Communication Systems
Communication systems are the deliberate design of who tells whom what, through which channel, and how often - built on purpose instead of growing by accident as the organisation scales.
The sequence opens by mapping what's actually flowing today and closes with checking, by asking people, that the redesigned system is working.
Reach for this when…
- Decisions get made in one meeting and half the team hears about them a week later, if at all.
- You've added channels (chat, email, standups) faster than you've removed any.
- Two teams are working from different versions of the same plan.
How to run it
- Map what actually gets communicated today: which decisions, updates, and to whom.
- Find the gaps: what should be flowing that isn't, and what's flowing that nobody reads.
- Assign one channel per type of message and retire the rest.
- Set a cadence for each channel and who owns keeping it running.
- Check it's working by asking people, not by counting messages sent.
A worked example
Situation. Tiago Ferreira ran Douro Freight, a logistics firm in Porto, Portugal, where dispatch decisions travelled by phone, text, and a shared spreadsheet depending on who was on shift.
Applied. Mapping the actual flow showed three channels carrying the same information with no single source of truth, so he cut it to one dispatch board and a fixed daily handover call.
Result. Missed handovers dropped sharply within a month, and new dispatchers stopped needing to be told twice where to look for the day's changes.
The catch
A clean communication system does not fix a trust problem - people who don't trust the official channel will keep using the side one, and no policy stops that. It can also over-formalise a small team that worked fine on informal chat. Design for the size and stage you're at, not the org chart you aspire to.
If a shadow channel is still carrying the real decisions, your redesigned system is decoration.