How Stanley Black & Decker Uses Probabilities Over Perfect Messaging In Modern Change Strategy

Waiting for absolute certainty before sharing organizational updates often backfires. When companies hold back until every detail is finalized, employees fill the information void themselves, draw different conclusions about what matters most, and stall execution. A more effective approach communicates in probabilities, clearly outlining what is decided, what is under consideration, and what is off the table, allowing people to keep moving even when the final picture remains unclear.

Jason Greenspan, the Vice President of Global Internal Communications at Stanley Black & Decker, specializes in guiding large organizations through continuous transformation. After senior roles at The Grossman Group and a nearly two-decade run at McDonald's, he is a key advisor to C-suite leaders navigating large-scale operational overhauls. Across those roles, he helps executives move away from traditional, one-time announcements and toward a more transparent, probability-based approach to internal communication. "When leaders fail to communicate the trade-offs and their thinking, employees fill the vacuum themselves. Teams move in multiple directions, with some focused on cost, others on quality, and the effort to realign them becomes very high," he says.

Earning that influence requires more than communication expertise. Leaders who want a seat at the table need to understand the business deeply enough to connect communication gaps directly to operational outcomes. That means knowing which initiatives are at risk, which teams are misaligned, and what it is costing the organization in real terms. 

• Margin over messaging: The stakes of poor communication are not abstract. When direction is unclear, resources follow the wrong priorities, and financial targets take the hit. "Lack of transparency around change puts margin and growth goals at risk. People end up working on the wrong things, and that directly prevents us from hitting our targets," he says. Positioning communication gaps as operational risk, rather than a soft people issue, is what makes the argument land with executives focused on the bottom line.

• Ears to the ground: Making that case effectively requires real intelligence about how the organization is actually feeling. "You need deep tentacles in the organization, not a focus group or a survey, but a real-time read on how people are perceiving the direction," Greenspan says. That kind of insight allows communicators to bring specific, credible concerns to leadership rather than vague impressions, and it is what separates a trusted advisor from a messaging function.

A strong communication strategy starts with behavioral clarity. Before any messaging gets built, leaders need a precise picture of what they want employees to do differently. Strategy narratives tend to cluster around vision and values, and the specific, observable actions that should follow get treated as an afterthought. But getting the communication right is only half the job. The other half is knowing whether it worked. Most organizations measure that through engagement data and sentiment surveys, tools that are easy to run but often tell a more flattering story than the operational reality warrants.

• Skip the slop: The gap between intention and instruction is where corporate communication tends to collapse. "If you haven't defined the behavior you're trying to change, the communication strategy has no foundation. The strategy message isn't clear, the change message isn't clear, and what comes out the other end is slop on top of slop," Greenspan says. Most organizations make the mistake of crafting the narrative first and hoping behavior follows. The sequence should run in the opposite direction: clarity of action comes first, and clarity of expression follows from it.

• Vanity vs. sanity: Clicks, open rates, and confidence scores are easy to collect and tend to trend positive, but comfort is not the same as signal. "Communicators measuring engagement numbers, open rates, and views, and whether people say they understand the strategy or have confidence, none of those things translate to any kind of outcome. Most often they don't," Greenspan says. The only metric that holds up is whether people are actually behaving differently. A restaurant remodel either happens or it doesn't. A factory either hits its cost target or it doesn't. "They're either doing it, or they're not," he says.

• The playback test: Binary outcomes confirm whether people are moving, but they don't reveal whether they understand why. To get at that, Greenspan asks employees two open-ended questions: what are the top priorities for this change, and what are the three things you are doing in your role to support them. The answers show whether priorities are landing as intended and whether daily work is actually connected to the goals. "Looking at behaviors and how well people can play back what they heard gets us a lot closer to the holy grail of understanding whether the change worked," he says.

The old model treated transformation as a contained event with a clear start and finish. That model no longer reflects how organizations operate. Large companies are almost always mid-change, navigating strategy pivots, operating model updates, and organizational shifts simultaneously, which means the communication muscle needs to be always on rather than deployed episodically. "Change used to look like a couple of waves a year, belief and despair, start and finish. That's not the reality anymore. It's a constant EKG, and the goal of communications is to help people move through it."