A Strategy Travels Only as Far as Communication Carries It

About this collection

In an organisation of real scale, a strategy reaches the floor only through the communication architecture built to carry it. The larger and faster-moving the organisation, the more decisive that architecture becomes. Large organisations with strong technical cultures face a particular challenge when a strategy has to travel. The systems for generating power, managing a grid, running an operation at national scale are engineered with extraordinary rigour. The system for carrying meaning through the same organisation, for making sure a direction set at the top becomes a behaviour lived at the bottom, is rarely engineered with anything close to the same intent. It tends to be inherited rather than designed, cascaded rather than architected, and measured by how much was sent rather than by what changed as a result. This matters more, not less, in a moment of structural transition. When an organisation is building one shared identity at the very time its formal structure is being separated into distinct entities, each with its own mandate and its own pressures, the work of holding a single direction becomes harder and more important at once. The leadership language that unites the top has to survive a journey through layers, divisions, and now separate operating companies, and arrive intact at the people who were never in the room where it was agreed. There is a structural dimension to this: When communication functions are positioned to distribute information rather than to shape meaning, a strategy arrives as a notice rather than a direction. People receive it, acknowledge it, and return to their work without feeling that it belongs to them. There is a cultural dimension: In organisations built on technical rigour, and tempered by a long period of operating under pressure, the instinct is to broadcast direction downward and to add detail rather than clarity. The capacity to listen upward, to let what the floor knows travel back to the people who decide, is usually the first capability lost under stress, and the last one rebuilt. The result is that the people with the most valuable operating knowledge often have the least influence on the rooms that matter. And there is the measure that makes all of this concrete: The honest test of whether a strategy has reached the floor is not the briefing that took place. It is the experience at the point of service. A customer does not encounter a strategy in the language leadership uses to describe it. They encounter it in whether the person in front of them behaves as though the direction is real. When that behaviour has not yet arrived at the service layer, the communication has not yet finished its journey. Our framework identifies ten distinct dimensions where this breaks down in large organisations. The thirteen voices on this page address the eight we believe matter most for where Eskom is now. They work at the boundary between communication and culture, between leadership behaviour and organisational meaning, and between strategic intent and the human conditions that allow that intent to travel.