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Internal comms person/plumber and lover of life's quirks

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Why 'cascade' is a corporate comms myth-take

There is one dreadful word still bandied about in internal communication. There are several but one I'd particularly love to see buried in the corporate comms nonsense graveyard of terms and practices is 'cascade'.
I know it still exists because a well-meaning FTSE big boss recently mentioned to me he had 'cascaded our annual results so every one of our 20,000 employees now knows and understands where the business is going'. Fingers crossed with that one.
I have also spotted 'cascade' lurking in Linked In forums, in IC articles and as a key achievement in communicators' CVs.
And we are not in 1990 anymore, Toto!
Anyone reading this post (apart from my mum) will have a few such archaic words they loathe too. Would love to share those. But surely in internal communication, and in a world where people are connected more than ever before, 'cascade' should have died out dinosaur-like a decade or two ago?
'Cascade' is no way to do business, folks. It is a corporate myth to imagine information cascade's like a waterfall through a business from the top to the bottom just because the CEO speaks about strategy and a thousand managers' not-very-brief briefing packs are produced. Even if the approach does start with lots of good intentions, as one comms grandee suggested brilliantly, the process 'leaks meaning at every level' and mostly grinds to a halt somewhere  in the middle because people have more important things to do - like work.
Conversation and helping facilitate that is what matters and that is sometimes a whole lot harder to achieve yet ultimately more effective and a tad more grown-up.
Cascade can always reinvent itself -  as a name for a bathroom company.