Organizations spend a lot of time trying to understand the people they serve or hope to reach. They invest in research, track engagement, conduct surveys and hire people with expertise in understanding customers, donors, constituents and other stakeholders. Yet knowing what people think and allowing that knowledge to influence organizational decisions are two different things.
I see this particularly clearly in communications. An organization can know quite a lot about the people it is trying to reach and still produce communications that reflect its own priorities far more than theirs. But the forces that produce that disconnect rarely stop with communications. They can shape decisions about strategy, programs, products, fundraising and growth.
When I see this pattern repeatedly, I start looking at the operating environment around the communications function. Who has decision-making authority? How is external evidence weighed against executive judgment? What happens when different functions want different things? And how comfortable are people challenging a direction they believe won’t work?
Those questions can reveal problems that better copy won’t solve.
When authority outweighs evidence
There’s a term used in product development and analytics that captures one version of this particularly well: HiPPO, or the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It describes situations in which evidence points in one direction, but the opinion of the most senior person in the room ultimately carries more weight.
Communications is especially susceptible to this because communication is something everyone does. A senior executive who wouldn’t dream of overruling an accountant on an accounting treatment may feel perfectly comfortable rejecting a positioning recommendation because it doesn’t sound right to them.
Sometimes that judgment is valuable. Senior leaders have context that research alone may not capture, and decision-making is part of their job. The issue is what happens when authority starts functioning as a substitute for external evidence.
Research may show that customers respond to direct, concrete language while leadership prefers something more aspirational. Testing may demonstrate that one message performs better while a board member dislikes it. Donors or constituents may repeatedly misunderstand terminology that people inside the organization consider essential.
The question isn’t whether the CEO gets a vote. Of course the CEO gets a vote. It’s whether the organization can distinguish executive preference from evidence about the people it is trying to reach and whether the people with the relevant expertise have enough authority to make that distinction matter.
When the organization becomes its own frame of reference
A related problem is inside-out thinking. Organizations spend an enormous amount of time thinking about themselves: their strategy, programs, structures, funding, products, terminology and priorities. The people outside them generally do not.
That creates a natural tendency to begin with What do we need to tell people? rather than What matters to the people we’re trying to reach?
An organization may decide, for example, that it needs to “communicate the strategic plan.” Internally, the plan may represent months of work and be enormously important. Externally, very few people care that an organization completed a strategic planning process. They may care quite a lot about what will be different as a result.
The same thing happens with organizational terminology (what I call inside baseball), program descriptions and websites. Information gets organized according to how the institution understands itself rather than how someone outside it is likely to look for or understand it.
A strong communications function should help correct for this. But there is a limit to what it can do if the rest of the organization views its role primarily as packaging decisions and information already determined elsewhere.
When apparent consensus isn’t really consensus
Not all of these problems originate with a powerful executive. Sometimes a questionable direction survives because nobody is quite willing to stop it.
Management scholar Jerry Harvey coined the term Abilene Paradox to describe situations in which a group collectively agrees to something its individual members don’t want because each person incorrectly believes the others support it.
There are recognizable versions of this in organizations. A campaign or message is proposed. Marketing has reservations. The agency has reservations. People closer to customers or constituents see a problem. But concerns are softened, people defer to one another and silence gradually gets interpreted as agreement.
If the communication ultimately fails, it can be remarkable how many people reveal afterward that they never particularly liked it.
That raises questions well beyond communications capability: whether disagreement is genuinely welcomed, whether people understand who owns a decision, and whether inconvenient information can make its way through the organization before a direction becomes difficult to reverse.
When everyone is optimizing for something different
There’s another version of this problem that doesn’t require bad judgment or dysfunctional culture. Sometimes everyone involved is doing a perfectly rational job, but they are solving for different outcomes.
Legal wants to minimize risk. Development wants to protect an important donor relationship. A program leader wants the complexity of the work represented accurately. The CEO wants to reinforce strategic positioning or a personal brand. Communications wants the people receiving the message to understand it and respond.
None of these objectives is unreasonable. But they aren’t necessarily compatible, and the communications process often becomes the place where unresolved organizational priorities collide.
That’s how a relatively simple communication accumulates multiple messages, caveats and calls to action. The final product may accurately reflect everything the organization wanted included while becoming considerably less useful to the person receiving it.
If decision rights are unclear, every stakeholder effectively has veto power, or there is no shared agreement about the primary objective, asking communications to reconcile those priorities in the final copy doesn’t resolve the underlying problem.
Looking upstream from the message
This is why I’m interested in persistent communications problems as a diagnostic signal.
Organizations can spend a lot of time trying to solve them where they become visible: rewriting the message, redesigning the website, conducting another study, changing agencies or even changing marketing leadership. Any of those things may be appropriate. But if essentially the same problems keep resurfacing, it is worth looking further upstream.
How does information from customers, donors or constituents enter strategic decisions? Who has authority when expertise and hierarchy point in different directions? Where do competing functional priorities get resolved? And is communications involved early enough to influence what the organization is doing, or primarily asked to explain it afterward?
Those are questions about leadership, incentives, decision rights and organizational structure.
The implications extend beyond whether a campaign performs well. Organizations depend on external signals to make decisions about positioning, programs, products, fundraising, customer experience and growth. If the operating model routinely filters those signals through hierarchy, internal priorities or functional politics, valuable information may be getting lost long before anyone starts writing the message.
Communications can therefore be a useful place to look for organizational misalignment because the symptoms are unusually visible. A message that doesn’t resonate, a website organized around internal structures or a campaign weakened by too many competing priorities may be telling you something about how the organization makes decisions more broadly.
Bringing the outside perspective into the organization
Marketing and communications teams can bring research, expertise and an external perspective to an organization. Whether that perspective influences decisions depends on the environment in which they operate.
The more revealing situations are often those in which external evidence challenges what people inside the organization already believe. Can that evidence meaningfully affect a decision? Can expertise challenge hierarchy? Can someone surface a concern before consensus hardens around a direction? Are competing objectives resolved explicitly rather than buried in the final communication?
The same dynamics that prevent external insight from shaping communications can prevent customer, donor, constituent or market insight from shaping strategy and growth.
So when I see a persistent gap between what an organization says and what the people it is trying to reach appear to need, I look at what sits behind it: how external insight enters strategy, where decisions get made, whether authority and expertise are appropriately balanced, and whether competing priorities are being resolved.
Communications may simply be one of the places where a larger organizational alignment problem becomes visible.
Emily Moyer is the Principal of Impact Ilk Brands, a consultancy designing architecture for growth at mission-driven businesses and non-profits. If growth has to be recreated each cycle, something underneath isn’t working. Ready to address it? Schedule a chat with Emily on this page.
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