The organisation that cannot explain itself
- trinimaturana
- Reflexiones y Opinión
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What is the most pressing problem your organisation is facing right now?
There is a question I have started asking in strategic sessions, almost as a diagnostic tool.
What is the most pressing problem your organisation is facing right now?
It sounds simple. It is not.
The answers that come back are rarely wrong. They are just completely different from each other. One leader names a process breakdown in their area. Another describes a cultural tension that has been accumulating for months. A third talks about a market shift nobody has responded to yet. Someone else mentions a technology rollout that is not going as planned.
Nobody is lying. Nobody is uninformed. But something becomes visible in that room that rarely gets named directly.
These people are not describing the same organisation.
They are each describing the fragment of it they can see from where they sit. And in the absence of a shared language for what the whole looks like, every fragment feels like the whole.
A failure that has no name
We have frameworks for most kinds of organisational failure. Financial. Operational. Strategic. We know how to identify them, measure them and, in many cases, fix them.
But there is a failure mode that sits underneath all of those and rarely gets its own name.
An organisation that has lost the capacity to explain itself coherently.
Not to the market. Not to its investors. To itself.
Where leadership speaks one language. Managers translate it into another, shaped by their team’s immediate pressures and their own interpretation of what matters. Employees receive a third version, filtered through experience, and whatever they last heard at a town hall six weeks ago.
The organisation is still functioning. Meetings are happening. Work is being delivered. From the outside, everything looks operational.
But underneath that activity, something has quietly dissolved. And the most visible symptom is not conflict or resistance. It is exactly what I see in those sessions: people who have been in the same organisation for years, sometimes decades, who can no longer give the same answer to the same question.
How organisations lose their narrative
This rarely happens all at once. It accumulates.
A strategy gets announced but never fully translated into what it means for the people expected to carry it out. A restructure happens, and the new structure makes sense on paper but nobody explains how decisions will flow differently. A values refresh is launched, and the language changes on the intranet while the behaviours in the room stay exactly the same.
Each of those moments creates a small distance between the official story and the lived one. Over time, those distances compound.
I have started thinking about this as narrative slack: the space that opens between what an organisation says it is, what it says it is doing, and what people actually experience on any given Tuesday.
That space is not neutral. It shapes how people interpret ambiguity. It determines whether employees trust the next announcement or receive it with quiet scepticism built from a hundred previous small disappointments. And it has a direct effect on the organisation’s ability to move in a coherent direction, because you cannot align people around a story they have stopped believing.
What is striking is how long an organisation can accumulate narrative slack without anyone formally naming it as a problem. Operationally, things can continue to work long after coherence has started to erode.
Who is looking at the whole
Consider what each function in an organisation actually sees.
Finance sees a set of numbers that tell a particular story about performance and risk. HR sees a workforce, its composition, its concerns, its attrition patterns. Operations sees processes, bottlenecks, efficiency gaps. Technology sees infrastructure, capability, technical debt. Leadership sees the strategic picture, filtered through the information that reaches them and the assumptions they bring to it.
Every one of those perspectives can be entirely accurate. And simultaneously, entirely incomplete.
What is missing is not better information within each of those functions. It is someone whose work requires them to traverse all of those realities at once. Not to own any of them, but to understand how they connect, where they contradict each other, and where the distance between them has become large enough to matter.
That is a strange position to occupy inside an organisation. It does not belong to a single function by nature. But it describes something that a genuinely mature strategic communication function does, not because it has been formally assigned the responsibility, but because doing its work well requires exactly that kind of organisational traversal.
The communicator who is helping leadership explain a transformation to employees must understand what employees are actually experiencing. The communicator supporting a manager through a difficult team conversation must understand what the manager has not been told. The communicator advising on how a decision will land must understand the gap between how the decision was made and how it will be interpreted by people who were not in the room.
That traversal is not incidental to the work. It is the work.
Making incoherence visible
This is where I want to be precise about what strategic communication can and cannot do.
Organisational coherence is not something communication can own. Leadership owns it. Strategy owns it. Culture shapes it. Many functions contribute to it.
What strategic communication can do, when it is positioned close enough to the centre of the organisation to see clearly, is something more specific and, I think, more valuable.
It can make incoherence visible.
It can notice that the strategy says one thing while the experience of the people expected to deliver it says something else entirely. It can detect that three different parts of the organisation are using the same words to describe fundamentally different things. It can observe that leadership believes a decision has been understood while managers are still trying to make sense of it. It can see that the gap between the corporate narrative and the organisational reality has been widening quietly for months.
Noticing those gaps is not the same as closing them. But an organisation cannot close a gap it cannot see. And the communicator who surfaces incoherence early, before it has compounded into something much harder to address, is using one of the most valuable positions the function can occupy: the ability to see across organisational boundaries that others are rarely required to traverse.
That is a different framing of the function than the one most organisations are working with. Not the keeper of the narrative. Something closer to a sensor of coherence.
What those different answers reveal
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the different answers I receive in those sessions is that none of them needs to be wrong. Each person may understand their part of the organisation perfectly well.
The problem begins when nobody can explain how those parts belong to the same whole.
An organisation can operate like that for a surprisingly long time. Decisions continue to be made, meetings continue to happen, and strategies continue to be presented. What disappears much more quietly is the shared understanding that allows all of that activity to move in the same direction.
And by the time an organisation can no longer explain itself to itself, the distance has usually been there for much longer than anyone realised.