The space between the boxes
Ninety-nine percent of problems at work are really communication problems. Here's how to keep an idea intact on its way to becoming something real.
Updated 27th August, 2026
Ninety-nine percent of problems at work are really communication problems – on the wiring that carries an idea, intact, from the room it was born in to the people who make it real
I recall my first meeting with the client. They had a delivery, management and engagement problem, like many companies. She showed me the org chart. A glossy, beautiful diagram with a delicious font. She said this is the problem. I asked her what she meant, taking a sip of tea and listening to make sure I fully understood where she was going with this. Was it the org chart design, or the org chart itself, or what it actually represented?
She said the problem was with the structure of the organisation, the way the teams were structured, the hierarchy (that's rarely the problem) and the way people were organised. That, was the problem she said. Not the diagram, and certainly not the font.
I disagreed.
You see, every organisation can show you its org chart. Boxes, lines, who reports to whom, who sits beside whom, which functions are run by which person. Often well designed. Nice to look at. It's a genuinely useful diagram, and it tells you almost nothing about how the work actually gets done – because work doesn't travel down the lines. It moves sideways, diagonally, out through a corridor or video call, and back in through somebody's inbox. It is carried on favours and politics and half-fuzzy conversations and a surprising quantity of guesswork. The real organisation is the one that never fits on a chart, how could it? It is the web of people communicating and making sense of things together.
I remember when that web was small enough to hold in your head. In a startup of forty people, communicating was almost effortless – we sat together, took on work outside our job titles to get things done, and came together to do whatever the work was needed that week to grow the business. We didn't have a communications plan, because nobody needed one. We knew what we needed to do and that rippled through the air plain for all to understand.
Then, as tends to happen when you have a good market fit, we grew. More people, more structure, more hand-offs, more role definition, more politics. And communicating got harder – not because any of us had got worse at it, but because there was suddenly rather more distance for an idea to cross.
That's an idea worth playing with. An idea is born and invested in. This is going to be a good thing; a new platform, new feature, new office in Silicon Valley. It is clear in the room the decision was made. Clarity prevails, understanding emerges, energy rises. Then it has to travel – to the teams, the next layer in the org chart, the people who'll actually turn the idea into something of value. And every retelling is a chance for it to lose a little of its shape and texture, until what lands can often be a twisted unhinged variant of what was meant. This happens with more regularity than we often admit to. The platform that was needed on day one but morphed over the next few months into something nobody actually wants, and won't use. The event that was clear at the start but lost shape and clarity through the internal process of trying to make it real. The marketing campaign that was clear one week and become something else entirely a month later, and not for the better.
People acting in perfectly good faith on a dozen slightly different pictures over time, until the end results is rather far removed from what was intended.
Communication is the wiring – the mechanism by which an idea stays true as it travels from the room it was born in to the people who turn it into value. When I say, only half in jest, that ninety-nine percent of problems at work are communication problems, this is what I mean. Not that people can't talk or listen or have plenty of meeting. Instead, that we rarely design for the distance an idea has to cross, or for the coming-together in the middle that keeps it intact along the way.
The middle is where we meet – or don't
I worked with a man of the most upmost standards. A real genuinely good man. Clever, funny, warm hearted and being driven around the bend by an org chart.
He worked in a matrix – that arrangement where, instead of one manager, you're offered two, which feels really pleasantly generous until you realise you now have two masters, rather than one. One held his career: the reviews, the progression, the bonus, the rank, the perks, the growth. The other held his week: the workload, the priorities, the actual results, the structure of where his time, energy and attention was supposed to go.
You can imagine the conversations that lead to a matrix organisation. Let's reduce the span of control. Let's ease the burden on management. Let's cross wires in the business to foster innovation. This all sounds sensible enough on paper, or in a meeting. Except the two of his managers rarely spoke and certainly didn't align around what mattered to the business, and the man himself. They gave him different priorities, different advice, a rotating task list of twenty-five things that were each, apparently, the most important. He spent his days trying to serve two masters who agreed on nothing and didn't speak, and he was losing his mind managing the gap between them. In the end, in terms of self preservation, he focused on doing the right thing for himself, which is what many people in a matrix system do; he did what needed to be done to elevate his career, his rank, his bonus, his pay, his longevity in the company. In doing so, he let the activity, the work, the turning of an idea into value slide. Who wouldn't do this?
The fix was so simple it almost embarrassed me to suggest it. I put a fortnightly half-hour in the diary for the two managers to sit down together. Talk. Agree what mattered this fortnight. Agree how to do right by the person carrying it out, and the business itself. That was it. The man's problem hadn't been a shortage of effort, or ability, or resilience – it had been a missing conversation in the middle. Nobody was standing where the two halves of his work were meant to join. The moment somebody did, the wiring closed and the current flowed. So stupidly simple that it was remarkable this wasn't part of the process when implementing a matrix system.
I've seen the same shape everywhere. A software team who built entirely the wrong thing for an internal client, because the two sides swapped a few documents and never once sat down to agree what "done" actually meant, and certainly didn't check very often during the build. A group of change coaches parachuted into teams who'd been told nothing – no why, no what's-in-it-for-me – and who quite reasonably dug their heels in and told them to get lost. The portfolio lead who hired a third-party to implement a key feature, threw some specifications at them and was astonished to find, 10 months later, that they'd built something that didn't work well with the rest of the internal product.
