What Goes Down Must Come Up

 

One of my business school professors – I can’t recall if it was in Organizational Behavior and Performance, or Information Technology – once offered up an axiom, that knowledge and information transfer was a two-way street, and if attempts to squelch it were made, then such communications would manifest in unexpected ways. I accepted his assertion on its face, without really understanding what the implications were. I didn’t have long to wait to find out.

I was working at the time for a medium-sized contractor, whose executive leadership indulged in a certain elitism that insulated them from any criticism from the lower-ranking members of the company, no matter how accurate or sincerely intended. This elitism was a source of frustration from the company’s workers, who largely felt that they were in a position to help the organization achieve its (stated) corporate goals, if they could only be heard. The first part of my professor’s axiom was in place – the executives’ arrogance represented a tamping-down effect on upward communications.

This company printed a little (around 8 pages) monthly newsletter, entitled the XYZ News (“XYZ” being the stand-ins for the company’s actual acronym). This newsletter represented the downward-trending communications, the bits of knowledge and information that these executives wanted the rest of the organization to know. It contained stories about project success, proposal wins, upcoming events, and some vignettes about the upper-level managers or owner. Access to information about project failures, proposal losses, stories about non-execs, or any other data item that might put the company in a bad light was banned from the official newsletter, and limited to rumor or hearsay.

Along about this time the knowledge transfer function dramatically broke free of the executives’ attempts at managing it. An underground newsletter sprang up that mimicked the official company’s newsletter, font, banner and all. The entries in the faux newsletter, however, did focus on those significant events going on in the organization that the executives did not want the rank-and-file to know, and the writing style threw in enough snark to amuse the workers and absolutely infuriate the leaders. Immediately an effort was launched to discover the producer of the imposter. People’s computers, hard drives, printers, and desks were searched, but the phantom publisher was never discovered.

Several issues of the fake newsletter were published prior to the time I left this company, and at least a couple were printed after my departure, or at least that’s what I heard from my friends and former co-workers. The company ended up being sold to a competitor within the year, at least in part due to the out-of-touch decisions being made by the executives.

What I found fascinating about the whole affair was the way that my professor’s assertion had come so dramatically true. The sense of superiority that these executives had indulged was largely detached from any true meritocracy, and was based instead on a pervasive cronyism. However, since these people were the bosses, it was really quite impossible to challenge any of their decisions, no matter how ill-advised.

It has been my experience that whenever the topic of knowledge transfer is broached, an automatic assumption is in place, that such transfers necessarily involve communicating the precious knowledge from the more august, learned, and, well, knowledgeable people – invariably highly-placed within the organization – to those in need of such knowledge, usually the lower-ranked ones. But, at least in this case, the necessary knowledge needed to go in the exact opposite direction, and did so, albeit not in a form those who needed it were willing to accept. They were only okay with sending “knowledge” down the hierarchy.

So, in this case, the knowledge transfer went down, when it needed to come up.