If you haven't been following this one, here's the backstory. Back in April, a few diabetes researchers published an editorial in one of the field's journals criticizing the Trump administration's cuts to medical research funding. It was the kind of thing that normally gets read by a few hundred people in the field and forgotten, and by one former ADA president's estimate, that's about how many views it originally had. Then, in the span of a week, it became national news and cost two of the American Diabetes Association's most senior leaders their jobs. And it wasn't because of the content in said editorial but because of how the ADA reacted to people talking about it.

So here's what actually happened. On June 5, at the ADA's big annual conference in New Orleans, a group of well-known diabetes and obesity researchers started passing out printed copies of that editorial. It's worth being clear about who these people were and what they were handing out, because it's the whole story. The editorial had run in Diabetes Care, the ADA's own journal. One of the people distributing it, Dr. Steven Kahn, is the editor-in-chief of that journal. Another, Dr. Desmond Schatz, is a former ADA president of medicine and science. So these weren't outside protesters, they were some of the most senior people in the organization, handing out something the organization itself had published.

They were doing it just outside the room where the Trump administration's NIH director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was about to give the keynote. Within minutes, Louisiana State Police walked five of them out of the building, took their conference badges, and banned them from the rest of the event. Bhattacharya ended up canceling his keynote anyway, the ADA said he had a last-minute conflict that required him to meet with President Trump, and a senior NIH official spoke in his place.

One thing the ADA still hasn't explained is who actually made the call to bring in the police. Was it a deliberate decision by leadership, or did on-site security escalate and nobody senior stepped in to stop it? That distinction matters a lot but from the outside, and to everyone watching the video, it landed the same way: an organization having its own top scientists removed by police for sharing the organization's own research.

Then the comms made it worse. The ADA's first move was to defend itself. It said the researchers had broken the conference's code of conduct, and that as a nonprofit it had to keep the event nonpartisan. That's not a crazy thing to say, nonprofits really do have to be careful about politics, and conference organizers really do set rules about what gets handed out on the floor. But it wasn't what anyone was upset about, and leading with the rulebook while video of police removing your own journal's editor was spreading online came across exactly the way you'd expect... like an institution hiding behind technicalities instead of dealing with what just happened. The rule may have been real but it certainly wasn't an answer.

Here's the detail that most of the coverage gets in the wrong order, and it's the one I'd put in front of any leader dealing with self-inflicted damage. The two resignations -president-elect Jennifer Green and planning-committee chair Mark Atkinson - both happened by June 8. The CEO's apology didn't come out until June 10. So the resignations weren't a reaction to a weak apology. They were a reaction to that first defensive response. And we know that directly, because Atkinson's name had been on the letter the ADA sent attendees defending the removals, and he resigned because he couldn't stand behind what it said. He called the letter "problematic, insufficiently apologetic, and not fully accurate." Think about what that means: the person who ran the meeting quit over the organization's words, not over the security decision itself. By the time the apology showed up, the damage from the defense had already done its work.

And the apology didn't fix it, because it was written to avoid admitting anything. CEO Chuck Henderson said: "Regardless of the circumstances that led to those events, I recognize the impact that experience had. I am deeply sorry for the hurt, frustration, and the pain that resulted." Notice that nobody in those sentences actually does anything. Whole lot of passive voice. The hurt "resulted." The circumstances "led to" events. The membership, a roomful of scientists who read carefully for a living, caught it immediately.

The real lesson here isn't about how to write a better apology, though this was a bad one. It's about the decision that came before any of it. Before you move to shut down criticism, whether it's coming from inside your company or from the outside, be honest with yourself about what the criticism is actually costing you versus what shutting it down will cost. An editorial that a few hundred people have read is a small problem. Five researchers being walked out by police is the most shareable possible version of that same problem. Most criticism inside an organization has a tiny natural audience but trying to crush it is usually what hands it a big one.

The ADA has promised an independent review, and that's a real path back if they want one. But how they handle whatever it turns up will decide whether this becomes a bad chapter or a permanent stain. If the review comes out slowly, or half-finished, or with the uncomfortable parts blacked out, it'll just be the next version of this same mistake.

Here's a thing worth remembering the next time you're sitting on good news and bad news at the same time: if your audience is already nervous, your good news isn't the headline. Their nervousness is. And anything you hand them that feeds that nervousness, even something small, even something you mention in passing, is what they'll grab.

Two companies reported earnings the same day last week, and together they make this point cleanly.

Adobe had a genuinely great quarter. Record revenue, strong growth, its AI business tripling year over year, and it raised its forecast for the year. On paper, this is the kind of quarter you frame and hang on the wall. The stock fell anyway.

