashion, they recognize the opportunity to apply those proven ideas and methods to the business world.
As I ventured into behavioral sciences research, papers, and tapped into a global network of behavioral scientists, I got deeply familiar with the frameworks, tools, techniques, thought exercises, diagnostics, and ideas that addressed exactly what I was discussing.
I began to form the foundation of the new Piar. One that works with global PR and communications leaders to co-create workshops fitted to their context. Rooted in behavioral science, the goal is to help them think differently about the work they do. Through right-place, right-time thought exercises, individuals and small groups can take any goal, decision, outcome, or idea and do a reset. We call out the issues: bias, assumptions, unrecognized misconceptions. Without blame, we untangle mental complexity in ways that result in confidence, team cohesion, less friction, fewer rewrites, and peace of mind that comes with knowing the logic has been stress-tested.
I know what PR and communications measurement best practice looks like, intimately. Realistically, the PR and communications space has distance to travel for the entire industry to collectively arrive at the gold standard AMEC has established. In many cases, in my past roles I was part of a system that could potentially put profits ahead of the PR and communications industry I became enamored with. Especially after my stint as a TV news anchor, the eye-opening exposure I got to journalism, the power of print and broadcast media, the emergence of social, working with spokespeople and media contacts gave me an entirely different view of media monitoring, PR and communications measurement, analysis, and how that translates across PESO (Paid, earned, shared, and owned media).
I was exposed to that space during a tumultuous time in my personal life. I worked for great organizations across the globe, saw and understood how operations function, where challenges exist. With the privilege and trust of former colleagues, clients, and friends, I hope to honor the industry of PR and communications and those relationships by doing something valuable for the industry.
Instead of receiving significant payment to give people dashboards that provide their leadership with comfortable feelings, telling them everything is acceptable, layering media coverage over marketing, sales, and business performance data to correlate that everything is good, I get to help people see the truth. Meet them where they are with support, in ways that help them perform at their best. Where they can take up space with confidence.
Because correlation does not equal causation.
Consider the boardroom where you present correlation and pass it off as causation. Media coverage increased. Sales increased. The timing aligned. Executive leadership accepts your opinions with a grain of salt, and the show goes on. Just be honest: How does that feel internally?
Now consider the alternative boardroom. You present the truth, along with its limitations like time lag of impact, and other realities as concrete as physics. You explain your decision-making process, and naturally show what realistic indicators are for your unique context. You earn confidence and trust through intellectual humility. You demonstrate that your decisions are backed by behavioral science frameworks. You did the work to increase the likelihood things would go right.
Which version represents the leader you want to be? If this message is reaching you, trust me: your leadership wants you to be the leader in version two, and you do not have to wait for permission to become that version of yourself. It is a straightforward thing to do. All you need to do is look at your world a little differently. If by the end of this read you are unclear on anything, reach out about approaches to try right away.
For a substantial part of my career, I helped public relations and communications teams build exactly what those statistics describe: dashboards connecting media coverage to sales spikes, social mentions to revenue growth, executive visibility to market performance.
The data usually showed something like: A campaign launched in Q2, and sales increased in Q2. Media coverage expanded, and website traffic also expanded. The CEO completed three podcast interviews, and brand awareness increased in the next survey.
We packaged it carefully. The client's leadership accepted the status quo, kept ordering more reports, and the clients would take up less space than the marketing, advertising, brand, sales, product, customer experience, social media people in the meeting room. Budgets received approval for another quarter, though the team always remained lean. Great for press releases, terrific support to the greater team. There is nothing wrong with that, unless of course it makes you feel uneasy internally.
I developed skill in finding patterns that created a sense of confidence. I understood which metrics produced the justification that protected headcount and spend. Teams retained their positions, with limited bandwidth. Agencies retained their retainers. Organizations continued forward in a cyclical fashion, expecting the past to repeat itself in the future.
Above all, one problem persisted: I taught people to mistake correlation for causation, framing it as methodology, and I consider that to be a failure personally and professionally. Nothing to do with my employers, or even what the client ordered. It was something I did not realize I was doing at the time. An unrecognized misconception that I personally was propagating that was risky. Deep down I probably wished more people in leadership would hear me out. In hindsight, decisions of weight that affect people's jobs, shareholder value, fiduciary responsibilities - the risks of building those decisions on assumptions is jarring.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, I believe this failure was a necessary setback to test how I will bounce back from adversity. I believe that as long as I find the truth and lock that in as my north star, while remaining flexible about the short-term vision, I can unlock value for society to benefit from.
After that realization, I examined where actual strategic thinking occurred in communications. The answer revealed itself inside the walls of large agencies with behavioral science practices.
