If you’re reading this in the United States, happy Veterans Day. Thank you to everyone who served, to the families who served alongside them, and to the generations before them who did the same.

On Tuesday, Australia’s national airline Qantas, announced that Accenture would take over some of its back-office work as part of a multi-year technology overhaul. The agreement goes beyond bringing in consultants to recommend cost take out or efficiencies. Some services currently performed inside Qantas will move to Accenture teams based mostly in India and about 850 corporate roles are expected to be affected over the next few years, starting with finance, procurement, HR and marketing, with the first changes by mid-2027. CEO Vanessa Hudson told staff in an email, "I know this is hard news for some, and I'm sorry for the uncertainty it brings."

The same day, the Australian Services Union, which has members among Qantas's corporate staff, said it had been told previously that this wouldn't happen. "Earlier this year, Qantas told us directly there was no plan to offshore any jobs," said Scott Cowen, the union's assistant national secretary.

Qantas says that's wrong. "We have never given assurances to the union that some jobs wouldn't move offshore," a spokesperson said, adding that the two sides had met several times in recent months to discuss roles potentially moving to Accenture teams in India and Australia.

We aren’t going to litigate who’s right here and nothing published so far settles it but what is abundantly clear is that this disagreement has been in plain view for months.

The promise was in media coverage back in August

At the beginning of August, the Australian Financial Review reported that Qantas was considering outsourcing up to 1,000 positions to India under a proposal known as Project iQ citing several people briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously. The airline gave the classic holding statement saying it was in "early stage discussions with Accenture, but no formal agreement is in place and no decisions have been made." It also said it was looking at ways to speed up its use of technology and AI. That's a fair statement because it confirmed the talks and didn't pretend nothing was happening.

But look at what happened to that message afterwards. At least two Australian news outlets ran it under headlines saying Qantas had denied the offshoring reports. And in those same stories the union gave its own account of where things stood: Qantas had told it "there is no plan to offshore any Australian jobs," and the union expected the airline to "stay true to these commitments."

So from August on, an employee searching for news about their own job found three things that didn’t match: a careful non-answer from the company, a headline saying Qantas had denied it, and a union saying the airline had promised no jobs would go overseas.

“There’s no plan” may describe the position at that moment. It may also be understood (or presented) as a commitment about the future. We don’t know what happened in Qantas’s meetings but we do know that by August the union was publicly describing a commitment, while the company’s published statement described an unfinished decision.

Qantas also has some baggage here.

In August 2025, Australia’s Federal Court fined Qantas A$90 million for illegally outsourcing more than 1,800 ground-handling jobs during the pandemic, the largest penalty imposed for breaches of Australia’s industrial-relations laws. The airline had already paid another A$120 million into a compensation fund for affected workers. None of that tells us whether this new deal is legal of course but when you have that history, you should expect people to look closely at what you say about the next outsourcing plan and whether you follow through.

There are three+ versions of your position and you only wrote one of them

Three different positions were attributed to Qantas from August onward. The company’s own position, which simply confirmed talks and said nothing had been decided. The media version, which compressed that into a denial stronger than the company’s quoted statement. And the union’s, which described a commitment that no jobs would go overseas. Qantas only authored one of those positions itself but still had to live with the other two for three months.

I wrote in the Q3 Narrative Power Report that the environments we work in are getting more crowded, and that the hard part isn’t writing the statement anymore, it’s that four or five parties are describing your position at the same time and only one of those descriptions is yours.

This is what that looks like in practice. Qantas now has to defend the outsourcing decision and dispute what it supposedly promised before making it.

So the moment I’d most want a team to act on is the day somebody else describes a commitment you don’t recognize. When the union said publicly in August that it had been told there was no plan to offshore, that was the day to ask two questions inside the building. Did we say that? If so, does it still hold up? If the answer to either is no, go back to them privately that week and say so. If the published media account goes beyond what you said, ask the outlet to correct it and give employees the same clarification directly. If you did give an assurance and the position has changed, explain what changed and when.

From the outside there’s no telling whether Qantas did that, and it may well have, since its own account is that it was discussing India with the union for months. But a position attributed to you that you don’t correct is still yours to own.

That means knowing what’s being said in rooms you’re not in. The media line is the most careful version of the company’s position. The least careful one gets shared in a union meeting or a team huddle by someone trying to calm people down. Ask HR and employee relations what they’ve actually told people, in their words, not the talking points you sent them. And after any meeting with employee representatives, send a short written note saying here’s what’s decided, here’s what’s still being considered, here’s what we committed to, here’s when you’ll hear more, tell us if we got anything wrong. You may still disagree but at least you’ll be disagreeing about a document, which is a lot easier to settle than two different memories of a conversation.

That’s also the test I’d put a holding statement through before it goes out. Not “is this technically accurate,” but really think about it from the perspective of a union official or other stakeholder. What would they tell their members you just said? If the answer is a promise or a commitment, you need additional more direct language.

So before your next briefing on any unfinished plan, I’d gather the leadership team to align on answering one question the same way: are we telling people this hasn’t been decided, or are we telling them it won’t happen? If three people give you three different answers, fix that before any of them briefs someone else.

It shouldn't be this hard to get the facts.

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