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The Crisis of Organizational Communications

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The Crisis of Organizational Communications in 2020

Do you work in or with an organization?

Are you overwhelmed?

Do I even need to ask?

Organizational communications in 2020 is in crisis. Communications channels and content have exploded. Information outside organizations changes with every 60-minute news cycle, while organizational processes and tools seem decades out of date and supported with a fraction of the staff needed. The friction between how fast information flows in public and how slow information flows in organizations increases daily, leaving everyone frustrated, anxious, and immobilized.

In 2011, in a keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I used the Red Queen Hypothesis as an allegory for organizations and their need to change dramatically if they want to survive because the approaches that got them here won’t take them any further. They are, in fact, losing ground – slowly at first and then more rapidly.

The Crisis of Organizational Communications in 2020

Over the past decade, this dynamic has only increased, with employees in every department running and getting further behind. Organizational boards and executive teams risk extinction by not dramatically restructuring their corporate governance for the knowledge economy. COVID-19 has accelerated that risk. As I projected, people are now the weakest link – they are breaking. Many individuals spend most of their time communicating instead of working – so when do they work? By working longer and longer hours.

The way we have always worked is unsustainable.

Customers Feel Alienated

Customers have noticed. While customers get information on social media, in communities, and through their networks, they often have a challenging time getting anything directly from a person at an organization. The impenetrable fortress is making them wonder what’s going on back there while the world keeps spinning. The silence is often deafening.

When customers can connect, it is more often than not with an online form, an email distribution list, a chatbot, or a faceless social media account. If they need help or an answer from an individual, there are hoops, hurdles, and queues to make it through – a veritable ninja course of obstacles. These experiences leave them feeling burdensome, exhausted, and unappreciated – and very often annoyed. It does not create a good customer experience.

Employees Are Overwhelmed

If you work in an organization, you probably have a contentious relationship with your email inbox. Between the emails, texts, websites, files, chat tools, business systems, community platforms, and social media channels, you are assaulted with information and options. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, you likely added five to eight hours of video meetings per day on top of that.

When do you actually work?

Employees are drowning in information, coming at them from all angles with little rationalization or standardization across different people, teams, and communities within and across organizations. This communications environment is both bewildering and taking an increasing amount of time to navigate. There is little support or guidance, even as organizations continue to deploy and adopt more technology without rationalization, integration, design, or intelligence. Most employees don’t have the skills, the time, the experience, or the access to navigate this ecosystem effectively. So employees tend to default to what they know and are comfortable with even if they also understand it is not effective.

Increasingly overwhelmed and stressed, employees cannot rethink how they work but are in dire need of a reboot. Add with the stress and risk of working through the COVID-19 crisis; there is little incentive to rock the boat or the time to experiment.

HR Is In a Tenuous Position

Human Resources groups have always been primarily tasked with protecting and mitigating the organizational risk of having employees. People are accounted for as liabilities and not assets on balance sheets. Because corporations are set up to maximize shareholder value and profitability, they necessarily seek to minimize their liabilities. One of their liabilities is the cost of employees. This accounting standard puts the incentives of the organization and shareholders at direct odds with employees. HR departments exist to manage and negotiate that inherent conflict with the goal of maximizing contributions while minimizing costs. Trying to improve the employee experience with the fundamental incentives are broken is impossible – and so is dramatically increasing engagement.

Social technologies have increased information and transparency, giving employees more options and better information with which to negotiate. The competitive pressure on HR departments has increased significantly as the balance of power between organizations and individuals have shifted. As we move into a knowledge economy, the friction increases with traditional risk management and HR approaches, which typically seek to standardize roles. Organizations need creative and innovative employees, two things that cannot be forced with extrinsic motivators, which is HR’s primary toolset. HR staff is overwhelmed navigating this new power dynamic while applying the standardized processes, roles, and governance that mitigate risk.

