The symptom
“Communication breakdown” is the explanation reached for whenever a strategy’s intent doesn’t show up consistently in what different parts of an organisation actually do. It’s a genuinely useful label in the sense that something did break down — but it’s imprecise enough to cover at least two quite different failures, and treating them as the same problem tends to produce a response aimed at only one of them.
The first kind of breakdown is vertical: a message from leadership doesn’t reach, or doesn’t land clearly with, the people expected to act on it. The second is lateral: two teams, both of whom received and understood the message clearly, interpret its implications for their own work differently, and neither has any reliable way of discovering that the other has landed somewhere different. Both get called “communication breakdown.” They call for different attention.
Distinguishing between them requires asking a slightly different question than the one most post-mortems reach for. Rather than asking whether the message was communicated, it’s worth asking specifically whether the people involved received the same message and still ended up somewhere different — because that single check separates the two failures cleanly, in a way that “was this communicated well” on its own does not.
What leaders usually conclude
Because both failures share a label, the instinctive response to either tends to be the same: communicate more, communicate more clearly, communicate more often. That response addresses the first kind of breakdown reasonably well — a clearer, more frequent message does tend to improve how reliably it reaches the people who need it. It does considerably less for the second kind, because the second kind isn’t a clarity problem. The message was clear. It was received accurately by both teams. What broke down was the coordination between two accurate but independently formed interpretations of what that message meant for their specific work. Repeating the same clear message to two teams who already understood it perfectly well the first time doesn’t create any new information that would help them notice they’ve diverged from each other.
What the evidence suggests
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research, published in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, named poor vertical communication explicitly as one of the “silent killers” of strategy implementation — a barrier operating largely below leadership’s own visibility, often because leadership believes a message has been communicated clearly when what actually reached the frontline was considerably thinner. This is the first kind of breakdown, and it’s the one most organisations are reasonably equipped to notice and address, because it shows up as a gap between what leadership said and what the organisation heard.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s separate research, published in Harvard Business Review and based on a multi-year study of more than 250 companies, points at the second kind. Their central finding was that vertical alignment processes were generally sound across the organisations they studied — the cascade from strategy to plan mostly worked — while lateral coordination between units was where execution consistently unravelled, with only 9% of managers saying they could reliably rely on colleagues in other functions all of the time. This isn’t a message failing to travel down. It’s two functions, each clear on their own instructions, lacking any reliable mechanism to check whether their independently formed interpretations actually align with each other.
Treating both as “communication breakdown” and responding with a single, generic fix — more communication — tends to genuinely help the first problem and leave the second almost entirely untouched, because more clarity from leadership does nothing to connect two peer teams who were each already clear, just clear about different things.
There’s a further complication: repeated attempts to fix a lateral coordination gap with more top-down messaging can actively obscure the real issue over time. Each additional communication effort produces a genuine, measurable improvement in message clarity, which shows up favourably in any survey of “do people understand the strategy.” That reported understanding can climb steadily while the underlying lateral coordination problem remains completely untouched, because the two things being measured — comprehension and coordination — were never the same thing to begin with.
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Questions worth considering
- When “communication breakdown” is cited as the cause of an execution problem, is it describing a message that didn’t travel down clearly, or two teams that each understood their own instructions and diverged anyway?
- Is the organisation’s response to communication problems calibrated to which of these it’s actually facing, or is it the same response regardless?
- Where two teams’ work depends on a shared interpretation of strategy, is there any mechanism for discovering a mismatch before it shows up downstream?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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