Communication is the connective-tissue of strategy.

The inertial forces of marketplace competition render an organisation’s strategy obsolete unless it adjusts its activities carving a new winning position. The ensemble of activity within an organisation defines its value-chain. Communication serves as the mechanism to connect and re-align activities towards the new position. However, much like strategy making, communication is an imperfect learning process requiring a considered and deliberate approach to account for the uncertainties of the marketplace and changes within the organisation.

People can respond tumultously to change. The approach communication can be effective in overcoming that fear of change. “A strategy for communication about uncertainty” outlines five different approaches:

Each is a generalisation of observed approaches with ‘Underscore & explore’ being the most effective:

The issue is a change in Porter’s Five Competitive Forces. The organisation success is a new set of integrated decisions leading to a winning position. Focusing on how the issue is linked to the organisation’s success explaisn to employees the why. Why the organisation needs to shift, change, or pivot. Crucially, the approach gives automony to those not decision makers to adapt and therefore empower to make change.

This is not a ‘my door is always open’ at the end of a powerpoint presentation about an ‘executive decision’ at the conclusion of a town-hall with 100 people. That’s low-effort, poor engagement, and not communication. Small, and open forums allows to and fro of issues, ideas, and understanding is more appropriate. Leadership is not just the executives at the top but permeates down through the hierarchy.

Strategy decisions mostly happen at the top of the hierarchy and its the immediate supervisors and employees are the most impacted. One imperfection of communication is that transmission is its lossy nature; the core message discussed loses potency as it reaches the bottom. Therefore the quality of leadership and middle management and their communication is crucial to reducing this loss.

Authentic leadership has an:

Transparent organisational communication is not top-down one-way communiques but interactions that traverse the hierarchy. Authenticity, like leadership, is hard to define because it’s simple a construct. An intangible. But academic definition of this is:

How well self-awareness is internalised by leadership is projected in the moral perspective, information processing, and transparency. Importantly, the definition highlights working with followers meaning a positive and productive relationship must exist.

Inauthentic leadership and badly communicated decisions are are, for lack of a better word, bullshit which is well understood in academic literature:

John Petrocelli writes alot about this topic. And to describe the behaviour of bullshitting:

If a decision made is a career ambition that has little regard for the competitive environment of the organisation then any communication will come across as inauthentic and therefore BS. People will smell the proverbial turd and the strategy will not envolve in a direction the positions the organisation to win. Personal strategies are not organisational strategies and shows a lack of self-awareness from leadership.

Connecting an organisation’s activities to pivot in a new strategic direction requires effective communication. It links the issues faced by the organization with a path to success, explaining the ‘why’ and mitigating the tumultuous behaviors that arise during periods of change. If leadership at all levels cannot engage with the issues and foster two-way communication, any attempt to re-position the organization will fail. People, whether consciously or subconsciously, perceive inauthentic behavior as BS and will not respond in the intended manner.