Doing some debriefing on a recent project, we were a little disappointed to discover that our carefully planned communication campaign that ran in conjunction with the project did not seem to create as much awareness and enthusiasm as we had thought it would.  Drilling deeper, we discovered that our plans had been relatively solid, but we had not anticipated the amount of inbound communication that an average person receives in this organization.  Our messages were lost in a constant stream of newsletters, emails, announcements and other messaging the company and its lines of business produce.

Frankly, in many businesses the problem of communication is bifurcated.  In some organizations there is simply not enough communication, so people are unaware of corporate strategies and their roles within the corporate structure.  In other firms, such as the one I'm referring to, there is an overabundance of communication, and once everything is important, then nothing is important.  What we discovered is that people simply did not have the ability to filter out what was important in their messaging and inboxes, so anything that was not sent from a person they knew and trusted (even within the organization) was simply discarded.  In this organization, it is not unusual to receive 20-30 emails a day with updates on product announcements, new ventures, strategic initiatives and so forth.  This firm, and others like it, have lost the meaning of communication and are now "spraying and praying", hoping that the right people will receive the message, be able to identify its importance to them, and then act on the message.

There's a fine balance somewhere in the middle - understanding who needs a specific message, what they need to understand about that message, the channels that should be used to deliver that message and in what terms the message should be delivered.  In firms where little information is shared, people make assumptions based on what they know or the rumors that float around, then act in what they think is their best interest.  In firms where too much information (really - data) is pressed upon individuals, then the best interest of the receiver is to screen out anything that does not appear to be immediately important and relevant.  Which means, in our case, that messages from the COO about a very strategic project impacting a large percentage of the population WERE NEVER READ.  Why?  Too much communication and not enough relevancy of the communications lead the receivers to simply screen it all out.

It's time for a rethinking of corporate internal communications.  In some firms, we've reached a point where there is simply too much of a good thing.  Every project, campaign and program should be forced through a vetting process to determine how critical the messaging is, what the appropriate audience is, how frequently they need to receive the message and what the appropriate channels are for the messaging.  Right now the answers appear to be:  Exceptionally critical, everyone, all the time, in every channel.  If that's the case, why do we need communication staff?