Executive Essay · The Communication Trap
An executive essay on what the word is covering, with four checks to run before the next program
“We have a communication problem” may be the most readily accepted sentence in organizational life. Nobody argues with it. It comes back at the top of the employee survey, it is the first finding of most reviews after something has gone wrong, and it arrives with its remedy attached: a statement, a channel, a format, a course.
The remedy is bought. Some of the trouble eases, because some of it really was about how people speak, write and listen. The rest stays, and a year later it is called communication again.
It stays because the word is covering several different things at once. One is a capability: knowing what to say, how to say it, and whether it was understood. The others are conditions: what happens to the person who speaks, who is able to act on what was said, and whether what is known reaches the place where it is decided. A course reaches the first. It does not reach the others. And because everyone can speak and hear, the first is assumed to be in place when often it is not.
What follows is a working model of how this plays out at four scales, with one check at each that can be run before anything is commissioned.
The individual: what to say, how to say it, and whether it is worth it
Start with the person, because that is where the failure shows.
Someone saw a problem early and said nothing, or said something that nobody took as a warning. From outside this looks like one thing. It is one of three.
The person did not know what they had. It was an unease and not yet a fact, and they could not tell whether the fault was in the work or in their own understanding. Or they knew what they had and did not know how to hand it over: to whom, in what form, so that another person could act on it. Or they knew both and judged that it was not worth it, because speaking would cost them something or would change nothing.
The first two are matters of capability, and they are far more common than organizations suppose. Speaking comes with the body, but communicating is a judgment that has to be exercised afresh each time, and most people have never been taught that it is a skill at all. So they do not know whether they have it. The third is a condition, and no amount of teaching addresses it.
The usual reading collapses the three into one. Either “they lacked the courage,” which presumes they had a finished sentence ready, or “they need communication skills,” which presumes nothing stood in their way.
Audit implication: take the last thing that arrived too late and ask the person who first knew: what exactly did you have at that moment, a fact or a doubt? Then ask whether they could have put it clearly, to the right person, in a setting where nothing was at stake. If they could not, there is something to teach. If they could, the obstacle is not in them.
The group: what it does with what is said
Move up one scale. A group teaches its members when to speak, and it does so without a word.
Every group has things that are said and things that are stepped around. People learn the difference by watching. Often a single case is enough: someone once raised the awkward point, was heard out politely, and was afterwards consulted a little less. Everyone present drew the conclusion. Most of those who keep quiet in a group have never tested the rule themselves.
There is a gentler mechanism that does more work than fear. A concern is raised, heads nod, someone says it should be looked at, and the meeting moves on. Nobody takes it up. The one who spoke feels heard and the others feel they have responded. Repeat that a few times and the group has taught a second lesson: speaking is safe here, and useless.
These are different conditions. A group can remove every risk and still be deaf. And attention tends to go to the one who speaks, when it is the one who receives, and how they react in the first seconds, who decides whether there is a next time. That holds for whoever leads the group and for every member in turn.
Often the group has simply never worked out what to do when someone does say it. Whose is it now? Who looks into it, and by when? What if it is only a suspicion?
Audit implication: take the last three concerns raised in this group and trace what became of each. Who took it, by when, and what was reported back to the person who raised it? If nobody can say, the group is teaching futility, however safe its members report feeling.
The organization: where it goes
At the next scale the question is the route.
An organization that has been surprised often concludes that people must speak, and says so in a policy or a values statement, or by declaring an open door. The request is sincere. It leaves open what happens next.
Follow one piece of unwelcome news upward. At each hand it is shortened, because the next person has less time. The doubt is trimmed first. It is merged with other items and given a color or a number. By the time it reaches someone with the authority to act, it is a calm line in a summary. Nobody concealed anything along the way, because each hand was only summarizing.
Then there is who decides. Those who know the work best often have no authority over the date or the budget, and those with the authority receive the work as a digest. A person can speak with complete clarity to someone who cannot act on it.
And there is what is rewarded. Where people are measured on the date, the one who reports that the date will not hold is reporting against themselves. Where every hour is committed, careful listening goes first, since a doubt takes longer to hear than a status.
The remedies an organization reaches for share one feature. A new statement, a revised reporting procedure, a standard format, a channel, an extra meeting, a course: each changes what is said or how. None changes what becomes of it. Some carry a cost of their own. In a fixed format the fact survives and the judgment falls out, because there is no field for “I am uneasy and cannot yet say why.”
The instruments used to reach the diagnosis do not help either. A survey records how the trouble is felt, and people call most of what goes wrong between them communication. It does not show what produces it.
Audit implication: follow one real case from the person who first knew to the decision that was taken. Count the hands it passed through and note what each removed. Check whether the person it reached could act on it, and what happened afterwards to the one who brought it.
Society: what was assumed before anyone looked
The widest scale is the least measured, and what follows should be read with that in mind. Its mechanisms can be described. How much each one weighs is not known.
A society that has never separated speaking from communicating hands its organizations four things. The first is an assumption: anyone who can talk can communicate, so success is expected and failure must be someone’s carelessness. The second is a vocabulary in which messages are sent, delivered and received like parcels, which makes clearer messages and better channels the only remedies that come to mind. The third is a few figures that everyone has heard, about how much of meaning lies outside the words or how much of failure is due to communication, which nobody can trace to a count. The fourth is a ready purchase. Courses in speaking, listening and difficult conversations are on sale in known lengths at known prices, and they were prepared before any particular buyer’s problem was examined.
Other things come in with people. Their schooling and profession have already told them whose judgment may be questioned by whom. They are expected to be reachable at all times, which multiplies messages and uses up the unbroken attention that hearing a doubt requires.
Nobody in this is acting in bad faith. Sellers offer what is asked for. Buyers choose something available and defensible over an inquiry of uncertain length. But the order of events is fixed from outside: the purchase comes first, and the examination, if it comes at all, comes after a failure.
Audit implication: for the last communication program you approved, ask what examination came before the purchase, and on what evidence the problem was named communication. If the answer is a survey result or a figure everyone knows, the diagnosis was imported along with the remedy.
The four at once
These are not four stages. They are present together in one ordinary moment.
A meeting is ending. Whoever leads it asks: anything else? Three seconds pass, nobody speaks, and the record shows that no concerns were raised.
One person at the table had an unease about a figure and no sentence for it yet. The others had seen what followed the last time someone slowed things down, and each waited for someone else to begin. The agenda had no place for a doubt, and nobody in the room could have moved the date in any case. And everyone present took the closing question as sufficient, because that is how meetings end everywhere.
Take any one of these away and the silence would have been a different one. When the figure later proves wrong, the review will ask who knew, find one name, and recommend communication training.
What is left in your hands
None of this argues against teaching people to communicate. Where the capability is missing it has to be taught, and it is missing more often than anyone assumes. The argument is about what is examined first, and about not sending one remedy to do the work of several.
For the individual: establish whether the person did not know what to say, did not know how, or judged it not worth saying, before prescribing anything.
For the group: look at what it does with what is said. Work with those who receive as well as those who speak, on real cases of their own.
For the organization: decide where what is said goes: who receives it, who may act, what is done with a doubt, what becomes of the one who brings it, and when there is time for it.
For society: notice which parts of the diagnosis were assumed and not found, and look before you buy.
Then teach. Teach it as judgment, on the real work, to the people who have to meet, together, with someone checking what arrives. In that order the teaching holds. Where it is the first and only step, it is being asked to carry everything else as well.
It was never only a communication problem, and it was never not one either. The word was right about part of the trouble. The check at each scale is there to find how large that part is before the next program is approved.