Relentless Communication

If you think you've communicated the vision enough, you haven't. Not even close.

When you’re driving organizational change, your most reliable lever is repetition of communication. What’s the vision? What are the constraints or strategies we’ve implemented to get there? Who’s enrolled in the change and what’s in it for them? As change leaders, you need to put these questions and answers on blast and repeat, tailoring them to the many audiences you encounter.

John P. Kotter found that most transformation efforts fail not because the vision is wrong but because leaders drastically undercommunicate it. A single all-hands meeting or a well-crafted email represents, by Kotter’s estimate, “.0001% of yearly intracompany communication.”

The forgetting curve, first documented by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s, shows how quickly new information evaporates without reinforcement. Left alone, people lose most of what they heard within days. Regular reinforcement slows the decay dramatically. This is why a leader who says “I already told them” has already lost. Communication is a loop, not a one-shot broadcast.

Why Volume Alone Isn’t Enough

Kotter identified seven elements of effective change communication: urgency, overcommunicating the vision, consistency, inspiration, two-way dialogue, multiple channels, and leadership visibility. Flip any one of those and you get a failure mode. Inconsistent messaging breeds confusion. One-way broadcasts breed cynicism. Leadership absence signals the change doesn’t actually matter.

The subtlety is that overcommunication doesn’t mean repeating the same script to everyone. It means segmenting your audience and tailoring the value proposition. An engineering leader rolling out dynamic teaming might emphasize shortened time-to-market for executives, cross-functional learning for senior engineers, and career growth through diverse project exposure for individual contributors. Same change, different “what’s in it for me.”

Evolving the Message

Effective communicators phase their messaging as the change unfolds. Early on, it’s rationale and vision. As implementation starts, shift to progress updates and early wins. Later, bring data and hard metrics. Eventually the message becomes embedded storytelling: real results from real teams. This evolution keeps people engaged instead of tuning out a stale pitch.

Getting Over Yourself

Leaders resist repetition because it feels redundant to them. Dale Carnegie’s observation helps here: people spend about 95% of their time thinking about themselves, not tracking how many times you’ve said something.

The signal that your communication is taking hold is when other people start saying it back to you. When the message shifts from “your message” to “our message,” you’ve achieved collective ownership.

Until then? A - Always, B - Be, C - Communicating.

Resources

• A Leader’s Guide to Overcommunication — the original newsletter deep dive
• John P. Kotter, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” Harvard Business Review (1995)
• Change Vision & Strategy — workshop that puts this principle into practice