A Case for the Criticality of Organizational Communication

Consider the fact that the Homo Sapiens have fundamentally not changed for millennia. The same human that built Rome has built the iPhone today. But our society as a function of its knowledge and capabilities has progressed exponentially in the interceding time. How?

Think about transistors. 1 transistor is a switch. 3 of them could potentially be 3 switches. But connect them the right way, and they become a Logic Gate — a simple device able to make a Logical decision whereas 1 could do nothing better than be a manual switch. The vast leap from something inane to a device with logical decision-making capabilities is, frankly, amazing. This is all because of their interconnectedness. Furthermore, put a few million together and you have IBM’s computers of yore; a few billion and you have the chip that powers devices in our hands manifold more powerful than anything our forefathers could have dreamt of.

Likewise, we used to be a planet of a few million humans for ages, living more or less at the mercy of nature. Sure, there were a few spurts of sporadic growth. But these were largely driven by exceptional individuals — Pythagoras, Plato, Copernicus, Aryabhatta and many more. These periods of growth were therefore extremely short-lived — largely limited to the lifespan of these individuals — when seen on the timescale of centuries. Moreover, these were vastly dispersed over time as well.

It is important to note something on this point, though — the dispersion across centuries decrease as the centuries pass. For every Copernicus of the 15th century, there have been many more in every succeeding century. Nor is it just a statistical effect by virtue of population growth — the amount of “Copernicus per person” has been increasing in every century.

There is a dominant school of thought that ascribes Society’s rapid Societal Progress (I define this as the sum total of both our knowledge of the sciences and the commensurate technological capabilities) to our method of Scientific Inquiry. This school of thought says that the moment humanity shifted to an Empirical method of scientific research as opposed to the erstwhile mythical/non-Empirical method of scientific research (which was basically everyone pretending to know everything while almost nobody knew anything), we started on our trajectory of rapid upward growth in the Middle Ages. Until then, we were more or less living in darkness with little evolution of humanity over the centuries. Simply put (or not so simply), because we introduced scientific rigour into our methods, we started differentiating true knowledge from the faff of crackheads and charlatans. This enabled us to slowly build on the foundation of sound scientific knowledge, and progress thereon.

Au contraire, this is the effect of a more fundamental shift in the system of our society, not the cause of it. Scientific rigour might have propelled the knowledge of a few men (and, unfortunately, men is what all of them were, what with patriarchy and sexism) how exactly did it evolve Society? What is the gap between this chain of logic?

As you might have guessed, I believe the answer lies in the example of the transistor. Instead of being 3 separate switches, we became a Logical Gate. Simply put, we evolved in our methods of communication. The few millions of individuals were no longer just individuals, but became a Network — a collective Society. This Society became an entity unto itself (therefore the capital S in Society). Individuals remained the same, as they were and are, but with every passing day Society accumulated more knowledge. This Society is powered through the Network of individuals, which in turn is more fundamentally powered through communication.

Let’s take the example of an imaginary clan back when stone spears were cool (although one could argue that they still are). One person thought of the stone spear and started waving it around and threatening her friends with it. But she could only do so much — after all, in a 10 v 1 fight, the 1 will lose with or without a spear. But once she spread that knowledge to her clan, the sub-Society (i.e their clan) acquired the knowledge of the stone spear. This happened because she somehow communicated her knowledge of the stone spear. Even something as simple as her friend seeing the spear and replicating it, unbeknownst to her, is communication through display. Taking the hypothetical scenario further, this sub-Society — let’s call it sub-Society A — acquired the knowledge of the spear and attacked their neighbouring sub-Society, sub-Society B, with it. Most of sub-Society B died but a few got away and made their own spear, therefore sub-Society B acquired the knowledge of the stone spear. So on and so forth, until all of Society acquired this knowledge and therefore evolved to a more advanced state where the constituents of its network, i.e the individuals, largely had access to the knowledge of the stone spear. The point I am trying to make is that it wasn’t the invention of the stone spear that caused Society to progress — rather, it was solely the communication of said invention that eventually made Society a bit more matured.

The obvious question to ask, then, is what changed at the end of the Middle Ages that caused a sudden rapid growth that led to the Industrial Revolutions, if not a transformation of scientific enquiry? If communication is key, then communication did largely exist before it as well. So what variable altered to the extent that Society progressed within 2 centuries more than it had in its entire prior history of millennia?

The theory I favour is that the interconnectedness of humanity as a whole increased, as it has been increasing from the start. This interconnectedness is driven by Communication. The effectiveness of Communication has 2 components — quality of the medium of communication and the reach of the Network it belongs to. Around the 15th century, a handful of languages (English, French, Arabic etc) was used by a major share of the entire population, especially more so with the technological ones. Inventions such as the printing press during that time also drastically improved the quality of communication.

