Most conversations about our industry focus on what the public eventually sees, the release, the interview, the story that runs. What tends to get left out is everything that happens before any of that, the quieter work of deciding what a story actually is, whether it holds up and whether it is ready to be told at all.

That work rarely gets discussed publicly, partly because it does not photograph well and partly because it is difficult to describe without sounding abstract. It is also, in my experience, the part of the job that determines whether everything that follows succeeds or quietly falls apart.

Where Instinct Actually Shows Up

It shows up in small moments rather than big ones. Reading a brief and sensing within minutes whether a story has real news value or needs reshaping before a journalist will look twice. Knowing when to push back on a client's preferred narrative and when to let it go, because not every disagreement is worth spending the relationship on.

Sensing when an angle that tests well internally will not hold up once it is out in the world, or when a client is really asking for reassurance rather than a professional opinion, and knowing which one to give them.

None of this is written in a textbook, and none of it can be taught in a single sitting. It comes from years of making these calls, watching what lands and what doesn't and slowly developing a feel for when a decision is right and when it only looks right in the moment. A junior strategist can learn the mechanics of the job fairly quickly, but knowing which risks are worth taking and which ones are not takes longer and is something that only comes from doing it enough times to notice the pattern.

Instinct and Experience — Together

Instinct and experience work as a pair rather than substitutes for each other. Instinct on its own is a guess dressed up as confidence. Experience on its own, without the judgement to interpret it, is just doing the same work for years without getting sharper at it. Together they give a strategist the ability to move quickly and still get it right, which matters most when a client needs an answer today and not after a week of deliberation.

The same judgement also protects a client well beyond any single decision. A strategy that holds up under scrutiny is worth more than one that simply performs well in the short term, because attention fades within days while a client's standing, once it takes a hit, is far slower to recover.

Most experienced strategists can point to a specific call that looked right at the time and turned into a liability once circumstances shifted. What separates that outcome from a clean result is rarely luck. It is instinct catching what a first read missed.

The Part That Goes Unrecognised

Most of the credit in this profession goes to the outcome, the campaign that worked, the story that landed. Far less goes to the years it took to build the judgement that made those outcomes possible in the first place. This is not a complaint, since visible outcomes are naturally what get noticed. On World PR Day, it is simply worth naming that the judgement behind those outcomes is where the real skill of this profession sits, and it is the part that takes the longest to build.

For anyone earlier in their career, the honest advice is not to look for a way around this. The instinct comes from doing the work long enough, making enough calls and paying close attention to which ones were right and which ones weren't. There isn't a quicker route to it, and most people who have been doing this for a while would tell you the same thing.

*Image courtesy of contributor