Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 002
Who says what—with what effect
A disciplined audit separates source, message, channel, audience, and effects without assuming passive recipients
Premise
Many executive communication plans jump from message production to presumed impact. Harold D. Lasswell’s 1948 formula—Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?—forces leadership to expose the assumptions hidden between intention and consequence. Its value is decomposition: it makes communicator, content, medium, audience, and outcomes separately examinable.
That usefulness depends on a crucial historical boundary. Lasswell’s formula is not the “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet” model. No scholar clearly proposed that named direct-effects theory in formal form; later accounts constructed it as a simplified description of early media-effects thinking. Giving Lasswell authorship of it distorts both the formula and the historical record.
What the model is: Lasswell’s Formula in Knowledge →
Continue in the series
- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryAnalytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
- DomainEvidence & Evaluation
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Analytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
Organizes dimensions, distinctions, types or questions so that a situation can be examined systematically. A framework supplies structure, a typology distinguishes forms, and a heuristic offers a usable way to orient judgment.