We need more communication OR do we?

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We need more communication OR do we?

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 09/26/2025 · 20m

If you’ve worked in a big org long enough, you’ve heard it: “We need more communication.” Funny thing—no one ever asks for less. And yet the meetings multiply, the updates thicken, and clarity… doesn’t.

I was in an all-hands where the request bubbled up (again). Smart people. Good intentions. But the underlying signal wasn’t “please add two more status calls.” It was “I can’t map what I’m hearing to what I’m doing.”

Think about the kids’ game of telephone. The message loops around the circle, and by the time it gets back, it’s unrecognizable. That’s enterprise communication at scale. We add volume to compensate for poor fidelity, then wonder why everyone looks checked out on Zoom’s Brady-Bunch view while “listening.”

Or take Toastmasters. Every meeting opens the same way: mission readout, roles, rhythm. It’s boring in the best way—because the form gives context. You always know why you’re there and what good looks like. Most business meetings are the opposite: new slides, new “urgent” topics, no steady spine.

When people ask for more communication, what they’re really asking for is alignment. Where do I fit? Where are we headed? How do I know today’s work advances that? If they had those answers, they’d need fewer meetings, not more.

So, what do we do about it?

1. Lead with purpose, every time. If you convene a group, you owe them a crisp “why,” a concrete “what,” and a visible “how we’ll know we’re done.” Read it out. Put it on slide one. Rinse and repeat. The repetition is a feature, not a flaw—like the Toastmasters open.

2. Translate for the receiver, not the sender. That snarky, clever deck you wrote for execs? It crushes at team lunch and flops in the boardroom. Communication isn’t what you said; it’s what they understood. Before you hit send, ask: “What decision or action should this audience be able to take after this?”

3. Replace “more” with “fewer, clearer.” Most leaders respond to confusion by increasing frequency. Try the opposite: cut the touchpoints and sharpen the content. One weekly update that ties work to goals beats three meetings that narrate activity. If you must add something, add a single page that answers: “Where we’re going, what’s changed, what matters now.”

4. Name the real constraint. “We need better tools.” “We need more people.” Maybe. But often the bottleneck is invisible alignment debt—hand-offs no one understands, goals that don’t ladder up, or priorities that contradict. Before you spend on software or headcount, run a quick five-whys with the team on why communication feels insufficient. Nine times out of ten, you’ll surface a process break, not an email gap.

5. Make meetings boring (on purpose). Borrow from Toastmasters. Standard roles. Standard sections. A mission read aloud. It calms the room and shortens the distance from “why we’re here” to “what we’re deciding.” When the form is predictable, the content can do the heavy lifting.

Here’s the irony: productivity apps keep cheering us on to do “more”—more tasks, more updates, more pings. But if those tasks aren’t aligned to a real customer outcome, the scoreboard doesn’t matter. One meaningful decision moved forward beats 700 tiny motions that felt like work.

Process Debt Truth: Most teams don’t lack communication; they lack a shared map. Fix the map, and the meeting count takes care of itself.