By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassThe communications plan is on track. Eleven emails sent, two town halls held, an intranet hub live, a monthly newsletter, and a video from the sponsor with 3,400 views.
The readiness survey comes back and 44 per cent of people say they do not know what is changing for them. Both statements are accurate, and the second one is the outcome that matters.
The gap is measurable, and leaders are on the wrong side of it
This is not an impression. McKinsey’s survey of 1,657 executives on transformation found that frontline employees do not perceive the communications they receive to be as effective as their leaders think they are.
That is a structural finding rather than a comment on any particular programme. Leaders assess communication from the sending end, where they can see effort, volume and intent. Employees assess it from the receiving end, where the only question is whether they now know what to do differently. Those two vantage points reliably disagree, and the sending end is the one that writes the status report.
The same survey found only 39 per cent of respondents saying their organisation had built broad ownership of the change effort — and 11 per cent at companies whose transformations failed. Volume of communication and ownership of change are close to unrelated.
Broadcast optimises for the thing that can be counted
Reach, open rates, attendance and views are all easy to measure and all describe the sender’s activity. Comprehension, relevance and behaviour change are hard to measure and describe the receiver’s state.
Given a monthly governance meeting that wants numbers, the countable metrics win, and the plan quietly reorganises itself around producing them. More emails is an achievable action. “More people understand what changes for them” is not an action at all until someone works out what would cause it.
| What broadcast does well | What it cannot do |
|---|---|
| Establish that something is happening | Explain what happens to this person’s role |
| Give a consistent account of why | Answer the question the person is actually holding |
| Provide a reference people can return to | Detect that the message was misunderstood |
| Signal seniority and commitment | Surface the objection nobody will raise in a town hall |
| Reach everyone at once | Produce ownership, which requires people to work something out |
The left column is genuinely valuable, and broadcast is the only economical way to get it. The failure is treating the left column as the whole job.
The cascade is where it stops
Most plans assume a cascade: the sponsor tells the leadership team, who tell their managers, who tell their teams. On paper the message reaches everyone within a fortnight.
In practice the cascade stops at the layer where somebody cannot answer the next question. A manager who has been given a slide but not the answers to “does this affect my headcount” or “what do I tell someone who cannot do the new process” will do one of two things: forward the deck without discussion, or hold a brief meeting that avoids the difficult part. Neither transmits anything.
This is why cascade failure is not a communications problem to be solved with better materials. It is a manager readiness problem, and the diagnostic question is simply whether managers can answer the three questions their teams will actually ask.
What actually changes behaviour
The most reliably replicated finding in this tradition is nearly eighty years old. Kurt Lewin’s wartime food-habits studies compared lectures with facilitated group discussion and decision; the groups that discussed and decided changed their behaviour at far higher rates than those who were told.
The mechanism is not that discussion is friendlier. It is that working something out and committing in front of peers produces a different relationship to the outcome than receiving a conclusion does. That finding survives when almost nothing else attributed to Lewin does, and it is the strongest argument against a broadcast-only plan.
Practically, this means the highest-value communication activity is usually the smallest: a forty-five minute session with one team, working through what specifically changes for them, with someone present who can answer questions and change something in response.
A better shape
- Broadcast the stable facts once, properly. Why, when, and where to find things. Then stop re-sending it.
- Move the budget into small-group sessions by function, where what changes is specific and questions can be answered on the spot.
- Equip managers before the announcement, not with it. Give them the answers to the awkward questions, including “we have not decided that yet, and here is when we will”.
- Route objections somewhere they can act on them. If a session surfaces a real problem and nothing changes, you have taught that group that consultation is theatre — and the next session will be quiet.
- Measure comprehension, not reach. Ask four people in each function to say what changes for them. Two minutes per person, and it is the only communications metric that describes the receiver.
None of this requires more communication. Most programmes are already over-communicating the why and under-communicating the what-changes-for-you, and adding volume to a broadcast channel makes the second problem worse by consuming the attention that the specific conversation needed.
More on readiness and leadership action in the Change Readiness Hub, or read why communication and engagement are different things.