The greats, like Ogilvy, maintain one. Edelman maintains one. Dozens of top-tier agencies have constructed their reputations on applying behavioral economics to campaigns: cognitive biases, framing effects, decision architecture.
They charge premium rates for insights that help clients make better decisions, and why should they not? They protect those frameworks as proprietary assets.
This structure creates a bottleneck. The application of behavioral science gets locked behind consulting fees and agency relationships. The frameworks that could help every communicator make better decisions, spot their assumptions, test their logic, challenge their biases become intellectual property, delivered only to clients who can afford them, to use to compete, to pursue excellence, to change behavior on behalf of their clients. I find the best agencies draw links to behavioral science well, and often.
Most PR professionals operate with playbooks from past campaigns that may not apply to current contexts, gut instinct shaped by availability bias and recent experience, pressure to prove impact using metrics that measure visibility rather than effectiveness, and no systematic way to audit their thinking before stakes become high. Turning behavioral science into a nice-to-have footnote rather than a need-to-have mental hygiene standard operating procedure.
That represents the actual crisis, as I see it.
The Onclusive data about measurement struggles points to something deeper. When teams cannot prove ROI, the issue is rarely inadequate analytics tools. There is a media obsession, and also a tools obsession these days. The issue is the absence of systematic frameworks for surfacing assumptions before they become narrative risks, testing strategic logic against cognitive biases, building decision frameworks that survive cross-examination in boardrooms, and connecting reputation work to business outcomes and impact over time through causal reasoning instead of post-hoc correlation.
These are thinking problems that looking through the measurement lens alone cannot actually solve. Just because your goals and objectives are SMART does not necessarily mean they are automatically smart.
Teams can possess sophisticated dashboards. When the strategy those dashboards measure was built on untested assumptions, confirmation bias, and pattern-matching from contexts that no longer apply, measurement simply quantifies decisions that were flawed from the start.
AMEC has provided the industry with measurement frameworks that work extremely well. The integrated evaluation framework offers structured approaches to planning, implementing, and evaluating communication programs. The challenge is that even the best measurement framework cannot automatically fix strategic decisions built on faulty reasoning. Make no mistake, I do not claim to know any PR and communications leader's work better than they do. I simply have organized a way to get them to think about their own work differently. That alone can be what is necessary to overhaul decision quality. The eureka moments can be what de-risk those efforts, outputs, and plans that are articulated best for leadership, using best practices in measurement and evaluation.
Three forces are converging to make this urgent.
First, the AI transition. AI systems are handling content creation and execution at scale. The differentiating skill for communications professionals centers on thinking clearly about complex decisions that machines cannot make. According to Onclusive, 42% of in-house professionals and 40% of agency professionals expect their roles to remain largely unchanged by AI, while 41% of agencies and 26% of in-house expect a shift to strategic advisory. That shift requires the ability to think clearly about thinking.
Second, budget pressure. Onclusive shows 45% of agencies and 34% of in-house teams expect communications investment cuts. Defending budget requires more than dashboards. It requires defensible decision logic that survives CFO scrutiny.
Third, accelerating context change. Shrinking newsrooms (52% of agencies, 42% of in-house cite this challenge), algorithmic volatility, misinformation threats, regulatory uncertainty mean old playbooks break faster than teams can adapt.
Teams need decision frameworks that adjust to changing contexts.
Communications professionals who can think systematically about their own thinking, who can spot their biases, test their assumptions, and adjust when evidence changes, become strategic assets their organizations cannot afford to lose. Candidly, I am especially concerned about the B2B sector in this climate of heightened uncertainty. Uncertainty is a reality. Submitting to it unlocks a level of mental creativity and ingenuity greater than those who wish they could brush it under the carpet. These are highly uncertain times indeed.
I built what I wished had existed: systematic thinking practice for communications teams. I began rolling them out to trusted friends in PR and communications, and I am fine-tuning them to be delivered in ways that make leadership proud of their communications team. That gets them to win confidence and trust in the boardroom. The learning experience has to imply a social contract: if we do not realistically see an intervention as co-creating significant value together, it should not be attempted.
They are workshops that teach teams to think and give them frameworks they own forever.
Here is how it works: Individuals and small teams bring a real challenge. An actual situation: an upcoming campaign, a crisis scenario, a measurement puzzle, a stakeholder conflict. We use their unique context to shape a three-hour agenda, with a titrated mix of thought exercises, group activities, and introduce behavioral science tools and techniques to apply, only at the right time.
We spend the three-hour workshop examining the assumptions driving choices, testing them against behavioral science frameworks, and building decision logic that holds up under pressure.
