The Convenient Diagnosis
Communication is a safe thing to admit. The harder question usually doesn't get asked.
The bank had a problem: documents were everywhere. Loan files lived in drawers and desks in branches. The digital storage and indexing was a Frankenstein of conventions from conversions past. Finding anything took longer than it should and servicing requests stalled while someone searched for a document that should have been a click away. Was it a loan document? Account document? Contract? Agreement? Note?
So the operations and servicing teams got to work. They spent months rebuilding the entire document library. New naming structure. New keywords. New workflow. Carefully designed, thoroughly tested, properly documented. And fully converted. By the time they finished, they had something genuinely good. A real solution to a real problem.
Then they rolled it out.
And the loan officers kept their desk files.
What followed got diagnosed as a change management problem. Communication wasn’t sufficient. Training fell short. The front line was resistant to new ways of working. All of that became the story.
None of it was wrong, exactly. But it wasn’t the real problem either.
Nobody had asked the loan officers how they worked. Nobody sat with them long enough to understand what they reached for during a loan, how they moved through a file, what they needed to find and when. The project had been built entirely from the ops and servicing perspective because that’s who supposedly owned the problem. Their better system would be better for everyone.
The case was never made to everyone who had to change.
In many ways, things were worse than before. At least before the months spent on the project, everyone knew where the files were. Now there were two systems, neither of them complete, and a front line that had learned not to trust the next initiative.
When leaders tell me they have a communication problem, I listen carefully.
Communication is almost always part of it. But it’s also a very safe thing to say out loud. A leader can acknowledge poor communication without putting the decision itself on the table. The plan was right, the path was right, but we just didn’t bring people along soon enough or clearly enough. Fix the communication and move on.
It’s a convenient place to stop. And stopping there has a cost.
Think about deciding where to meet your spouse for dinner without asking her. You pick the place, show up at six, and she isn’t there. You call. She didn’t know. That’s a communication problem, and it’s easy to fix.
But say you tell her. And she still doesn’t want to go.
Now the communication problem has been solved and the resistance didn’t go away. Which means it was never really a communication problem. You picked a restaurant for yourself and expected her to want what you wanted. The case wasn’t made. It was assumed.
That’s what happened at the bank. The ops team solved their problem, communicated the solution, and called it change management when the front line didn’t follow. The harder question never got asked. Did we build a case that works for the people whose daily work we’re asking to change? There wasn’t a good answer, so the conversation stopped somewhere safer.
Most change efforts that stall aren’t stalling because of poor communication.
They’re stalling because the case was built for the people already convinced. The people in the room when the decision got made, who lived with the problem long enough to feel the solution as obvious. By the time anyone notices the disconnect, the project is months in, the budget is committed, and re-examining the case feels like going backward.
So the diagnosis becomes communication. Or training. Or culture. Anything that leaves the original decision intact.
The people who aren’t moving are often the first clear feedback the effort ever got. They’re not obstacles. They’re information.
The question worth asking before you launch is whether you’ve made a case that works for everyone who has to say yes. The time to ask it is before the months of work, before the rollout, before the communication plan.
Most teams ask how to communicate the decision. Fewer ask whether they’ve earned the right to make it.
Those are different questions. The first one is easier. The second one is the work.