okay I have a tip for you and then I'm going to back up and explain why I think it's important the tip is when you're trying to communicate some new vision of the future some new strategy for getting there it's a part of a major change effort watch out how much and where and what are the vehicles for communicating because it is very very easy for you not to under communicate a little bit but to under communicate by huge amounts in a way that will literally literally kill a change effort even if it's a brilliant
strategy even if it's obviously so important to the people at the top of the organization super under communication dead change now why does this happen let's assume that you're part of the core team that is trying to devise a new strategy better yet you've just bought si P you're putting in this huge new information technology system you may be spending half or three-quarters of your day working on this humongous change that's going to happen in the organization that's what's happening to you every day the amount of information that's coming at you and you're passing out
the communication that's coming at you and you're passing out on this project is just humongous and it feels like at a gut level that there must be just gigantic amount of almost too much time is being spent on communicating about this stuff so when you get to that phase where you really need to make lots of people understand why you're putting in this new system what it is how it ties to some you have of the future of the company being a winner what is the strategy for doing it etc etc there is a tendency
to use a few channels a few speeches a few memos or electronic equivalent and nevertheless it feels inside like you've communicated a lot but when I see situations like this I go down three levels in the hierarchy and people are going why because in their lives if you look at what they're doing and you look at the time that the communication came at them as a part of their lives maybe it's one tenth of one percent or one hundredth of one percent of the time in their week and of course with with data being blasted
at them constantly it gets totally lost they don't know what's going on and the problem wasn't just a little bit of under communication it was a huge amount can you do something practically about that companies do the 10% to get it right do they find new vehicles they use interesting emerging technologies they find ways to be efficient and that's the key not not driving resource after resource into the a gigantic communication program they find ways to efficiently use what's going on to beam out information in lots of different ways to lots of different people constantly
not once a month but daily and that is phenomenally important in trying to push a change along and make it successful
