The control of environment

I've been wondering how an organisation controls its communications environment to the maximum efficiency and I'm beginning to think that the key is in the amount of leakage from the external environment that is encouraged. There are various stories about businesses that sell their culture so completely that everything from socks to vocabulary is standardised, ensuring complete compliance with corporate goals - however, those corporate goals are likely to become the wrong targets and increasingly inappropriate in a changing environment.

So the need to get the message across is countered by the need to ensure that it is the right message. That second point is a cauldron of trouble - does it suggest that the direction is the wrong one? Does it threaten the ego of the senior directors? Does it give too much encouragement to the Change Freaks who believe, like Shiva, in development through destruction, without appreciating that systems work and that there are people whose identity is bound up in those systems?

I've seen organisations with no real message to communicate; and organisations where their message fails to appreciate the local culture, so that it is filtered and flattened to comply with local beliefs and objectives; and organisations where the message is so heavy-handed that criticism is traitorous and feedback is carefully controlled ... and ignored.

The consistent observation is that organisations do not understand the factors involved, I suppose, and are ill-equipped to deal with them on a personal and systematic level. The key gaps are usually in organisational intelligence functions and the related field of internal communications.

The worst thing is, from my point of view as a communications consultant, is that so few organisations seem to care!