IT Sees the Approaching Storm

IT departments are often the first to see the enormous implications of the changing communications landscape – but with little authority or capacity to address them. Most organizational IT budgets are consumed, supporting legacy technology, ensuring security, and managing users. With the remaining resources, IT teams look to adopt and deploy technology and applications that will help the organization innovate – but most often without the design, UX, consulting, and analytics resources or capacity to help ensure its successful use, rationalization with existing tools, and impact on the business.

Cloud technology has also dramatically changed IT’s role and ability to impact organizational change. Cloud solutions are adopted across the organization as individual groups and departments see the necessity, creating an explosion of technology that is not integrated, used consistently, or managed by the organization. IT has lost much of its control and ability to aggregate data across the organization rendering it impossible to understand, rationalize, report, and act on what is happening. IT is overwhelmed, trying to keep track of all the organization’s technology just to ensure they have it identified and secured.

Executives Remain Isolated

Executives, surrounded by assistants and communication teams and in meetings constantly, see and experience little of the chaos. With a ‘bias toward action’ and a mindset that prefers solutions to problems, they often dismiss issues assuming they are driven by politics or personalities.

The challenges and opportunities for organizations have changed significantly, however. In production economies, the business opportunities were often logical and mechanical; standardizing supply chains and communications increased outcomes. Today, the opportunities for most organizations are complex and include many valid options, most of which are not obviously better than others. This new dynamic requires a far different approach to analysis, decision-making, and leadership. It is a decision-making environment with which many executives are not intuitively comfortable.

Current executives, educated and experienced in a different environment, have little time in their daily routines to explore this shift and little motivation given their past success, which is what got them to their role. These concurrent dynamics are colliding in ways that make change extremely challenging.

Meanwhile, crises are coming in quick waves. Executives are trying to address them in the ways that always have – but by the time they have assessed, discussed, and made decisions, their employees and customers are on to the next crisis. Their decisions and communications, when delivered, are already dated and out of touch with the fast-moving environment around them. These executives are overwhelmed with the pressure to change the organization but little confidence in taking the bold steps necessary and even less comfort with dismantling carefully crafted communications that are reviewed by multiple departments.

Community Managers Are In the Crosshairs

Organizations with limited capacity for direct engagement and small communications teams are using social networks, collaboration, and community channels to connect individuals to each other.

Externally, a small cadre of community managers ensure these channels give customers answers and information – and they do. Communities have been wildly successful at supporting customers, building awareness, and increasing product use – and the 2020 State of Community Management research shows that Advanced Community programs continue to invest and grow these programs and the governance required to support them.

IT groups have also invested in the infrastructure to support employee communities, hoping to relieve some of the communications tangle internally and to fill many of the enormous communications gaps across the organizational ecosystem. This effort, however, has been less than successful. While the infrastructure is available, there is little understanding, interest, and motivation to change. For employees, communication behaviors are driven by power dynamics, and the power dynamics of organizations have not changed. When a community manager (and it is usually only one) is hired to support this change, they typically sit in IT, internal communications, or learning & development – siloed and confined to a narrow objective with no visibility, support, or resources to fundamentally change how the organization works. They see many of the problems, support change in pockets, and see the huge opportunities squandered, but they are completely overwhelmed juggling basic needs against tantalizing opportunities.

Communications is a Mess

Everyone is overwhelmed. No one has the authority, influence, and expertise to make needed changes.

And the new information environment is impacting and changing every corner of organizations, how they work, and what is possible. In a world where innovation and creativity drive success, how an organization communicates and the culture that creates IS its business model. Communications can no longer be thought of as the group the manages websites and static content. It is a critical driver of becoming an agile and adaptable organization.

Because communications teams are not strategically positioned, the wave of new information channels is overwhelming everyone and pushing them to the breaking point. When used strategically, new communications channels and processes create transparency, easy alignment, more time to work, and increased flexibility. Those organizations that seize the opportunity to dramatically retool their organizations will reap unprecedented rewards in employee loyalty, customer satisfaction, and financial stability.

However, like seized gears, most organizations are stuck because they try to change their approach in any one area on its own – and stalls as it runs into traditional processes in other areas. Without a systemic change to corporate governance – adapting HR policies, management practices and objectives, accounting standards, and metrics – each effort to change communications will hit a wall and revert to the organizational standard, aligning with existing power dynamics and motivators.