Both these factors, in turn, led to the network becoming wider with more people added to it. The equation looks something like this — summing of the factors of population growth, increased penetration of this network of connected people, as well as the quality of medium highly correlates to the evolution of Society. As such, our Society reached an inflexion point — a critical mass/threshold roughly between the 16th and 18th century after which Society started achieving an ever increasing rate of progress. Therefore, effective communication enabled this rate of rapid progress.

To sum up the idea so far — humans essentially form groups of small sub-Societies; the collective of all interacting Sub-Societies form the human Society. This Society is essentially a network driven majorly by communication. The evolution of this Society is dependent largely on the degree of effective communication/interconnectedness. One of the key takeaways is also that Societies outlast the lives and efforts of individuals. They are extremely robust systems that are able to withstand most shocks, both internal and external. This is the reason Societies have a life of their own; one could imagine this as a colony of ants. Each ant by itself is a blind, rather pathetic creature but a colony of ants as an entity behaves in a far more complex and intelligent manner than its constituents (a well-studied phenomenon called emergent behaviour in systems).

This model works exactly the same way for organisations. Every organization is a potential sub-Society, in the exact same way that communities of humans potentially form sub-Societies. An organization, to be sustainable, needs to become an entity unto itself. If it is dependent solely on individuals, then the organization becomes as short-lived as the individual. For it to be sustainable, the organization needs to become a thriving Network of its own. If this happens, the organization becomes robust enough to withstand most shocks, internal and external; even if the organization faces a 100% attrition rate, it will mostly survive.

A Society tends to assume a set of collective heuristics/norms that dictates its behaviour — one can picture it as an Amoeba that might constantly change its shape, yet the outer ephemeral layer is what actually makes the Amoeba. The norms and heuristics of Society are the outer layers in this analogy. They will change with time, yet at each moment they are the boundary layer of the Society they belong to.

In the same way, the vision, goals, operating rules, business decisions etc. are the outer layer of the organization-Amoeba. These things enable the entity — the organization — to have life by defining it. Yet, to drive the evolution of this organization, these sets of norms and heuristics aren’t enough because the organisation is a network. The only way for a Society to consistently evolve is through the communication and interconnectedness of its network when seen over a timescale of decades. Similarly, the only way to make an organisation evolve consistently is by ensuring it has effective communication in its network.

The difficult part is translating these abstract models to physical processes. While it’s well and good to say that an organization needs to be robust, how do you ensure it become so?

This is again well-studied and every business guru worth their salt has some dearly-held strategy for it. But regardless of how much these theories might diverge, they largely agree on the fundamentals — sustainable companies need to have a compelling vision, a suitably flexible structure, constant R&D and innovation, etc. And these are definitely true. But one thing that isn’t spoken about nearly enough is the intra-organizational interface i.e communication methods in organizations.

For most organizations to be sustainable over decades, they need to build products that matter — products that solve deep problems really well. Good solutions for these products will only come into fruition when they are made in a holistic manner. To be made in a holistic manner, the solution requires inputs from many different types of stakeholders, and contributors across many functions and fields. The iPhone wouldn’t be what it is today if so many different people hadn’t come together and contributed effectively — engineers, marketers, designers, design thinkers, consultants, researchers, and many others. For an organisation to have the capability of integrating extremely diverse and divergent teams into a single project team, the interfacing between every person that is a part of it needs to be seamless. This is largely the only way to build products that truly matter and will last for decades.

Organizations, therefore, need to focus a lot on its internal communication structures. Communication in the broadest sense possible — from briefing/debriefing, to opportunities for co-workers to chit-chat over water coolers, to emails, to non-verbal communication. Innovation is a key practice but the interface structure of the organization is the enabler for effective innovation. The better the communication structures, the better the interconnectedness of the organisation-Network.

This interconnectedness has 2 benefits. First, it enables individuals to build on a shared pool of organisational knowledge. The originator of an idea may bring the idea to 30% competition but that might be their maximum capability of taking it forward; a good organization should have somebody else who can take it from 30% to maybe 60%, and so on until they reach 100%. The competitive advantage this offers to organisations that are capable of this, over organisations that aren’t, is very significant. The quantum and quality of work of the former will, on average, be far above that of the latter.

Second, it makes the organisation robust by ensuring ideas are driven by organisations rather than individuals — this includes previously discussed aspects such as increased quality of projects due to diverse contributions, longevity of the idea due to the fact that the project decouples from individuals and becomes an affair of the sub-Society, i.e the organization, thereby evolving the organization itself.

We humans have always evolved and done well through the millennia because of our need to form harmonic and stable societies. This has always been possible because of our extensive methods of communication. After all, in George Orwell’s 1984, the idea that Big Brother would control the population by limiting the vocabulary to 6 words and thereby render the population mindless drones is well-acclaimed because it strikes a chord; intelligence needs a medium to spread. I believe that organisations need to evolve the same way that societies have; but since we have complete control over the former, we can achieve things in a few years that natural communities may take centuries to. Decoupling organisations from individuals and focussing on making the network stronger through better communication are key.

It seems fitting to end with Isaac Newton’s quote -

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”