None of these were shortages of talent or goodwill. They were places where an idea set off across the organisation and nobody was in the middle to keep it whole, catch it when it dropped and nurture it through to something of value.
Volume is not clarity
The instinct, when meaning goes astray, is to send more communication. More emails. More decks. More definitions. More meetings. More channels, more all-hands, more updates about the updates. It rarely helps, and it often makes things worse – a truth that researchers gave a lovely name to some years ago: the metamyth that, when it comes to communication, more is always better (Zimmermann et al., 1996). It isn't. A second email nobody reads is not twice the clarity; it's twice the noise and waste at the same time.
The thing we're actually after isn't efficiency or more communication – it's sense-making and understanding. Helping people understand what the work is in service of, what's genuinely happening, why it matters, and where they fit. That's harder than sending an update, because it asks the sender to be clear about things they're often still working out themselves. But it's the only version that travels and keeps that idea moving towards something of value.
Fire off a single message and assume everyone has read it, understood it, and drawn the same conclusion from it, and you've mistaken transmission for understanding. They're not the same thing. One leaves your outbox, flies across some cables and arrives in an inbox somewhere else. The other arrives in someone else's mind as understanding, and only the second one counts.
Here's a rule that kind of makes sense. Say the important things clearly more than once, and in more than one form – because people are different, and the medium that lands for one often skips straight past another. And let it ripple properly: not by osmosis or wishful thinking, but deliberately, each layer re-telling the next in language that fits them, and then – the step almost everyone skips – checking it actually arrived, by asking and double checking understanding.
Keeping the idea intact across the gaps
If the wiring fizzles out anywhere, it's at the joins – the hand-offs, where one person's work becomes another's. It's here that people reach for documents instead of conversations, drop a work item into a queue and hope, and, when the relationship's gone a little squiffier, or the egos going rogue, hold back what the next person needed to know. An us-and-them finds a lovely home exactly where the current was meant to cross.
Patching this type of wiring problem is astonishingly simple and reliable: find out where your work comes from and where it goes, and build a real relationship at both ends. Go and meet the people who hand you work; ask the people you hand it to whether it arrives in a shape they can use, and what would make their lives easier. Better still, staple yourself to a piece of work and follow it all the way through, noting every places where it changes hands – you'll end up with a richer and more honest map of how value really moves than any chart could give you, and a list of the people worth knowing too.
It's probably worth considering two smaller habits that help ideas remain true as they move towards value. Drive out assumptions. Humans are remarkably good at filling gaps with a story, and everyone's story is slightly different. Assumptions are often addressed with a little evidence, a willingness to listen to others, a reconfirmation of what the original idea was supposed to be, and a focus on the type of value being chased.
Secondly, in all communication use plain words and a good visual. Jargon doesn't signal intelligence; as David Ogilvy put it, long showy words are "the hallmarks of a pretentious ass." Say the things simply, show it where a picture helps create better understanding, and far more of your meaning survives the journey through an organisation.
Follow the confusion – it's a signpost, not a fault
Here's the rather wonderful part. When the wiring is off, it leaves a trail, and the trail is easy to see once you decide confusion is information rather than a fault to be corrected in the person. Where do people go quiet, or do the same work twice, or ask the question that's clearly been answered somewhere they couldn't find? Where are people frustrated because they still care but likely have a problem that needs addressing? Where are two teams doing the same work without realising? Where are lots of "alignment" meetings happening over and over.
Follow that.
It almost never points at a person. It points at something specific and fixable – a decision that was never properly made, a boundary nobody dare cross, a direction that is unclear, an assumption two teams each held and neither expressed and more. Find those, mend those, and the confusion diminishes.
Communication isn't a soft skill laid politely on top of the real work – it is the work, the wiring the whole enterprise runs on, the thing that keeps an idea whole as it crosses the distance between someone's good thought and the value derived from it. Get it right and delays, friction, confusion and misdirection disappears: ideas arrive intact, people meet in the middle, and the organisation moves with a momentum that's hard to trace to any one cause.
Communication is not a soft skill or a problem to be managed. It's a piece of craft worth getting good at – and, happily, one anyone can start on tomorrow.
A few moves that keep the wiring good
The Wiring. Most of these cost a conversation, not a budget.
Get the two people in a room. When someone's stuck serving two masters, or two teams keep colliding, the fix is usually a conversation between them – not the person in the middle trying harder.
Say it more than once, in more than one form. A single email isn't communication. Repeat the important things, in the medium each person actually reads, and then ask whether it landed.
Ripple it down deliberately. Don't trust osmosis. Each layer re-tells the next in language that fits them; you check, by asking, that it arrived whole.
Know where your work comes from and where it goes. Build a real relationship at both boundaries. Ask the people downstream what would make their lives easier. Staple yourself to a piece of work and watch every hand it passes through.
Drive out assumptions. People fill gaps with their own stories. Close the gap early with a little evidence and a lot of listening, before it sets into "fact."
Follow the confusion. It's a signpost, not a problem. Duplication, silence, work that circles back – each points at a missing decision or an unclear boundary or confusion. Mend that, and the confusion stops being made.
Where this sits in the Atlas
Orientation·Idea to Value·Communication·Creativity & Climate·Learning
Bibliography
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