From Books on Communication, in the Communication series.
Five Acts on the Communication That Fails Without a Signal
Bernhard Schieber
Find it · The diagnostic book of the series, organized by failure
The meeting ended well. The report is green. The acknowledgment arrived. And nothing happened.
Organizations find their failures because someone suffers and the suffering travels: upward, downward, across. Communication failure travels by none of these routes. It produces agreement, not pain, and months later its cost returns under another name: execution, resistance, leadership.
The Invisible Failure follows that failure in five acts, each named in words executives already use:
I. They said yes, and did something else.
II. If there were a problem, someone would have told me.
III. We rolled it out everywhere, and everywhere it became something else.
IV. We approved it unanimously, and nothing happened.
V. Nobody stopped it, and it still never arrived.
Each act shows the mechanism that keeps the failure silent, from the individual to the group, the organization, and society, and gives it a measure. The book stands on the shoulders of the research the series has gathered, and it is written as an argument, not a survey: a few models carry each act, and the rest of the field is one reference away.
What you cannot see has a measure.
In the series
The Invisible Failure is one of the three deep works of The Communication Series, between Communication at Scale, which follows every model and instrument of the series through every scale it reaches, and The Architecture of Communication. Four single-book works lead into its five acts: The Broken Premise, The Lineup, The Fine Print, and The Quarterback.
Formats
Paperback, 6 × 9 in. Ebook.