I suspect many organizations will not survive because of this challenge and its scope. It is an existential threat that will come quietly at first – and then feel like a freight train bearing down on the organization. How many boards are sensitive to and prepared to act?

Organizations As Communities

Community structures are among the few governance approaches that can address this seemingly chaotic environment by distributing leadership and capacity to its members. As complex adaptive systems, communities are dynamic and diverse enough to react effectively; addressing, and responding to the complex system around them.

When we develop the Community Maturity Model is was, in effect, an organizational governance model designed to help organizations move from rigid and fragile hierarchies to dynamic and adaptive networks of communities. It reflects all the areas that are impacted by a changing information environment and how to nudge each competency into a looser state – from rigid processes and detailed rules to higher-level principals that inform but do not restrict decision-making at the edges. This adaptability allows organizations to evolve in a phased way that leans into its strengths while filling gaps.

What to see where your organization sits?

Take the (free) Community Score Assessment to find out where to prioritize your focus and resources.

How to improve online engagement

Organizational Governance in Crisis

The communications crisis has created division not just within society but within organizations – pushing each functional area to extremes. Everyone is overwhelmed and reacting to that anxiety in different ways. Some groups are shutting down, others are trying to control the chaos by organizing, what is fundamentally unorganizable, and some are denying a problem exists at all.

What do you do when you are running twice as fast and still falling behind?

You need to play a different game.

The old rules are broken beyond repair. Using them is a fool’s errand. Finding a way to fundamentally restructure organizations for a new era is imperative. Global organizations that benefit from market inertia and diversity may not feel the existential threat at the moment but have no doubt it is coming. Watching this space over the past decade, I have seen the impact of this crisis accelerate – and that acceleration will continue and increase in speed.

Organizations need a new governance model – one that does not pit its employees, customers, and partners against itself and each other.

Start with a BOD committee and a strategic task force that includes communications, IT, HR, L&D, KM, a community strategist, finance, legal, and the CEO.

The Economics of Culture Change

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Why is Culture Change Such a Strategic Priority?

Culture change is a hot topic in organizational development and leadership circles and for good reason; there is finally a growing understanding of its impact on the performance of organizations. The economics of culture change is driven by culturally normed behaviors. Culture acts as a powerful controlling determinant. Culture determines how quickly an organization can pivot, react to crises, and pursue new opportunities.

The less trust there is in a culture and between groups within it, the more structural force and extrinsic motivators are required to create and deliver products and services. Francis Fukuyama’s treatise Trust is a newly relevant read on how social structures impact wealth, prosperity, and economic growth.

The Employee Value Proposition has Decreased Dramatically

Organizations have traditionally used extrinsic motivators to maintain performance and productivity – initially physical force and more recently economic pressure. You can read more about how this evolved in my musings while on sabbatical. In any negotiation, coordination or collaboration information is power. Historically large organizations had much greater access to information than individuals in negotiating wages and salaries. This gave rise to unions and associations, which restored some balance but far too many individuals were still left to their own individual resources. Along came the Internet and with it, the explosion of access for everyone, which has dramatically increased the power of individuals to understand, pursue, and negotiate options.

This tweet, from Josh Bernoff, perfectly encapsulates this trend – smart, well-connected individuals who understand and can communicate the value they offer will create a work life that fits their unique interests, needs, and circumstances.

Jim Storer and I co-founded The Community Roundtable because we could not find an employment model that worked for us. We didn’t want to maximize salary at the expense of our personal and family lives – and we didn’t want to sacrifice doing interesting and valuable work either. What we’ve found is the ability to do valuable work much more productively and with people we truly enjoy – but work that gives us plenty of flexibility and time to invest in our personal relationships. We are not forced to compromise.

