Have you ever played “The Whispergame”?

You have a group of people and the first person whispers a short story in the next person’s ear. This goes on until the last person of the group has heard the story.

Inevitably, the story becomes completely distorted.

This is what I hear and see happening in a lot of organizations.

As an example: a Team Manager would like to know how many products members of her team have sold. She asks the Data Analyst to develop a report showing individual sales performance.

The Data Analyst starts checking the database, and concludes the necessary data for the report is missing.

He asks the Data Engineer (who is in another department) to retrieve the sales data. The Data Engineer gladly complies. He creates a work item which gets prioritized by the Product Owner. However, because the request he received wasn’t specific about the need for sales per employee, he makes data available at a higher aggregation level: sales per department (common failure point: ambiguous request → wrong output.)

The Data Engineer informs the Data Analyst that the data is available in the database and wishes him luck. The Data Analyst takes a look only to conclude that the data does not contain sales at the aggregation level of a single employee.

He informs the Data Engineer, the Data engineer reopens the work item, the Product Owner needs to prioritize it once again and the merry circle starts over…

… Because this will not be the last time that the Data Analyst and the Data Engineer speak about this specific dataset. There will be new requests by the Team Manager. New misunderstandings. And still we plunge, helpless and unending, into the abyss of miscommunication, ever deeper into the ravenous dark of our own ruin (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

By the way, this is a purposefully uncomplicated chain of communication. In larger organizations you have Cybersecurity, Networking, Data Architects, Infrastructure and many others. Each adds a potential point for distortion. Whenever you have a request or a need, The Whispergame starts and it is your job, and the job of everyone involved, to ensure that all understand the requirements.

Some ways to mitigate this problem are asking questions and summarizing what the other person said, or “narrating the debate”, as Greg Koukl calls it in the book Tactics I recently read. (for the record, in the book the Tactics “narrating the debate” has a completely different goal, but the principle also applies to the problem highlighted in this post)

Summarizing:

• Clarify the WHY behind the request
• “Narrate the debate”: summarize the request as you understand it, define acceptance criteria and ask the requester to review those criteria

What communication challenges have you seen in your organization?