Why One Message, Isn't One Message
Why Your Change Programme Assumes Everyone Is the Same Person
Quite a few years ago I watched a government department in Australia roll out a new organisational structure hundreds of people across six offices.
Same slide deck. Same town hall. Same talking points. Same Q&A script. Same follow-up email with the same bullet points and the same link to the same intranet page nobody would visit.
Leadership called this “consistent messaging.” Which it was. It was also completely useless.
Because the six offices heard six different things.
The office that had been restructured eighteen months earlier heard “here we go again.” The office whose manager had just been promoted heard “this is what success looks like now.” The office that had quietly built workarounds to survive the last operating model heard “they are about to discover what we have been doing.” The office whose previous director had been moved on after the last change heard absolutely nothing, because they had already decided that listening to organisational announcements was a waste of cognitive effort.
Same words. Six different meanings. All of them perfectly rational given each office’s history.
This is agent heterogeneity, and it is one of the most important ideas in complexity science that almost nobody in leadership applies.
In a complex system, the agents are not identical units waiting to receive updated instructions. Each one carries a different internal model of how things actually work around here. Different histories of what happened last time. Different theories about what the official story means versus what is really going on. Different threat responses. Different loyalties. Different calculations about whether engaging with this change is worth the risk.
The variety between them is not noise. It is the mechanism.
This is where it gets uncomfortable for anyone running a large-scale change programme. The standard playbook treats heterogeneity as a communications problem. “If people aren’t aligned, we haven’t communicated clearly enough.” So, you communicate again. Louder. With more slides. With a video from the CEO. With a roadshow.
The six offices continue to hear six different things, because the problem was never the signal. It was that you were broadcasting to a room full of people with different receivers.
An organisation that successfully eliminates internal variation, that achieves perfect message alignment, that gets everyone “on the same page,” has also quietly removed its own capacity to adapt to anything it hasn’t already anticipated. Adaptation requires variety. A system of identical agents cannot adapt, for the same reason a monoculture cannot survive a new pest. The disagreement, the dissent, the person in the corner who thinks the whole thing is misguided, that is not the obstacle. That is the raw material.
What would happen if you stopped treating different interpretations as a communication failure and started treating them as data about the system?
What if, instead of asking whether people received the message, you asked each team what they heard? What if the six different meanings told you more about your organisation’s readiness for change than the entire project charter?
What if the person in the corner who thinks the whole thing is crap misguided is not the problem you need to solve, but the adaptive capacity you cannot afford to lose?