Clarify Root Causes of Poor Communication

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” (repeated by prison warden in "Cool Hand Luke")

Of course not all facts should be communicated. While the importance of protecting vital confidentiality cannot be overemphasized, what is and is not confidential is a matter of crucial judgment. Trust and confidence can be inhibited or destroyed to the degree confidentiality is abused, either by neglecting to preserve proper confidentiality or by being overly obsessive and paranoid in refusing to share information.

For purposes of this current topic, we will assume propriety in maintaining proper confidentiality of what should NOT be communicated, and focus on doing better at whatever it takes to more effectively communicate all that SHOULD be communicated to improve profit, cash flow, and the market value of the company.

Clarifying and overcoming root causes of poor communication will increase profit, cash flow, and market value.

Poor communication is wasteful and counterproductive. To not be dealing with reality is a killer of time and resources. The complete truth is more than just facts of random value; it requires the added clarity of insightful priorities.

All efforts to improve company efficiency, productivity, or effectiveness, much less profitability, cash flow, and market value, must take into account the quality of human communication within the company. Not just from management to employees, but from employees to management and the multitude of timely and truthful messages needed from any one person to another that can improve business value.

The human communication factor in the world of improvement can be negative (obfuscation - fuzziness, muddiness, avoidance) or positive (clarification - truthfulness, completeness, priority valued). Obfuscation is more than conventional lies, denials, & deception. To obfuscate is to disguise, conceal, confuse or complicate, even by avoidance (passive resistance). The antonym is to clarify.

What exactly is confused, disguised, concealed, or complicated by obfuscation? We can call it the truth or reality. Synonyms for truth include fact, reality, certainty, accuracy, genuineness, exactness, legitimacy, veracity, honesty, candor, integrity, etc. Antonyms include fiction, falsehood, error, dishonesty.

Obfuscation may be due to any mix of: (1) seeking potential gain from promoting error, (2) fear of the consequences of communicating the truth, and (3) apathy, ineptness, mental impairment, and accident.

The more sensational category of seeking gain through fraud, demagoguery, and other forms of abuse gets the most press, and is the cause of costly attempts at regulation. The other categories are more hidden, but probably more common and costly. The concealment of truth, deliberate or unintentional is a major barrier to improvement which can be reduced by improved leadership, management style, and resultant company culture and organizational design and development. The transparency of open book management is conducive to if not vital to improvement.

Truth is knowledge of things as they really are, as they really were, and as they really are to come. Knowledge that is filtered by fear, covered up, denied, or misrepresented is obviously less visible. Visibility is the first and most important level of clarity.

Improvement requires clarity about base line conditions. The truth must be clearly described and accurately revealed by those who know so that all affected can make needed improvements. Truth is more than appearances. Symptoms are appearances. Truth that matters most to improvement has to do with root causes, which are identified through increasingly deeper levels of clarity.

Common thread root cause clarification has immense potential to increase cash flow, corporate value, and everything else good in and about the company.

Because the barriers of fear, apathy, cynicism, ineptness, mental impairment, and accident are massively costly, clarifying and overcoming their root causes is enormously profitable.