Participants receive tools like Bias Spotter checklists for running five-minute audits on plans, Trust Equation frameworks for evaluating stakeholder messaging, pre-mortem processes for anticipating failure before it happens, Stakeholder Narrative Mapping for complex stakeholder dynamics, and decision frameworks that work when legal, operations, and leadership disagree.
We conduct two 30-minute follow-ups over the next few weeks to ensure the frameworks stick and adapt to specific stakeholder expectations.
Teams do not hire us again unless they choose to. The methodology is theirs. The tools are theirs. The thinking practice is theirs.
This truly has been the most difficult challenge in my professional career to date. Unlearning my own bad habits in thinking, spending precious time and making a sizeable, six-figure self-investment in ultimately restraining myself from rushing through a one-way door decision. That is to say, one that I cannot come back from. This announcement of Piar's relaunch is me walking through the one-way door with truths in hand. So with that, I offer you some observations:
If PR and communications professionals are going to survive the transition to strategic advisory roles, if we are going to prove we are worth the investment when budgets are tight and AI handles execution, we need the cognitive frameworks that large agencies have been treating as proprietary assets.
As basic professional infrastructure.
Before launching a campaign: stress-test the logic. Before setting quarterly goals: challenge the metrics. Before responding to a crisis: audit biases. Before reporting to leadership: distinguish between correlation and causation.
This represents survival for many, and a pursuit of learning for the sake of their own growth.
In finding out the truth, we observed that the most effective way to overcome a damaged reputation, for individuals or for the profession, is to demonstrate expertise compelling enough that past performance becomes irrelevant.
In working with communications leaders to make it as easy as possible to get sign-off for a workshop, we found that the most effective way to justify budget is to walk into the boardroom and defend strategic logic with frameworks that survive cross-examination.
In confiding in pioneers for advice, who have held the mantle for the industry for years, we discovered that the most effective way to prove communications caused results is to design campaigns with the realities of business physics deeply understood and unanimously accepted among key stakeholders upfront.
The communications leader or team must be aware of the behavioral aspects and effects of stakeholder perception on their work. They need to have the clarity and confidence required to demystify the true enemies as they present themselves. Enemies to decision quality like unrecognized bias, assumptions, myths, misconceptions.
Some refer to these as illusions, gaps, blind spots, or even unknowns. Regardless, they should be observed and neutralized from the start, and throughout, as they invariably creep up.
The immediate effect, which compounds over time, is the ability for a communications leader to proceed with measurement best practices with a type of intellectual integrity, honesty, and subtle confidence that comes from a culture they are building around understanding limitations. Being on the same page about the realities, and collectively placing bets on uncertain inputs, outputs, and tactics based on much more than gut feel. It is placing bets on decisions that have the highest likelihood of success, especially as you see them in context.
That is what Piar exists to teach.
We are starting with three initiatives.
First, workshops. We are running a founding client program: 3 teams at 50% off ($3,000 instead of $6,000) in exchange for detailed feedback and case study participation. Teams that want to learn these frameworks on live work can pursue that path.
Second, a speaker series. Monthly panels with PR directors and communications VPs discussing the challenges the profession faces in private: proving impact, defending strategic logic, building credibility as advisors. The first one launches soon.
Third, open access to behavioral scientists. We launched an open call for PR and communications professionals to submit their toughest challenges to our network of decision researchers. Real situations, clear thinking.
If you have read this far, you likely recognize the problems described here. Perhaps you have felt the dissonance between the correlation-as-causation narratives told to leadership and the reality of how communications actually functions.
Perhaps you have wondered how science-backed approaches locked behind consulting fees, for those PR and communications teams who could afford it, could have helped you, while your team makes decisions based on gut instinct or unrecognized biases. Often.
Perhaps you have wondered if a better approach exists to prove value than building dashboards that measure visibility instead of impact.
A better approach exists. It starts with thinking differently about when and how rigor gets applied to decisions.
Before campaigns end, when teams scramble to prove ROI. Before they start, when assumptions can still be stress-tested and course corrected.
Before reputation is already at risk as a crisis response. As standard operating procedure, when decision frameworks can prevent crises from occurring.
Let's make systematic thinking standard for communications.
Read the full press release about Piar's launch | Learn about workshops | Submit a challenge to behavioral scientists
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Tanzeel "Tan" Sukhera is the Co-founder & CEO of Piar. Tan is based in Montreal, and has 7 years of experience in Media Monitoring & Social Listening, PR & Comms Measurement, Strategy & Analysis. Through events and workshops, Piar helps PR and communication leaders apply behavioral decision science to real-world campaigns, messaging, and stakeholder work. Learn more or reach out at piar.co.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tsukhera/ 👈
