Here's a fun game: take a product, service, or experience and look at the transitions. Are they smooth, choppy, maybe non-existent? That's the organizational communication pattern at work.

There's a corollary, too: Tesler's Law which says, every system has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be removed, only moved. That is, in order to accomplish a task using a given product/service, the user will also take on some amount of work. "Usable" products are usually those that minimize the amount of effort required to achieve an outcome.

Conversely, when an organization provides a choppy, fragmented experience, not only are they inefficient internally, they're creating an inefficiency for the user!

You can easily imagine substantial downstream impacts: increased demand customer support, untenable technical debt, lackluster reviews & ratings, increased churn, expansive acquisition costs, and so on.

Teams will often assume restructuring is in order; we can infer from the images below that structure doesn't necessarily matter. Changing the structure without changing content, cadence, and/or other factors will usually prolong, and probably exacerbate, existing weaknesses.

Fortunately, progress & remediation can improve almost instantly by improving the ways in which we communicate. Not necessarily more communication, better communication.

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Originally published here.