Organizations will likely never be able to get many individuals back into full-time fully committed roles – at least not in the way those positions are currently constructed. This trend will continue for the most valuable individuals. Far from the typical gig worker who serves at the mercy of commoditized, atomized tasks with little security, these are people with the leadership skills and experience to negotiate for the career they want. Many others will follow. Over time this will hollow out organizational leadership and expertise, leaving only the more risk-averse and complacent, who will reinforce the status quo making it almost impossible for organizations to change.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and its rapid acceleration of virtual work, has added even more competitive pressure on organizations because it is clear that many jobs can be done remotely, giving even more flexibility and options to employees. How do organizations compete and keep employees when they have less and less power to dictate employment terms, and employees have more power to define what kind, how much, and from where they contribute value?

Employees Want Security AND Meaning

In communities, the bulk of the power and control lies with individual members. Individuals determine how, when, and how much they participate and they are driven to do so primarily by intrinsic motivators – things that cannot be influenced by force. Intrinsic motivators include the need to cooperate, the joy of riffing and playing with others, the pursuit of new challenges, and the search for meaning; all the things that drive online gaming, open-source software development, and any healthy community.

Intrinsic motivators are so powerful that people will volunteer considerable amounts of their time and money to their pursuit, creating immense loyalty to causes, movements, and communities in the process – as well as accepting lower salaries to work in cause-related organizations. These intrinsic rewards are what allow individuals to thrive, making them feel alive and worthwhile. But people also need extrinsic rewards in the form of money, food, insurance, and health care to ensure physical security.

Organizations that can offer the extrinsic rewards people need PLUS the intrinsic rewards that offer deep satisfaction are the ones that will thrive in an environment where people have much more power and choice.

Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva sums this up perfectly. Money is nice but Money + Love will always win.


The Knowledge Economy Changes the Dynamics of Work

When most work done by individuals was in production, coercion worked. One unit of work could be standardized to exchange consistently for a unit of extrinsic reward or force – the proverbial carrot or stick. It was considered a fair exchange but it never maximized productivity – it standardized, moderated, and made production predictable. This helped organizations manage risk but it also capped potential.

The bulk of production tasks will soon be completed by machines, robots, or algorithms. The unique value that people can add is in their creativity, perspective, innovation, and energy. Those outputs are neither standard nor are they specific transactions that can be turned on and off. To produce creativity, innovation, and energy organizations must engender behaviors and habits that, over time, cultivate unique outputs. To generate these, organizational culture must reinforce and normalize different behaviors. More than behavior, however, is that creativity and exploration require people to care, both for their own work and the work of others. Organizations cannot care. Only other people can care. What organizations CAN do is create the environment and manage the boundaries around who cares and who does not – creating the conditions that generate both the extrinsic rewards that people want and need to both live and thrive.

Communities Support and Normalize Change

Communities have long been a requirement of human potential. People thrive when their communities support who they are and challenge them to grow into their best selves. Communities are ever-changing and evolving – they are complex adaptive systems that can quickly respond to individual needs.

Organizations are taking note and intentionally fostering internal, employee-facing community ecosystem to address organizational and culture change. Community programs are increasingly integrated with digital transformation efforts.

What we know from successful, healthy, and productive communities is the following:

  • Measuring engagement behaviors and how work happens is as important, if not more, than measuring outputs and transactions.
  • Aligning, hiring, and leading requires a compelling shared purpose that is bigger than the organization and is meaningful to every participant in the community.
  • Management needs to focus on the system; business model and exchange rates for different kinds of value, infrastructure, programming, and managing boundary conditions rather than on managing the work and tasks of individuals.
  • Decision-making needs to be maximally inclusive but with clear responsibility for resolution given to specific individuals.
  • Leadership needs to be distributed and an attribute that is given to those who are motivated and influential, rather than something bestowed upon people based on their role and structural authority.
  • Learning, growth, and exploration need to be built into the structure in a way that diversity becomes a feature that is maximized and celebrated instead of a bug that is moderated.
  • Metrics and progress need to focus on behaviors, not content.

This community-based business model is a powerful driver of commitment and loyalty – both for employees and customers. It too requires investment before it pays off – but the dynamics of that investment and the return happen differently. In this year’s State of Community Management report we were able to quantify this investment and, interestingly it has a similar curve to other types of business investments but the focus is on normalizing new behaviors and motivators using a relationship-centric approach vs an infrastructure-centric one. Both are needed by the primary means of influencing change changes.

