Talk When You Have To, Not When You Want To

There are two kinds of speakers in every room, every newsroom, every comment section, and every press briefing: those who talk because they have something ready to say, and those who talk because everyone else is talking. The difference between them is not talent. It is discipline. And in a profession built entirely on words, that distinction should be the first thing a public relations practitioner learns — and, increasingly, the first thing every citizen with a smartphone needs to relearn.

Two Ways of Speaking

Talking when you have to follows a process. An idea is conceived. It is tested against research, weighed in consultation, checked for what it will cost the organisation or the person if it is wrong. Only after that process is the speaker equipped — with facts, with context, with an understanding of who is listening and what is at stake — to make a statement. The statement, when it finally comes, carries weight precisely because of what preceded it.

Talking when you want to skips all of that. It is speech driven by the presence of other speech: a trending hashtag, a colleague's hot take, a microphone that happens to be nearby. The impulse is not “I have something the moment needs” but “others are talking, so I should too.” It fills silence rather than serving it. It performs relevance instead of earning it.

Both produce words. Only one produces communication.

Why This Matters More in PR

Public relations exists at the exact point where an organisation's private thinking becomes public statement. That makes the profession the natural home of “talk when you have to” — and its most frequent violator of the rule.

A spokesperson under pressure to respond within the hour is tempted to fill that hour with whatever sounds confident, rather than with what has actually been verified. A brand watching a competitor's campaign go viral feels the pull to say something, anything, to stay in the conversation. A crisis unfolds, and the loudest voice in the room — not necessarily the best-briefed one — ends up in front of the cameras.

Each of these is “talk when you want to” wearing the costume of professionalism. And each one is how reputations are lost in a single news cycle: not because the organisation did something unforgivable, but because it spoke before it was ready to.

The practitioners who last in this field are the ones who have made peace with silence. They understand that “no comment, we are gathering the facts” is not weakness — it is the visible evidence of a process still running. They would rather be seen as slow and accurate than fast and wrong, because audiences forgive a pause far more easily than they forgive a retraction.

A Discipline, Not a Talent

This is worth stating plainly: the ability to hold back is not a personality trait some people are born with and others are not. It is a discipline that can be built into how an organisation — or an individual — operates.

For a PR practitioner, that discipline looks like a simple internal sequence before any public statement leaves the building: What do we actually know? Who have we consulted? What is the worst-case reading of this statement, and can we defend it? If the answers are not ready, the statement is not ready either, regardless of how urgent the moment feels.

For the ordinary citizen on social media, the same sequence applies in miniature. Before adding a voice to a pile-on, a trending debate, or a breaking story: Do I know enough to say this? Have I checked it, or am I repeating what I saw someone else say with confidence? Am I adding information, or just adding volume?

The Cost of Talking Because Others Are Talking

Ghana's public conversation — like public conversations everywhere in the social media age — has never had more speakers or less silence. Everyone now has a platform. Few pause to ask whether they have earned the right to use it on a given subject at a given moment.

The result is a public square where noise increasingly substitutes for insight. Half-formed opinions travel at the same speed as verified facts. Statements made to be first outrun statements made to be right. Institutions that once had the luxury of a day to respond now face pressure to respond in minutes, and that pressure — more than any actual constraint on their knowledge — is what pushes them from “talk when you have to” into “talk when you want to.”

The irony is that this compulsion to speak rarely achieves what it sets out to achieve. It does not make the speaker more relevant; it makes their voice indistinguishable from the crowd's. It is the considered voice — the one that waited, checked, and then spoke — that people remember and trust.

A Standard Worth Adopting

None of this is an argument for silence as a virtue in itself. Silence that never ends is its own failure — organisations that go quiet during a crisis and never resurface with answers do just as much damage as those who spoke too soon. The discipline is not in refusing to talk. It is in refusing to talk before you have to.

For PR practitioners, that means building the consultation and verification step into the workflow long before a crisis makes it urgent — so that when the moment to speak arrives, the organisation is already equipped rather than scrambling. For everyone else, navigating a media environment that rewards instant reaction, it means a smaller, humbler habit: pausing long enough to ask whether you have something to say, or simply the urge to say something.

The two will always look similar in the moment. Only afterward, when the statement has landed and either held up or fallen apart, does the difference become impossible to miss.

Talk when you have to. Not when you want to.

Rexford Adjei Darko is a Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher.

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