Decision Making For Rooms Where Everyone Disagrees

In this episode of The Piar Podcast, host Tan Sukhera sits down with Katherine Neebe, SVP and Chief Communications Officer at Duke Energy, to explore what it actually takes to lead communications through genuine complexity, the kind where the people in the room fundamentally see the world differently. Katherine's path to the CCO role is unusual: she spent 25 years in sustainability, stakeholder engagement, and philanthropy, including managing a $97 million partnership between Coca-Cola and the World Wildlife Fund across more than 45 countries. Her first full year in communications has given her a rare vantage point on what transfers between the two disciplines and what doesn't. The biggest adjustment, she says, isn't skill but pace: sustainability problems are 100 years in the making, while communications demands a response within minutes. Katherine orients her approach to high-disagreement rooms around two principles: reasonable people can disagree, and instead of looking for compromise, look for how to optimize the system. That mindset shift, from "less" to "maximum," shapes how she structures stakeholder engagement at one of America's largest utilities. She describes the most powerful unlock she's found as experiential storytelling: getting stakeholders to physically experience the world through someone else's reality, whether that meant taking manufacturing executives into river basins at WWF or helping communities understand energy complexity at Duke. On transparency, she pushes back on the assumption that more is always better, distinguishing between answering the question people are actually asking versus the polite version, and noting that companies that only share good news lose credibility. On measurement, she frames the field in three buckets: input, output, and impact, acknowledging that impact remains the holy grail while arguing that the strongest internal case comes from pairing outputs with ongoing stakeholder research and showing discipline, consistency, and real-time learning. On crisis readiness, she emphasizes repeated tabletop exercises to build muscle memory, a culture where calm is contagious, and a commitment to post-event reviews that produce real action, not just documentation. The skill Katherine keeps coming back to isn't a communications skill at all. It's a judgment skill.