Community Business Models are Generative

While communities change the balance of power between organizations and individuals – and give individuals more control over how they work – the real power of communities comes in their ability to rapidly distribute and share value. The challenge is that community value takes time to build and the value of communities has been mostly implicit. Over the years, my work has focused on making community dynamics and value more explicit – creating TheCR’s Community ROI model and investing my time in deep research to better understand the investments required for organizations to maximize community value.

Initially, communities are small and experimental and require human facilitation and relationship building. As the community consolidates around and norms behaviors that generate shared value, the cost per member goes up because infrastructure can now be built to make those behaviors consistently easy and rewarded. Once that is completed, the cost per member of communities drops precipitously.


This cost model is rewarded by a compounding growth in value generated by the community, which flattens as the shared purpose of the community gets addressed and fulfilled.

The biggest difference in community business models is that investment and returns are more equitably shared – while communities CAN have sponsors that invest in them, that is not necessary. Members of the community, compelled by the shared value that motivates them intrinsically, contribute their attention, curiosity, time, and expertise. By sharing the value contributed by every member, the value compounds as more and more people join the community and benefit from it – creating a generative value loop.

In this year’s research, we translated the investments of both organizations in the form of management, investment, and programming, and by members in the form of attention, questions, and expertise. We did this by dividing the average community program cost per member (the organizational investment) and the average answers contributed per member across communities and multiplied it by the average value of answers (the member investment). We then looked at the rewards of communities. For organizations, we looked at the engagement and expertise provided by members that offset the need for the organization to invest in providing it. For members, we looked at the average number of answers they accessed in a year and multiplied that times the value of an answer.

The results were compelling – generating ROI not just for organizations but also for each individual employee.

As compelling as the results are, they are also profound.

Looking at how communities generate value we see that by sharing the value generated, it can increase the value… of its value. Sharing knowledge allows more people to apply it – and more people to build off of it rather than repeating its creation. It allows innovation to happen much more quickly.

Communities Fuel Innovation

This is the power of the Internet if you think of it as a global community that increases transparency and access to information. The result is increasingly fast innovation and adoption cycles of new technology.

What smaller communities – organizational communities – add is an increase in trust focused on a more specific objective. This focus is required to innovate around increasing complex challenges; challenges like global health pandemics, climate change, health care delivery, and education.

The question for organizational executives is no longer should we intentionally invest in the development of communities but…

…will we survive if we don’t invest in community development?

You might be a community manager if…

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…communications is an integral part of your job

…you work with a dispersed group of constituents

…you are responsible for building & growing relationships

That covers a lot of ground – PR/communications, marketing, sales, any management position, HR, product management, knowledge management, research… many organizational roles fit this description.  The difference is that the social media revolution has made us realize that it is no longer as powerful to develop content as it is encourage and promote the content of others.  Why? Well, it’s only natural in an ego-crazed world that people have started to trust more in what other people have to say about a person/brand/company than what they say about themselves.  In some ways, we’ve broken the social contract by over promoting ourselves and our companies to such an extent that no one really trusts what we have to say about ourselves anymore. So they look to who we are friends with, who we promote, and what we say and do toward others as a way of gauging how much they can trust us. Only then will they start to really hear what we have to say about ourselves.

This is a tough shift. For those of us, myself included, who are so geared toward producing a lot of content to demonstrate our own value it’s risky to stop talking and start referring people to others on a more regular basis. For those that aren’t really paying attention (maybe our bosses) it’s much harder to ‘see’ our value – see my earlier post on the Iceberg Effect.  That shift however, is at the core of a community management-based approach to communications and relationships, and vitally important to getting your point across – whether it is to internal teams, customers, prospects, or partners. So… want to think differently about how to communicate? You may want to learn more about community management…. whatever your job title.

Don’t trust us? Here are some people we think you should listen to:

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community and being a valued resource to community management and social media professionals through our  monthly subscription report,  membership based peer network,  community management training program and customizable advisory services for corporations and individuals.