“Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm.”
Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence”
Most leaders treat communication breakdowns as a personnel issue. Someone dropped the ball. Someone wasn’t listening. Someone failed to follow up. But in a well-designed organization, the right information reaches the right people reliably, not because everyone is exceptionally communicative, but because the system makes it hard for critical signals to get lost. If your team keeps missing the same handoffs, rehashing the same decisions, or operating on conflicting versions of reality, the problem may not be your people. It may be that you never wired the building.
What Wiring Actually Does
Electrical wiring in a building doesn’t just carry power it determines what gets power, when, and how reliably.
A skilled electrician doesn’t run wire where it’s convenient. Every circuit is intentionally routed. Load is distributed. Circuits are labeled. Breakers are placed where they can be reached. The system is designed so that when something trips, you know exactly where to look and what to do.
Good wiring is invisible until it fails. When it’s done right, lights come on, equipment runs, and nobody thinks twice about it. When it’s done wrong or not done at all you get flickering lights, overloaded circuits, and the occasional fire.
The wiring in a building doesn’t care how smart the electrician was. It does what it was designed to do. Or it doesn’t.
How This Plays Out in Companies
Organizational communication works the same way. Information needs to travel between teams, between leaders, between strategy and execution. The question is whether that travel happens by design or by accident.
When it happens by accident, you’ll recognize these symptoms:
- The same decision gets made twice because two teams were working in parallel without a shared signal
- Senior leaders are surprised by problems that weren’t actually new the information existed, it just never had a path to the top
- Updates live in someone’s inbox not in a place where the people who need them can actually find them
- Meetings exist to share information that should have already been shared your syncs are compensating for a broken system, not adding value
- People protect information as a form of power not because they’re political, but because the structure rewards those who know things others don’t
- New team members can’t get up to speed because organizational knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in the wiring
None of these are character flaws. They’re design flaws.
Why It Gets Worse at Scale
When your team is small, communication happens naturally. You’re in the same room. You overhear things. Gaps close because proximity fills them.
Then you hire. You add layers. You open a second office or go fully remote. And suddenly the organic flow of information the thing you never had to think about stops working.
What replaced it? Usually nothing intentional. Maybe some Slack channels. Maybe a weekly all-hands that’s too big to be useful. Maybe a leadership meeting where information gets filtered before it reaches the people who need it unfiltered.
The load on the informal network becomes unsustainable. Things fall through the gaps. Leaders start spending enormous energy on communication not because they want to, but because the wiring isn’t carrying the load.
At scale, informal communication isn’t a feature. It’s a liability.
What Well-Designed Organizational Wiring Looks Like
Healthy communication systems aren’t complicated. They’re consistent and intentional:
- Information has a canonical home — decisions, context, and updates live somewhere findable, not scattered across email threads and chat logs
- Meeting cadences match the work — daily standups for tactical coordination, weekly reviews for operational rhythm, quarterly sessions for strategic alignment; each serves a specific purpose
- Decisions leave a record — not as bureaucracy, but so that six months later, anyone can understand what was decided, why, and who was responsible
- Escalation paths are explicit — people know how to raise a concern, flag a risk, or get a decision made quickly without guessing who to tell
- Leaders communicate context, not just directives — the “why” travels with the “what,” so the team can make good decisions independently
- Communication failures are treated as system failures — when something important doesn’t get through, the first question is “where did the circuit break?” not “who forgot?”
The goal isn’t more communication. It’s better-routed communication so the right signals reach the right people, every time.
The Rebuild (A Personal Note)
There’s a particular kind of silence after a serious accident. Not peace something more like static. You can hear people around you, but nothing is connecting properly. The wiring between your brain and the world is temporarily scrambled.
I know that silence well. After my crash at 20, I had to relearn how to process, how to articulate, how to make myself understood when my body and my words weren’t cooperating the way they used to.
What I learned in that recovery slowly, frustratingly is that communication isn’t just about what you say. It’s about whether the signal actually lands. You can say the right words and still have them mean nothing if the receiver isn’t connected to you.
The same is true in organizations. You can send the email. You can hold the meeting. You can write the memo. And still, somehow, the signal doesn’t land. The message travels, but the meaning doesn’t.
The difference, I’ve found, is almost never effort. Leaders who have communication problems in their companies almost always care deeply. They’re talking constantly. They’re available. They want their teams to know what’s happening.
The problem is the circuit design not the current.
When I work with a CEO on communication, we rarely talk about how to give better speeches or write clearer emails. We look at the wiring. Where does information originate? Where does it need to go? What’s the path? Where are the gaps? What’s overloaded, and what’s been completely cut off?
Then we rebuild from there.
Final Thought
Depeche Mode were onto something. Words can do harm especially when they’re the wrong words filling the space where a well-designed system should be.
Most leadership communication is noise compensating for bad wiring. More all-hands. More Slack messages. More check-ins. All of it trying to patch, in real time, what should have been engineered into the structure.
You can talk your way through a poorly wired building for a while. But eventually something trips. And when it does, more talking won’t fix it.
Rewire the building.
Then enjoy the silence that comes from a system that works without you having to push every signal through by hand.
—
Architect Series • Issue 8
“I rebuilt myself. Now I design companies that can survive anything.”
