zlacker

>>tagoll+(OP)
Flat orgs are very popular right now, but isn’t it a huge benefit of a hierarchical organization with subparts that rather than the President of Azure getting on a VTC and telling the whole division that the goal is velocity he can explain to his reports (a small group) that they need velocity with reliability and they can explain to their reports (more small groups) and so on and so forth?

Yes, nuanced comms don’t scale so why isn’t the answer—-don’t require scaled comms?

>>bradle+b9
One reason is that non-scaled comms suffer from “telephone game”. If you do it like you’re saying, then go down 3-4 levels in the hierarchy and check what people are hearing, it will have mutated away from anything you originally said.

Sometimes to get everyone aligned (as best you can) you have to give everyone the same message at the same time — but it has to be a simple message.

>>wrs+fa
I wonder if you could checksum the telephone game by having a 2-level comms. That way the VP could validate that the Director didn't make a mistake when communicating to the EMs.

Eg,

n-level comms are where a CEO communicates to the entire org

1-level comms are where CEO->CTO->VP->Directors->EMs->ICs

2-level comms:

CEO->CTO+VPs

CTO->VPs+Directors

VP->Directors+EMs

Director->EM+ICs

>>tarr11+Qe
The term of art for this practice is “skip-level 1:1s”. It’s not ubiquitous but many think it’s a good idea, particularly when stepping into a new role/org. Obviously it can end up being a lot of meetings so it’s typically on a quarterly or less cadence.

Because of the branching factor it’s not feasible to do this for every bit of comms.