Communications: Top down vs reality

Catching up on the RSS feeds, Steve Crescenzo (what a great name) has written a post; Replacing "corporate" with "creative" on his blog Corporate Hallucinations (another great name, btw.)

He starts:

Is "corporate communication" an oxymoron?
It's easy to believe that when you see as many employee publications and press releases as I do.
They all look the same. Generic headlines, horrific leads, cliched photographs, boilerplate copy, acronyms and buzzwords galore, and terrible quotes.

later suggesting that:

So we concentrate on making deadlines and creating content that won't raise any red flags with executives, lawyers, sources, or anyone else who is going to see it before it goes "live."

And you know what? We win those battles. We make our deadlines (usually); stuff eventually gets through the approval process--scarred and changed, perhaps, but it gets through.

So we win those two battles . . . and by doing so we lose the war for readership. We create safe, sterile, generic "corporate" content that employees, reporters, and other audiences immediately dismiss, if they notice it at all.

But it doesn't have to be that way! There are communicators out there who are swimming upstream, fighting the good fight, raging against the corporate machine . . . and replacing the "corporate" in corporate communication with "creative."

They're challenging the "approvers." They're using techniques that work in the real world. They're throwing out the stuff that doesn't work and finding creative ways of reaching their audiences.

In my notably not very humble opinion, this whole battle is all about the conflict between a belief in the "top down" approach and the reality of how our organisations work.

I do have to concede that in our current world we'll never get rid of the lawyers, if you're writing things the public may possibly see then in the litigious society we've created we can't avoid having the legal department check things over.

Still, the big sterilising influence on communications is the desire for control from the top, the pressure to rewrite descriptions of the reality "on the ground" to fit desired strategic narratives. This fails on two counts:

1) People trust the evidence of their own experiences and like the citizens of the Soviet Union just start to completely ignore communications that seek to gloss over all the problems.

2) Clear, honest lateral communication about the problems and challenges in the organisation between various parties who need to co-operate is vital to implementing the strategic vision. Sacrificing this to a culture of "keeping everybody on message" is a route to slow and painful failure.

Is there still a place for top down communications? Of course! People need to be informed and engaged about the strategy of the organisation, but:

a) As soon as you drift away from an honest statement of realities, you've lost the chance to inform and engage.

b) Top down isn't enough. If you don't give equal time for lateral communication you're missing out on a vital element for internal communications success.

And yes, this message is as much for top management as for internal communications professionals, but it will fall to all of us in the internal communications field to really make the case with top management. Otherwise, as creative as you get in working around "the approvers" you're still just holding back the tide.

Technorati Tags: lateral communications, internal communications, improving communication

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