It fell because Adobe's investors didn't walk in asking "how was the quarter." They walked in worried about two things: whether AI is eventually going to eat the software business these companies are built on, and whether Adobe is steady at the top, given that the CEO already announced he's leaving once they find a replacement. So when Adobe delivered its great quarter and, in the same breath, mentioned that its CFO was also leaving and quietly trimmed its forecast for how fast the core business will keep growing on its own (that second part being exactly what the AI worriers were watching) the audience grabbed the worrying bits and ran. The record revenue was real, it just wasn't the question anyone in the room was actually asking.

To be fair to Adobe, some of this wasn't a choice. When a CFO leaves, you have to disclose it promptly; the law doesn't let you sit on it for a better moment. But putting the departure, the softer forecast, and the record quarter all into one announcement, with no effort to prepare anyone first... that was a choice. One analyst put it about as plainly as it gets: when you've already got a CEO transition underway, the last thing you want is a CFO transition landing on top of it. That's a packaging problem, and packaging is our job.

Now the contrast, which is where it gets humbling for those of us in this work. The same day, (RH) Restoration Hardware reported an actual loss, and its stock went up. You may remember we wrote about RH's CEO, Gary Friedman, back in April, when he opened a rough earnings call by quoting Einstein and the stock dropped about 20 percent. Friedman talks like that all the time, soaring, philosophical, the whole thing in capital letters. This time he talked exactly the same way. What did change was that his company finally had a real answer to the one thing investors had been worried about for months: the tariff damage. RH said it's moving production out of China and showed how the pain works its way out over the year. That answer is what moved the stock. Friedman's words were the same words. They just happened to be sitting on top of something solid this time instead of filling space where the answer should have been.

That's a helpful consideration because it cuts against what people expect us to believe about our own craft. In neither case did the communications move the outcome much. RH didn't talk its way up; it answered the actual worry. Adobe didn't talk its way down; it fed an existing fear and let people connect the dots. The words mostly rode along on top of the substance.

But there's a narrow, real piece of this that is ours, and it's the Adobe lesson. You usually can't change what your audience is afraid of walking in. What you can sometimes control is whether you hand them fresh fuel for that fear, and whether you hand it to them all at once or give them a chance to absorb it. So before your next big announcement, earnings, a reorg, a leadership change, a recall, anything where good and bad news collide, ask two questions. What is this audience already afraid of? And is there anything in what I'm about to say that lands right on top of that fear, that I could be sequencing or setting up differently instead of bundling into one breath? You don't get to pick the fear but you do get to decide whether you walk in and feed it.

The 52nd G7 Summit opened today in Évian-les-Bains, France, and runs through Wednesday, June 17. Three things on the agenda matter to people who run communications at companies with global exposure, and they're not the things leading most of the summit coverage.

The first is Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, and it's moving fast. The strait has been largely closed to commercial traffic since late February, when conflict with Iran erupted. But the new development this weekend is that a US-Iran agreement to reopen the strait appears close. Trump said last week the deal was largely negotiated, and Macron, previewing the summit, said the agreement was expected to be signed around the gathering, with Gulf states involved and a UK-France coalition standing ready to clear mines once it holds. For any CEO with energy, shipping, or Gulf exposure, that flips the operational question. A week ago it was "how long does the closure last?" Today it's "how fast, and how reliably, does the strait actually reopen?", because a signed deal and a cleared, insurable shipping lane are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where costs and timelines actually live. If your company sits anywhere near that route, this is the brief that takes priority over everything else at the summit.

The second is China and trade, the thread we picked up last week. On June 11, Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing joined a video conference Macron hosted on global economic imbalances alongside India, South Korea, and the IMF, and called for "a free and convenient trade environment." The timing was the message. The summit's trade agenda centers on the surge of low-priced Chinese exports, and EU leaders take up their own position on Beijing in the period that follows Évian, a process that runs through EU institutional channels and could take months, even if the directional signal lands by the end of the week.

The third is critical minerals. The summit builds on the Critical Minerals Production Alliance that G7 leaders launched at last year's Kananaskis summit; under that alliance, partners announced roughly C$6.4 billion in projects last fall aimed at reducing dependence on single-source supply chains. This is a target for channeling public and private investment, not a government check, but the direction is clear: the G7 is trying to build mineral supply that doesn't run through China, and Évian is expected to push it further.

None of this is a communications story on its own but it does become one if your company has real exposure, like supply chain, manufacturing, energy, or revenue, and the signals out of Évian prompt questions your CEO is expected to have a view on before the next analyst call or reporter email. The homework is narrow: do you have a clear, defensible position on how a Hormuz reopening timeline, potential tariff escalation, and minerals supply shifts hit your costs, your pricing, and your market access? If the honest answer is "not yet," Wednesday is your working deadline.