Here’s a Communication Strategy – Don’t Communicate Your Strategy!

 

A Google® search on the words “Communicate with stakeholders” returned over 8.5 million hits, and, without reading all of them, I’m fairly confident that most of these sites believe that such communications are a good thing. The problem here, as with other overly-extended project management precepts, is that the definition of “stakeholder” varies significantly depending on who you’re talking to, but it’s almost always overly broad.

According to eHow – money,

The broad definition of a “stakeholder” is anyone in a position to affect or be affected by the actions of a group or organization. [i]

Well, according to Metcalf’s Law (dealing with the ability of very small variances in distant nodes of a large network to have a massive, cascading effect on many other nodes of that network. Also known as the “Butterfly Effect”), that’s just about everybody on the planet.

To be fair, most of the scholarship on communicating with stakeholders does specify the need to tailor the message to the intended audience. But here’s the problem with that: if by “tailor” we actually mean “change,” then the message sent to the employees may be different than the message sent to customers, or even shareholders, and such changes are bound to be seen as duplicitous.

There’s also the problem of such “messages” falling into the hands of the organizations’ competitors. This threat is the primary reason why no organization’s mission statement ever contains any information that is, well, usable. It’s the same “delivering the best value to our customers while pursuing the goals of our shareholders” silliness, re-phrased in ever more convoluted syntax (and almost always in the weak passive tense, which makes me insane).

In my recently-released, must-have book, Game Theory in Management, I discuss games which have as a component communications among players. One of the most iconic is Chicken, made famous by the scene in Rebel Without a Cause where Buzz Gunderson gets stuck in his car as it careens off of a cliff. Whether both cars are headed for each other, or towards a cliff, the basic payout matrix is the same:

·         If Player A swerves and Player B does not, then Player A is considered to be cowardly (“chicken”), and Player B is considered brave.

·         And, vice-versa: if Player A does not swerve, but Player B does, A is brave, and B is chicken.

·         If both players swerve, then both are considered chicken (then why play in the first place?), and

·         If neither player swerves, then both die in a fiery car crash.

If this were represented in a payoff matrix, it would look like this:

So, just based on the rules and this payoff matrix, the only reasonable strategy to adopt would be to always swerve. But, if that’s the case, why would the game theory analyst ever even engage in a game of Chicken?

Because of the pre-game communications. Remember, based on the eHow—Money definition, your Chicken opponent is certainly a “stakeholder.” If, prior to actually getting into your car and speeding off to the critical decision point, you were to have a talk with your opponent, and convince him that you are either extremely brave (or crazy), and absolutely will not swerve, then you have increased the odds of selecting the no-swerve strategy, and living past then next ten minutes.  Conversely, if, after your interaction with your opponent, you come away convinced that he is brave enough (or crazy enough) to not engage in the swerve strategy, you would be well-advised to update your approach accordingly.

Which brings us back to why would anyone in the business world would communicate a strategy that’s worth hearing. If the message being delivered is inconsistent across the projected audiences, then the strategist will be seen as duplicitous. If the strategy being communicated is accurate and provides actual insight, then the competitors will inevitably catch wind of it, and use it to your strategic disadvantage. In attempting to communicate your strategy, you are either wasting people’s time, lying to them, or giving your competition an advantage. So, here’s my recommendation for communicating your strategy:

Don’t communicate your strategy.